MC.65: What AI Early Adopters Are Doing?

Discover how people are getting amazing results with AI in their daily work! From coding to writing, here's what the data tells us about productivity gains from AI users.

Author

Samuel ROY
December 14, 2024

Hey everyone,

The data is in: heavy AI users are seeing massive productivity gains in three key areas.

This post perfectly counterbalances my latest piece about the slow adoption of AI.

What AI early adopters are doing, and how is it improving their workflow?

I’ve analyzed three pieces of content: Tom Tunguz’s tracking of his AI usage (50-100 times per hour), Ethan Mollick pragmatic AI applications, and Anthropic's Clio latest research on real-world AI usage.

Unsurprisingly, the first area is technical work, especially coding.

Over 10% of Claude conversations are coding-related. People use AI as a higher abstraction over programming, where syntax know-how matters less.

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I find myself growing reliant on the AI to the extent that I no longer remember some of the R syntax

Tomasz Tungunz

The second area is communication and content creation, with 9.2% of Claude conversations.

Users leverage AI to draft documents, translate content and adapt existing material for different audiences and platforms.

Dictation, though not directly related to Claude, falls into this category. It’s 3x faster than typing. Tomasz Tungunz relies heavily on it, and I’m adopting it too. The time savings are truly incredible.

The third major area is research and data analysis. AI users avoid implementation complexities. They explain their goals to the AI co-worker who does the job of creating the simulation or charts.

And now, thanks to specialized agents, AI is able do its research on its own, which is pretty mind-blowing.

This reveals a guideline for AI use cases:

  • Tasks need expertise for verification but are repetitive: coding tasks, document drafts

  • Speed matters more than perfect accuracy: dictation, meeting transcriptions

  • Work can be broken into clear subtasks: research agents

AI won’t replace humans but is becoming an "essential coworker," amplifying capabilities in specific, high-leverage areas.

Looking to start? Try dictation and meeting transcriptions, they have high impacts on productivity. Essentially why our next version of Alter, a macOS AI assistant, has a focus on it.

Cheers, Sam

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