AI Changed my Life in 5 Big Ways

here's how two years of working with AI transformed my approach to work, learning, and life itself

Using AI isn't an isolated experience anymore. Over the last few years alone, the way we approach life and work has changed monumentally. And this transformation isn't slowing down… it's accelerating.

As someone who's been working with AI and AI products for two years now, I've experienced a distinct learning curve that I bet sounds familiar to you: initial excitement about the ease and possibilities → dangerous overdependence → finally finding equilibrium.

And now that I’ve found my equilibrium with AI and had time to reflect, I’ve realized that using AI has changed my life. Not just in the conventional way, but in a way that’s made me more critical about how we approach and consume life.

With that, here are 5 ways in which AI has completely changed my life:

1. Mental Discipline Became My Superpower

When I first started experimenting with AI, I fell into the exact trap so many people are in right now: I over-optimized. Emails, research, quick replies—I let AI handle it all. It felt like efficiency, but really, I was outsourcing my thinking muscle.

The cost showed up in places I didn’t expect. In conversations, I was slower to connect ideas. In meetings, my articulation wasn’t as sharp. I had unintentionally offloaded too much of the daily practice that kept me mentally agile.

Fixing this wasn’t about “using AI better.” It was about retraining my brain. I had to consciously stop leaning on it for small things and force myself back into the habit of doing the work—writing, analyzing, articulating—for myself.

That discipline reshaped how I see AI, but also how I see challenges in general. Mental toughness isn’t just for the hard moments; it’s just as critical in the easy ones when it’s tempting to coast. AI reminded me that efficiency without engagement is fragility disguised as productivity.

2. I Finally Had Time to Learn What Actually Matters

Here’s the paradox: the more AI simplified, the deeper I was able to go.

Instead of wasting energy on repetitive tasks, I suddenly had space to invest in the bigger levers of my work (understanding how products grow, how markets move, and how strategy actually drives outcomes.) That mental bandwidth was invaluable.

This is where the myth of AI “killing learning” breaks down. AI didn’t make me complacent; it cleared the path for me to learn faster and more deeply. It gave me back hours, but it was on me to decide whether to use them on scrolling or on sharpening real expertise.

The professionals who are thriving in this AI-enhanced world aren’t the ones who ask AI to do their jobs. They’re the ones who ask AI to do the chores so they can do the work that actually matters.

3. Intelligence Can't Be Outsourced

AI is incredible at drafting, summarizing, and synthesizing. But here’s the harsh truth: it won’t save you when it’s time to show up in the room.

I learned this the hard way in team discussions. I’d sometimes bring AI-generated talking points, only to realize that when the conversation went off-script, I didn’t have the depth to carry it. That’s when it hit me: credibility isn’t built on outputs, it’s built on understanding.

There’s no shortcut to critical thinking, and there’s no prompt that replaces judgment. The most effective people I know use AI to support their intelligence, not to substitute for it. They let it speed up the background work, but they never abdicate responsibility for the final decision.

In short: AI can give you leverage, but the leverage is only as good as the intelligence behind it.

4. Execution Became My New Planning

For most of my career, I treated planning like gospel. Hours spent perfecting docs, strategies, roadmaps. But AI flipped that for me: planning isn’t the bottleneck anymore—execution is.

Why? Because I can now generate in a day what used to take weeks. Multiple prototypes, draft strategies, market tests. Instead of speculating endlessly on “the right approach,” I can put three versions into the world and learn from real feedback.

This fundamentally changed how I work. The loop is faster, the stakes are smaller, and the learning is exponential. Planning still matters, but only as a starting line. The race is won in the number of outputs you’re willing to ship and iterate on.

In an AI-driven world, speed to execution beats perfection in planning almost every time.

5. Quality Inputs Became Non-Negotiable

Anyone who’s worked with AI knows the phrase: garbage in, garbage out. But over time, I realized this principle applies just as much to me as it does to my prompts.

AI will amplify whatever you feed it. If your inputs (knowledge, conversations, experiences) are weak, the output will be equally shallow. On the flip side, the better the quality of what you put in, the more powerful and original your output becomes.

That realization reshaped how I consume information. I became more selective about what I read, who I learned from, and the content I surrounded myself with. Because if AI is going to mirror and magnify my inputs, then I want to make sure I’m feeding both of us something worth amplifying.

In other words, curation became part of the work. The quality of your environment directly determines the quality of your thinking.

The Bigger Picture

These lessons aren't really about AI. They're about adapting to rapid change while maintaining what makes us fundamentally human: critical thinking, continuous learning, genuine intelligence, bias toward action, and intentional input consumption.

AI changed my life not by replacing my capabilities, but by forcing me to develop them more deliberately. In a world where AI can handle the basics, the humans who thrive are those who double down on what AI can't replicate: wisdom, judgment, creativity, and the ability to connect ideas in genuinely novel ways.

The transformation isn't stopping. If anything, it's accelerating. But armed with these lessons, I'm more excited than ever about what comes next!