Keep the Humans: Use AI to Make Life Better at Work
Keep the Humans: Use AI to Make Life Better at Work
You do not have to choose between heart and horsepower. Keep the humans. Use AI to lift the load. When we remove the boring parts of work, what is left gets easier to love.
This is especially true for women in tech who carry extra invisible work: context switching, mentoring, reporting, and the steady drumbeat of being the only one in the room. AI can be your force multiplier, not your replacement. Your judgment, empathy, and taste are the point. Let the machine handle the mess.
What "keep the humans" really means
Humans lead with values, judgment, and creativity.
AI handles the repeatable, the heavy, and the slow.
We design the workflow so people make the calls, and AI makes the drafts, summaries, and checks.
Think of AI as power steering for your brain. You still drive. It just turns the wheel faster when the road gets tough.
The four buckets: keep, assist, automate, eliminate
Sort your tasks into these simple buckets:
Keep: Work that needs your judgment or builds trust. 1:1s, roadmap calls, performance reviews.
Assist: Drafting, summarizing, brainstorming, outlining. You remain the editor.
Automate: Data pulls, formatting, tagging, QA checks, meeting notes to CRM.
Eliminate: Reports no one reads, approvals that add no value, duplicate docs.
If a task does not need your voice or decision, do not let it steal your minutes.
Tiny success stories
Bold product moves: A lead PM used AI to cluster 1,200 support tickets, found three hidden themes in an hour, and reframed the quarterly roadmap. Her team shipped a high-impact fix two sprints sooner.
Better balance: A data analyst and new mom set up an AI workflow to clean CSVs and generate first-pass charts. She reclaimed six hours a week and still hit accuracy targets.
Happier customers: A support lead routed common questions to AI-drafted replies, with humans approving tone and policy. First-response time dropped by 40% without losing empathy.
None of them gave up control. They gave up drudgery.
A 90-minute playbook to reclaim your week
Block one focused session. Bring your calendar, your to-do list, and one hairy problem.
1) Map your load (15 min)
List every recurring task from the last two weeks. Include meetings and ad-hoc asks.
Mark each as keep, assist, automate, or eliminate.
2) Pick three quick wins (10 min)
Choose one task from each of the keep, assist, automate, or eliminate buckets. (Make it easy to just use a highlighter on your list)
Aim for tasks under 30 minutes each when done with AI.
3) Design the workflow (30 min)
Inputs: Where does the data come from? Docs, tickets, code, calendars.
Steps: Draft, review, approve, publish. Name the human owner for sign-off.
Tools: Choose one AI helper you already have access to.
Quality bar: Define done. For example, 95% accuracy, brand tone, and links to sources.
4) Build guardrails (15 min)
Privacy: Remove or mask personal data. Error on the side of using less data and especially anything sensitive.
Bias checks: Add a checklist to review language and outcomes for fairness.
Approval gates: You or a teammate signs off before anything public.
5) Ship and measure (20 min)
Baseline: Time spent before vs. after, error rate, and satisfaction.
Target: Reduce time by 50% and errors by 20% this week.
Review: Adjust prompts and steps after two runs.
Prompts you can use today
Try these as-is, then tune for your domain. Paste a short description of your team and your quality bar at the top of each prompt.
Backlog triage
Read these user tickets. Cluster into 5 themes with supporting quotes. Flag anything that risks churn. Output a table with theme, volume, severity, and a sample quote.
Meeting to decisions
Summarize this transcript into decisions, owners, and due dates. Note open risks. Draft a Slack update in 120 words for cross-functional partners.
Code review aid
Given this diff, write a checklist of test cases and edge conditions. Suggest three clear commit messages. Do not approve code.
Data sanity check
Inspect this CSV for obvious anomalies, missing values, and outliers. Propose cleaning steps and show the exact transformations.
Action to take now: pick one prompt, run it on a real task today, and compare your result to last week. Keep what worked. Fix what did not. Repeat tomorrow.
Guardrails that build trust
Responsible AI is not a slogan; it is a system.
Consent and privacy first. Do not paste sensitive customer data into tools you do not control.
Document your prompts and reviews so others can reproduce results.
Keep a human-in-the-loop for anything legal, financial, medical, or customer-facing.
Log failures. Share what broke and how you fixed it.
When people trust the process, they trust the output.
Metrics that matter
Measure what AI frees, not just what it does.
Time returned to focus work per person per week
Cycle time from idea to decision
Defect rate before and after AI checks
Team sentiment: do people feel lighter, faster, and more in control?
If the numbers rise but morale falls, you automated the wrong thing. Adjust.
Tools: start with what you have
You do not need a new budget to begin.
Use your current chat assistant to draft, summarize, and rewrite.
Connect workflows to your docs, tickets, and CRM with no-code automations.
Add retrieval from your own knowledge base to cut search time.
Keep PII out of prompts unless you have a secure, approved setup.
The heart of the work
Our philosophy is simple: use AI to find the love in your work. It is easy to love work when you remove the parts of your job you never imagined doing. Keep your voice, your values, and your vision. Let AI carry the weight that does not need your heart.
You are not here to be a robot. You are here to lead. Keep the humans. Use AI to make life better. Start today with one task, one prompt, and one small win. Then take the next step tomorrow.
