Everything's Called AI Now

About this episode

🪥 Your toothbrush says it has AI. So does your rice cooker. There’s even an AI water bottle. If that leaves you a little confused — good news: it’s not you. You’re being confused on purpose.

“AI” quietly became the two most valuable letters in business, so it got stuck on almost everything. Some of it genuinely is AI. A lot of it is plain old software wearing a shiny new sticker. 🏷️

Here’s the calm way to see it. Almost everything with the label is really one of three things:

1️⃣ Plain rules — someone typed in the steps. Not really “intelligent,” just automated.

2️⃣ Pattern-learners you’ve used happily for a decade — spam filters, photo face-detection, music suggestions.

3️⃣ The genuinely new wave — tools like ChatGPT that write, summarise, answer, and create on request.

Most of the noise is bucket one in a costume. Most of the real change is bucket three. 🎯

So here’s your gut-check for any ad or headline: “What does it actually do that it couldn’t do before?” Ask it, and the fog clears every time.

😌 And the relief at the end: you have permission to ignore most of it. The amount of AI that truly matters to your day is small — a handful of genuinely new tools, and we’ll walk through them together, calmly.