The pressure is bigger than your boss
When you hear "use AI more," it feels like it's coming from management. It doesn't only come from there.
It's the coworker who always seems to have the perfect prompt. It's the LinkedIn post where someone turns one messy idea into a deck, a doc, and a full workflow before lunch. It's the YouTube tutorial where AI is wired into Slack, Notion, Drive, and Sheets, running like a full-time assistant. And it's the new ChatGPT or Claude update that makes you feel late to something you barely understood last week.
All of that reaches work and gets compressed into one sentence: "We need to use AI more." It sounds like a plan. It isn't one yet.
What your boss actually sees
From management's side, AI looks like less work. Presentations seem to make themselves, and reports stop taking three days.
That idea didn't come from nowhere. Every week there's another demo showing a tool that writes a document, builds a slide deck, summarizes a meeting, cleans a spreadsheet, or turns a rough idea into something polished. From the outside it looks obvious: if AI can do all this, why is normal work still so slow?
But a demo shows the clean moment. Real work has the part after it. The number still has to be checked. The slide still has to make sense. The citation still has to exist. The client context still has to be right. And the final judgment still belongs to a person.
Your boss sees the capability and assumes the workflow comes free with it. It doesn't. That's the whole gap.
From your seat
You're the one holding the output, so the story looks different. AI doesn't remove the work. It moves the blank page out of the way, and then it hands the judgment back to you.
It can turn messy meeting notes into a clean summary, but you still have to know whether it caught the decision that actually mattered. It can draft the client email, but you still have to know whether the tone is right and the promise is safe. It can build the first version of a slide, but you still have to know whether the slide says anything worth saying.
That's the gap underneath "use AI more." Your boss is measuring AI adoption. You're carrying the risk that comes with it.
Capability is not workflow
Here's the idea the whole thing rests on: AI capability is not the same as AI workflow.
Your company can hand everyone ChatGPT and still leave everyone guessing. One person uses it for emails, one uploads files they probably shouldn't, one tries it once, gets a weak answer, and goes back to doing it by hand. Leadership calls that "uneven adoption." Most of the time it's more boring than that. The workflow was never written down anywhere.
Access is not a system. Having ChatGPT Plus is not a workflow. Saving prompts is not a process.
A saved prompt is a starting point. A workflow is the whole path: what triggers it, what goes in, what AI does, where you check it, what comes out, and when you run it again. "Use AI more" is missing that verb.
The workflow card
That path has a shape. I keep it as a card with seven parts:
Task: the actual job (not "use AI," the real thing)
Trigger: what makes you start it
Input: what you hand the AI
AI step: what you let it do
Human checkpoint: the one thing you verify before it moves on
Output: what "done" looks like
Reuse: when this becomes a repeatable move instead of a one-off
Most "AI productivity" advice stops at the AI step. The checkpoint and the reuse are the two parts that turn a prompt into a workflow.
Copy this card
Here's the blank version. Keep it somewhere you'll see it the next time AI touches real work:
Task: What job am I actually doing?
Trigger: When do I need this?
Input: What am I handing the AI?
AI step: What should AI help with?
Human checkpoint: The one thing I have to verify?
Output: What does finished look like?
Reuse: When will I run this again?Start with one task you already repeat. One card is enough to prove the idea before you build a second.
My Beehiiv case as a filled-in card
Here's the example from the email, written out as one card:
Task: find what readers actually said in the last poll's comments
Trigger: starting a new issue, I want real reader language before I write
Input: the poll comments, already sitting in Beehiiv
AI step: ChatGPT (connected to Beehiiv) pulls the comments and groups the patterns
Human checkpoint: the exact wording of anything I might quote. Open Beehiiv, read the original, confirm it word for word
Output: a short list of real quotes (exact) and patterns (labeled as paraphrase)
Reuse: every issue where I quote a reader. Same card, same checkpoint
The checkpoint is the whole reason the card is worth writing down. Skip it, and the AI step looks finished, so you trust it too early. Keep it, and you know the one place to slow down while AI moves fast everywhere else.
Not every step needs AI
Part of a real workflow is knowing where to leave AI out. Some steps are already fast and reliable.
Copy-pasting a real quote takes seconds, and checking the original source is often quicker than asking AI to re-check its own version. Use AI where it lowers the effort, and protect the one place where being wrong would cost you.
If you already run custom GPTs
Take the checkpoint out of your head and put it in the instructions. Add a line to your project or system prompt like:
When you pull or summarize anything I might quote, separate exact quotes from paraphrases, and never reword a quote.
Now the checkpoint travels with the tool instead of depending on you remembering it at 4pm on a deadline.
So start with one task this week, one you already repeat. Write the card once, run it twice. If the checkpoint catches something, keep it. If it doesn't, make the card simpler. That's how "use AI more" turns into something real.