AI in the Wild talk
How people are really using AI and what this means for intention
I’ll be giving a public talk on Zoom on Thursday, July 24th (10:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM BST / 4:00 PM CEST) about the viral AI use case work I carried out which Harvard Business Review published last year and this year. I think of this as an opportunity to better get to know you, and vice versa.
This newsletter - One Thing at a Time - is not directly about AI. It’s about why we should use our time intentionally, and a system to enable us to do that.
But AI and especially the recent development, generative AI, do bear on this. Humankind has now developed a technology so intriguing that hundreds of millions of people are regularly using it. Such take-up has never happened before, and it is interesting - from an anthropological as well as a technological perspective. If so many of us have access to it and are using it for some purpose…what is that purpose? What’s the intention behind the prompt? Is that the right intention? If we line up our intentions, prompts, and the tech right, where does that get us?
Intention, as you may well have already gathered, is really the theme that runs through all my work, whether it’s labelled timeboxing or AI or something else. I think it’s magic.
In the Epilogue to Timeboxing I did talk explicitly about AI. There was a moment during the writing of the book - I was about half-way through - when I genuinely thought for a few days that my writing, and indeed anyone’s writing, would become obsolete before long. OpenAI’s GPT-4 had just been released, it seemed very impressive, and the rate of progress of all the LLMs around that time seemed even more so.
But that hasn’t transpired. There seems to be a limit on AI’s ability to write in a voice the discerning really want to hear: subtle, new, stirring, impactful.
I don’t think that high-quality, high-stakes writing is a use-case that AI will dominate any time soon. But there are many thousands of other use cases (some of which include low-stakes writing) which are interesting and useful and happening right now. That hit a nerve in 2024 when I conducted months of research and wrote it up in HBR. And even more so in 2025 when this article became HBR’s most popular in years. This may be the only public talk I give on the subject.
If this interests you, sign up here.
And then, of course, a timebox with all the details will be sent out to those attending, straight from my calendar, actually. (I don’t understand why more events don’t do this.)
Marc
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
Connect with me on LinkedIn