When we moved house recently, I had to flag anything that had been missed from the inventory.
This sounds tiny until you do it. You walk from room to room, spot damage, take a photo, then later agonise over whether to describe something as a scratch, mark or blemish.
It’s exactly the type of admin I detest.
But this time, I walked around taking photos and talking into my phone as I went. Then I gave the lot to Claude. It read the images, renamed each file, and assembled a document with a short note about where each photo was.
Done in minutes.
That’s my favourite kind of AI work.
Nobody is going to screenshot it on LinkedIn. It involved a rental inventory, which is about as far from science fiction as admin gets.
And yet it was brilliant.
Raising the ceiling and clearing the floor
Most AI excitement is about raising the ceiling. Clever agents, elaborate workflows, weird little builds a normal person could never have made before.
I like all that. After all, I once lost an evening building an elaborate system for deciding which giant decorated egg to bid on at auction.
The ceiling is fun.
But the floor is reliable.
By floor, I mean dull work with no creative glory attached. Just your problem now because some admin-generating institution has decided so.
I needed to redact a document recently. Normally that means drawing black boxes over things, or printing it and attacking it with a marker like a man from 1997. This time, it just got done.
Then there was the 300-page specification I needed to turn into a usable spreadsheet. Hundreds of fields, buried in the middle of the thing. It took about fifteen minutes.
My wife needed to write a complaint letter to the council. The kind of task that can sit on the mental to-do list for months. It got written because the barrier was suddenly tiny – and it scored us a refund. £120 saved in a few minutes of work.
The work that disappears
I like these uses because the work was already compulsory. Nobody was going to think more deeply because I spent three hours formatting a spreadsheet. The rental inventory would never reveal my true calling.
The upside is simple. The task gets done faster, with less irritation, and often better.
I find myself almost wanting to do the boring task, because the task itself is no longer the interesting bit. The interesting bit is working out how much of it I can make disappear. That sounds lazy, because it is.
That’s the bit I hadn’t expected. The emotional weight changes. The thing I would normally avoid becomes a puzzle. Can I give it photos and a voice note, then turn the mess into something usable?
When the answer is yes, it feels like cheating in the best possible way.
The bit I want to keep
There’s a trap with the flashier AI work. Sometimes the impressive bit is the bit I should be doing myself, like deciding what matters or developing enough taste to make the work mine.
I’m happy for AI to eat the work I hated anyway. I’m more cautious about letting it eat the work that makes me better.
That’s why I keep coming back to boring AI work. It clears the floor so I can keep my actual brain for the work I care about.
When someone asks me where to start with AI, this is where I’d point them. Find the annoying tasks you already have to do.
Start with the document that needs redacting, or the awkward letter you keep dodging. If AI can make the boring work disappear, you’ve found the easiest win.