How often do you use AI? I tracked my Sunday workday to find out. Between 4:30-9:00 PM (with a dinner break), I monitored every AI interaction while handling emails, analyzing data, & writing.

If the average American picks up their mobile phone 144 times per day & we call that addiction, I am using AI about a hundred times per hour. Is AI ten times more valuable than a phone?

Speech

Dictation activity is bursty with breaks for dinner. But looking at 7pm & later, I’m hitting the speech API at least once every 2 minutes but closer to every 90 seconds on average. Around 8:00 PM is when I started to email - massive activity spike.

On average, the typical transcription contains about 18 words, but more than a quarter of them contain more than 50 words. Those longer tracts are typically entire email responses dictated in one shot.

Dictation is 3 times faster than typing, so it saves me an enormous amount of time.

Two AIs process my voice : initially a dictation AI and a language AI that edits for brevity & clarity (both of these run on my laptop).

Coding

Publishing data-driven blog post analysis is a key part from formatting the data to analyzing it using R and then publishing charts. All of this is now predominantly handled with prompts to an AI.

I can generate several hundred lines of code in 5-10 minutes. With the newer models, I expect this to collapse to 1-2 minutes.

In fact, I find myself growing reliant on the AI to the extent that I no longer remember some of the R syntax, A sign of working at a higher level of abstraction : one of the promises of AI.

Fully focused on work, I’m employing AI roughly 50-100 times per hour.

Within the last 24 months it’s clear that AI has become an essential coworker, perhaps at least as important as a mobile phone, but very likely more critical.