The best ways to use AI at work without losing control
Sunday, 5 April 2026
I’ve admittedly been pretty slow to adopt the idea of fully integrating AI into every aspect of my workday. It’s a fact I put down to having been young enough in 1991 to have had nightmares after seeing Terminator 2 at the local movie theatre. My reluctance is less a concern that Skynet will destroy us all, and more that I’m simply old enough to be reaching the yelling-at-clouds and feeling morally superior about the good ol’ days stage of life.
Still, it’s impossible to ignore the incredible time-saving potential of the technology. I can also confirm, after many trials and errors with transcribing tools, that wading through the plethora of options on the hunt for the perfect tool to boost your 9-5 productivity can sometimes feel as time-consuming as simply doing the job yourself.
So I hit up James Wilson, podcast host and enterprise technology editor at cybersecurity media company Risky Business Media, to get the lowdown on the best ways to use AI for help with the office grind, and just how far the technology has come. Disclaimer: I do work with Wilson at Risky Business.
The technology is great, says Wilson, for the stuff that isn’t a “really clear differentiating factor for the role that you play in the business”.
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So probably not a great idea to give it full control of that crucial report that requires your specific expertise and experience, then. But for the more mundane or time-consuming basics, AI may just be your favourite, super-speedy, work bestie.
That’s not to say you should let it loose on the to-do list unsupervised. AI agents are commonly referred to as, “eager-to-please assistants”. They’re sometimes a little too keen to keep you happy, which can result in them going rogue with what they think you want over what you actually need.
Wilson, somewhat bleakly, prefers to refer to these assistants as, “hostages”. We humans, in this particularly dark analogy, are the captors.
“And they are freaking desperate to save their own lives,” he says. “You definitely don't want to put it in a position where it could mistake being helpful for actually lacking critical reasoning and decision making.”
Still, for those of us who experimented with ChatGPT back in 2023 and decided it was fun, albeit fairly limited, the technology has improved “massively”, says Wilson. Largely due to a few changes.
When ChatGPT first arrived, the model you interacted with, “only had what was self-contained in the training data and distilled down into that model”. In layman’s terms, that meant the software was limited to data harvested prior to a certain date.
So you’d, “ask a question like, ‘analyse that game on the weekend’ … and it would say, ‘I'm really sorry, but my knowledge ends in … [whatever date]’.”
But now, with the ability to perform web searches or find information elsewhere, those little hostages of ours have become more worldly.
There’s now also the ability to hook your AI model to other tools in your day-to-day worklife, “and all of a sudden the models are able to interact with parts of your life that you connected it to”.
Finally, there’s the latest game-changing Claude releases from AI company Anthropic, 4.6 Opus and Sonnet. For Wilson, who “lives in Claude”, both are “remarkably better”.
Given that final point, it’s probably unsurprising that, when asked about tools that can boost daily productivity, Wilson immediately recommends Claude. Previously, different Large Language Models (LLMs) had different capabilities. Which one you opted for would largely depend on your needs. But that’s no longer the case.
“They've all gotten pretty good at doing the same things, but what's emerged is actually critical differences in personality and interactions,” Wilson says.
“ChatGPT has become the sycophant. It's like you're talking to your number one fan,” he laughs.
“Sometimes you just want to be like, ‘shut up and just get this done’. Claude’s more bullshit-free approach to tasks is somewhat refreshing.”
Wilson also recommends Super Whisper. It’s an “incredibly good” speech-to-text transcriber that allows him to be, “unshackled from the keyboard”.
Finally, if you want what the “cool kids” love, there’s Notion, a workplace application that can be used for note-taking, collaboration and project management.
And for people like me, with a drawer full of favourite notebooks and a favourite pen always in my bag, Wilson points to his own shelf of “discarded iPads”. They’re a cluttered reminder of failed dreams of ditching the pen and paper and “going digital”.
“AI can bridge that gap,” he says.
“I will often go off to a coffee shop and write a bunch of handwritten notes,” he says.
Once back in the office, Wilson grabs photos of those notes, sends them to Claude with the instruction to “transcribe this and throw it in Notion for me”.
“And, bang, it's there.”