When AI Gets Boring, the CIO’s Fun Starts

AI has lost its “wow” factor. Like search engines in the late 90s, MP3 players in the early 00s, and video streaming by the mid 2010s, the novelty has faded… And that’s a good thing. You can’t get down to business with your jaw on the floor. When the awe recedes, the utility emerges.

Here are 5 ways I use AI every day to give me back time, energy, and focus — and how you can too.

1) Make Passive Time Productive with Mega-Podcasts

Finding information is no longer a problem. The problem is finding time to curate and consume it. I solve this with personalized AI mega-podcasts.

If there’s a topic you need to get up to speed on fast, collect articles, videos, and podcasts around it, feed them into NotepadLM, and ask it to generate a 30-minute podcast. Give it angles to explore and interrogate it in real time, asking questions as if you were calling into a radio show. The podcast will pivot dynamically according to your curiosity.

Gaining knowledge in this interactive, consumable format has saved me hundreds of hours scanning fragmented sources and lets me learn at the gym or on my commute. But beware: you’ll go down some deep rabbit holes.

2) Spar with AI to Spark Creativity On-Demand

CIOs are not artists. We’re engineers, most at home among ones and zeros. But with AI you can engineer the perfect conditions for creativity.

Let’s say you have the subject matter for a blog post but are struggling to come up with a good angle. Give ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude your topic, and ask it to help you brainstorm creative approaches. Don’t expect instant perfection. Instead use AI as a sparring partner. Enter the ring and have a back-and-forth to test ideas. Discard the weak. Refine the strong.

This safe, exploratory space will help you move faster from ideation to execution without the blank-page paralysis.

3) Appoint Your Own Board of AI Advisors

Stop treating AI as a tool. Instead, treat it like an expert assistant, who can provide tactical guidance on-demand.

First define a persona. Give AI a job description with a role, responsibilities, and skills, and save it as a custom GPT. Think DataAnalystGPT, MarketingStrategistGPT, PersonalTrainerGPT.

Delegating specialist tasks to my staff of AI assistants speeds up decision-making and frees me from constant mental context-switching. For example, my AI nutritionist reviews my workout schedule, tells me what to eat to hit my macros, and generates a weekly spreadsheet of meal plans.

4) Fact Check with AI Head-to-Heads

Trust should not be taken for granted, but tested. When you outsource your decision-making to AI, you risk being misled by false information.

An effective way of reducing this risk, is to fact check AI by running the same query through rival systems and comparing the outputs. If their answers agree, proceed. If they diverge, it’s a signal that one of them is incorrect and you should investigate further.

It’s a simple vetting practice that keeps me confident in the outputs.

5) Experiment with Agentic Browsing

Having said that AI has lost its “wow” factor, my wow senses did tingle a few weeks ago when I downloaded Perplexity’s new agentic browser.

I’ve only just begun to explore, but already it looks set to rewrite the rules of the game. Instead of finding information by punching a string of questions into a search bar, agentic browsers will make the experience of being online more cognitively intuitive and contextually-driven.

The real value will come from connecting its agents to your personal apps and letting them manage your inbox, book the best flights for your dates, or optimize your schedule without needing to toggle between tools.

AI Shouldn’t Shine. It Should Sharpen.

In the future, AI won’t be impressive. It will be indispensable. Forward-thinking CIOs will embrace the boring and integrate AI so deeply into their daily lives that it disappears entirely, leaving only clarity and purpose.

So tell me, how have you been using AI?

CIO Corner is the executive lens on what’s next in IT, delivered by Nasuni CIO, Dalan Winbush. With a firsthand perspective from the frontlines of IT leadership, Dalan unpacks what it really takes to modernize infrastructure, harness AI, and lead through complexity. This series tackles the hard questions CIOs face today, such as scalability, resilience, velocity, and value. It’s a candid look at how cloud and AI are reshaping enterprise IT — from someone who’s doing it, not just talking about it.