There’s no doubt that AI is everywhere right now. You only had to walk around BETT to see it – almost every product, every vendor, was either “AI-powered” or built entirely around it. LinkedIn is full of posts about use cases and productivity gains, while platforms like Instagram and TikTok are awash with AI-generated content that often leaves you wondering what’s real anymore.
And if I’m honest, that level of hype usually has the opposite effect on me.
For all the talk of new platforms and new ways of working, it takes a lot for me to move away from tools I already trust. It’s not that I don’t see the value – it’s that I’m busy. And change, at least initially, makes me busier. I’ll always run the latest software and want the newest hardware, but fully adopting a brand-new tool or workflow has never been something I’m particularly good at.
But AI has changed that.
Not because it’s clever, impressive, or fashionable – but because, for the first time in a long while, it genuinely removes friction from my day.
I don’t use AI as a replacement for thinking, but as a way to refine it. One of the biggest examples is rewriting content. I’ll still write the email or document myself, but I’ll use AI to strip out emotion, soften wording, or reduce the risk of something being misinterpreted. Text-based communication has always been prone to being taken the wrong way, and for professional content, having that extra layer of refinement feels like a safety net.
Scripting is where the impact has been even bigger, and easily my largest time-saver. Previously, I’d search for scripts, adapt fragments from different sources, and work within the limits of what I had time to research. Now, I can describe exactly what I want to achieve – including edge cases – and work with AI to build reusable scripts. It’s accelerated cloud migrations massively for me, and just as importantly, it’s pushed my own understanding forward rather than replacing it.
The same is true with Power Platform. Building a visit-logging app in Power Apps would have taken far longer without AI – not because it wrote the app for me, but because it helped me understand what was possible, why something wasn’t working, and how to approach problems without hours of trial and error.
Even outside of work, the pattern is the same. Podcasting is a good example. I moved from basic tools like Audacity and Teams to Riverside, and the AI-driven features – audio cleanup, summaries, and social clips — don’t feel gimmicky. They remove entire chunks of effort that used to sit between recording something and actually publishing it.
All of this personal use leaves me with a bigger question: is this happening at the same pace in education?
AI has the potential to reduce workload for staff more than almost any other recent technology shift. But if I’m not dramatically changing how I work inside Office despite having access to Copilot, are teachers?
My experience says not yet — and a big part of that comes down to how AI has been deployed. It’s overwhelming. It’s everywhere, but nowhere. There isn’t a single place you “open” AI in the same way you open Outlook – instead, Copilot appears everywhere, asking users to tell it what they want, rather than quietly helping them do what they’re already doing.
Delivering training and seeing Gemini and Notebook.lm in action, the contrast was stark. What impressed those I am delivering the training to wasn’t just the capability, but the integration. Gemini feels embedded into the tools people already use, enhancing what they are already doing rather than forcing them to explain it. It hasn’t been endlessly rebranded into existing tools without explanation – it’s been made visible, understandable, and immediately useful.
That’s where Microsoft has struggled. Copilot exists, but too often users don’t know what it actually does, where it helps, or why they should change their habits to use it. It is not built in to products in the same way.
And this matters, because the next major shift in educational technology isn’t hardware – it’s how people interact with the tools they already have. Training, adoption, and usability are now the real battleground. Ease of use is everything.
Right now, whether it’s Gemini on Android or Gemini inside Workspace, Google are making that leap feel natural. And if we want AI to genuinely reduce workload in education, that’s the lesson we need to take seriously – now, not later.
