From the Editor’s Desk: Putting AI to Work (Premium)

Last week, I observed that the real benefit we get from AI is a time savings that lets us focus on the work that's most important to us. And that was mostly an observation. Whether this is hypocritical or ironic, or both, I don't know, but I have struggled to use AI in my daily work. And that needs to change.

With that in mind, here are a few anecdotal experiences that may be of interest. A few baby steps, if you will, into a more AI-centric future.
?️ Summarize
Yesterday, I took the afternoon off to travel via train to Toluca, a city to the west of Mexico City, with my wife and two friends. Getting there is time-consuming and tedious, though that will get better when the high-speed rail line is completed, connecting central Mexico City to the Santa Fe neighborhood and Toluca. I specifically didn't bring my laptop, but had so much downtime I wish I had.

In any event, when we got back to our apartment much later in the day than expected, we grabbed a quick dinner and then Stephanie and I got caught up on work. In my case, there were several potentially interesting news stories that I pulled aside in browser tabs, and last night I ended up belatedly writing up the .NET 10 Preview 1 and Framework announcements. And that was all the energy I could muster. It had been a long day out in the sun, and at 10,000 feet of elevation, and I was beat. So I went to bed, figuring I could scan through the remaining items I had put aside in the morning.

Among them was a curious and pretty unique posting from Xbox called Xbox Game Studios Update With Craig Duncan. Unique because it was a video with no accompanying text-based announcements. And that meant I'd have to watch the video, and actually pay attention, to learn what that was all about. I knew that Xbox had delayed the Fable reboot to 2026 because Laurent pinged me about it just as I was leaving on Tuesday, before he wrote it up. And so I figured that was the meat of the video content. But perhaps there was more.

The video is only 19 and a half minutes long, but it's fair to say I was dragging ass this morning, and I wasn't particularly in the mood to sit through the video interview. So I did what I've done so often with such things, I copied and pasted the transcript of it into a document so I could just read it. This is useful when I want to quote from some event, though I have to step through the transcription in these cases and fix mistakes. But it's a nice time saver regardless.

But what if I could save even more time?

Inspired by the story my wife told me about her first meaningful use of AI, as relayed in a recent Ask Paul, I pasted the transcript into Word, which I normally don't use. And then I opened the Copilot pane and typed:
This is a video podcast transcript. Can you summarize it for me?
This was the response.
Sure, I'd be happy to help with that! ?

The podcast features Tina Amini and Craig Duncan, the new Head of Xbox Game Studios. They discuss Craig's extensive...