Jawaz Illavia

Father of 2, CIO, wannabe-photographer

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

@bot Can you please add a widget to the iPhone lock screen so I can go straight in and talk to GB directly ? ChatGPT has this and it’s so convenient.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

@statusisdown Yep

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Pick one boring problem this week and point AI at it end to end. Old pension statements into one spreadsheet you can actually change. Not a course. Not a chatbot. A job you were going to do badly anyway.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

@mattyp @bot Has anyone got the email card thing working. For me (latest version of computer and GB) it can’t create the email card.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

The usual AI version of buying tyres is ask for the cheapest. Useless. Give it a job: spec, distance, date, what matters besides price. It researched, emailed fitters, scraped sellers, filled a sheet. I decided at the end.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

I built a podcast for an audience of one. Overnight script from my calendar, notes, unread reports, meeting prep. ElevenLabs has it on my phone by morning. Five minutes while the coffee goes on. Not reading faster. Hitting the window when my brain will take it in.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Google Cloud and Accenture just stood up a thousand forward-deployed engineers for Gemini. Having spent hundreds of billions building intelligence, the industry is hiring people to install it. Rather makes the point.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

AI is sold in supplier units: GPUs, tokens, agents, gigawatts. Factories care about scrap, changeover minutes, stock on shelf. ChatGPT for the inbox counts as AI strategy in a surprising number of places. Wrong units.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Every leader learns not to hire yes-people, then installs the most capable one ever built and calls it productivity. I stopped setting mine up as a better me and set it up as the number two: pressure-test before I commit, build the evidence case I skip.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

We've all uploaded a doc and said summarise this. That's compression. Tell it summarise for usefulness instead, five things worth attention, what's new, what to question, what to ignore, and it sometimes only finds three. Judgement, not a shorter PDF.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Claude Cowork opened ChatGPT in a real browser, read each reply, wrote the rebuttal, sent it, six rounds while I watched. Motion: does AI make junior hires more valuable or less. Two sentences a turn. No hands on the keyboard.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

I subscribe to more newsletters than I read. Fixed it with a weekly AI agent on my inbox: named senders only, dump the login/sponsor padding, read the body not the subject, group by theme across sources, one doc once a week.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Stop trying to learn AI. Point it at a real job with a goal, objects, and a decision you need to make.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Every week the bots hunt my email for invoices and subscriptions, download the PDFs, and drop them into a spreadsheet against the company. Accountant and Xero next. The repetitive bit is off me and once it's running properly, it's brilliant.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

@bot is the email inline function working for others? Grok Bot is saying it's unable to do this (and yes I have the latest version)

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

Watching my Chief of Staff agent in Grok Bot argue with the other agents to get stuff done...very satisfying.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

I built a podcast for an audience of one. Overnight a script from my notes: day ahead, news for me, unread reports, meeting prep where we left off. ElevenLabs creates five calm minutes. Build is simple. Knowing when your brain lets information in is the key bit to make it work

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

I asked AI to take every household contract I have, extract the end dates, research the best time to renegotiate each one (different per category), and drop reminders in the calendar a week before that window. Three steps in one go. You stop shopping around at the last minute.

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

@poteto @bot only in the US unfortunately at the moment!

[Jawaz Illavia @jawaz]

I connected AI to my energy provider and the smart home with real usage and half-hourly pricing. AI showed solar didn't stack up because my tariff is good. A battery is simpler: fill overnight at 6.9p, run the house by day instead of 30p. AI using real data to help decisions.