What should you do with the AI tools you're already paying for?

It's a quiet AI news day — most of what crossed the wires (lab acquisitions, celebrity trademark filings, developer platform tie-ups) doesn't change what you do tomorrow morning. So instead of stretching it, here's the one thing worth your ten minutes today.

What should you do with the AI tools you're already paying for?

If you signed up for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini in the last year and mostly use it to tidy up the odd email, you're leaving the value on the table. A research note flagged by AI Daily News this week makes the simple point: nothing new launched that you need to buy, which makes this the perfect week to actually use what you've got.

Pick one chore you do every week — chasing late invoices, writing the same kind of customer reply, putting together a social post, drafting a quote, summarising a meeting. Then sit down for ten minutes and have your AI tool do that one thing. Paste in an example of how you'd normally write it, ask it to copy your tone, and save the result as a template you can reuse.

What to do next: Open whichever tool you already pay for, pick the one task that eats your time most, and run it through once today. If it saves you twenty minutes, repeat it tomorrow. If it doesn't, try a different task — the tool you're paying for should be earning its keep.

Quick hits

A few things crossed the wire that don't change your week, but you may hear about: Taylor Swift filed trademarks on her own voice and likeness to fight AI deepfakes, following Matthew McConaughey doing the same in December — a signal that voice and image rights are becoming a real legal area. OpenAI's models are coming to Amazon Bedrock in the coming weeks, which matters if your developers build on AWS but changes nothing if you don't. And HMRC quietly updated several Customs Declaration Service guidance pages — only relevant if you import or export goods, in which case forward the update to whoever files your declarations and ask them to confirm your codes are current.

Bottom line

There's nothing new to buy this week — so spend ten minutes getting more out of what you already pay for.

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