After church yesterday I was talking with a guy about the week ahead, and I mentioned I’ve got a five-hour drive Friday to go pick up supplies.
He said that sounded rough.
I said I was actually looking forward to it, and he looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
A few years ago I’d have agreed with him. Now a long drive alone is some of the best working time I get. I put the voice memo app on and talk — through problems, through questions I’ve been carrying, through whatever needs to get out of my head and into a form I can do something with. Five hours in the car is five hours of that.
So I told him about it. And he got quiet for a second and then asked a real question.
Some of the meetings he runs, he said, wander. They end up down rabbit trails. Could the AI pull out the parts that don’t matter?
Yes. If you tell it what matters.
We stood there about five minutes and I walked him through it. Record the meeting — and tell everybody you’re recording, because that’s just decent. Afterward, hand the transcript to the tool and say: this meeting was about this topic. Give me a recap. Leave out anything that didn’t relate to it directly or indirectly.
So if you’re on a business call and somebody spends ten minutes on a hunting trip, the hunting trip is gone from the recap. It still lives in the original. But what your team gets is clean notes, the decisions that were made, the action items, and who owns them.
He said, whoa, I’m going to have to try that.
On the drive home my wife looked over at me and said: you know that conversation you just had was a case study for the AI education stuff you’ve been building, right?
Yes. Yes it was.
I’ve spent a good part of this year working out what I think I’m for in this space. Not the AI guy — the communication guy who uses AI, and specifically the one who can sit with somebody my age or older and hand them a roadmap they can actually follow, from a person they already trust.
That’s been a theory, and it’s lived in outlines and drafts.
Yesterday it was five minutes in a parking lot with a man who’d never once thought to tell a tool what a meeting was about. No slides. No product. He walked away with something he’ll use this week.
I’m not going to overstate it. It was one conversation.
But I’ve been building toward a version of that conversation since spring, and it turned out the whole thing fits in the time it takes to walk to your car.
Friday’s drive just got more interesting.
David Willis 