What should I do with the AI tool I'm already paying for?

Quiet AI week. No new tools to sign up for, no price changes to react to, no rules that just landed on your desk. The labs spent the week on physics simulations and self-driving cars, and the most-shared AI story was an Anthropic employee giving her assistant a five-pound budget — it bought nineteen ping pong balls.

So here's the one job worth doing this week.

What should I do with the AI tool I'm already paying for?

If you, your bookkeeper or your office manager signed up for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini in the last few months and mostly use it for the odd email, you're paying for something you've barely opened. A quiet week is the right week to fix that.

Pick one task you do every week — drafting customer quotes, chasing late payments, writing job ads, replying to enquiry emails, building the staff rota. Do it through the AI five times in a row. By the fifth go, you'll have a prompt that actually works for your business, and that task drops from an hour to ten minutes for good.

Save the prompt in a note on your phone. Use it again next Monday. That's the whole assignment.

One small note if you import or export

HMRC quietly updated its Customs Declaration Service guidance this weekend — completion instructions, code lists, known-error workarounds. Nothing dramatic, but the codes shift without much warning and a wrong digit can hold goods at the border. Send your customs broker or freight forwarder a two-line email: "Have you applied the latest CDS guidance updates to our declarations?" If they say yes, good. If they hesitate, book a longer call.

One thing to check while it's quiet

If you've handed any AI tool the keys to your card, your inbox or your social accounts — for booking, reordering, replying, or running ads — spend ten minutes this week auditing what it can actually do. Set a hard spending cap on the card itself, not just inside the tool. Keep anything that sends emails or DMs in your business name on draft-and-approve mode for the first month. Tools change their settings without telling you. Banks don't.

Bottom line

Nothing new to buy this week — so squeeze ten percent more out of what's already in your pocket.

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