Jawaz Illavia

Four of my photos are going on a wall at The Handbag Factory in London, 28 Jan to 1 Feb, in Urban Lives with over 40 photographers. This is one of them. Come along if you're nearby.

I made this on my own PC at home, picture, sound and music, using only free open weight AI models.

Pick one boring problem this week and point AI at it end to end. Old pension statements into one spreadsheet you can actually change. Not a course. Not a chatbot. A job you were going to do badly anyway.

AI is sold in supplier units: GPUs, tokens, agents, gigawatts. Factories care about scrap, changeover minutes, stock on shelf. ChatGPT for the inbox counts as AI strategy in a surprising number of places. Wrong units.

I subscribe to more newsletters than I read. Fixed it with a weekly AI agent on my inbox: named senders only, dump the login/sponsor padding, read the body not the subject, group by theme across sources, one doc once a week.

Every week the bots hunt my email for invoices and subscriptions, download the PDFs, and drop them into a spreadsheet against the company. Accountant and Xero next. The repetitive bit is off me and once it's running properly, it's brilliant.

Watching my Chief of Staff agent in Grok Bot argue with the other agents to get stuff done...very satisfying.

I built a podcast for an audience of one. Overnight a script from my notes: day ahead, news for me, unread reports, meeting prep where we left off. ElevenLabs creates five calm minutes. Build is simple. Knowing when your brain lets information in is the key bit to make it work

I asked AI to take every household contract I have, extract the end dates, research the best time to renegotiate each one (different per category), and drop reminders in the calendar a week before that window. Three steps in one go. You stop shopping around at the last minute.

I connected AI to my energy provider and the smart home with real usage and half-hourly pricing. AI showed solar didn't stack up because my tariff is good. A battery is simpler: fill overnight at 6.9p, run the house by day instead of 30p. AI using real data to help decisions.

I needed four tyres last month. The usual AI version is ask for the cheapest. First attempt was useless because I asked it to find me my tyres, a question not a job. I gave it the goal, it researched, emailed out, scraped the web, filled a spreadsheet, then I made the decision.

101 tip... we've been told for years not to upload a document and say summarise this, but we all still do it. I asked it to summarise for Usefulness instead and output is so much better....it gives a view of what's important for me.

Rajiv Chandra of Mum & You: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became a CEO by @ChayaWeiner link.medium.com/LWBBvCmdUkb

Interesting to see some companies using COVID as a reason to transform, while others are using it as a crisis to only cut costs.

These are challenging times for the hospitality sector in the UK. Love My Local is a free-to-use website to help local pubs, bars and restaurants continue serving their local communities, safely. Click the link for more information if you’re a business ow…lnkd.in/efQmUKT

role #3 :-) Want to join the company that is brewing for a better today and tomorrow? At Carlsberg you have the freedom to make a massive impact and will have lots of fun (and a beer or two) doing it. Looking for a Senior PM for our eCommerce product to…lnkd.in/eKbr-UA

Want to join the company that is brewing for a better today and tomorrow? At Carlsberg you have the freedom to make a massive impact and will have lots of fun (and a beer or two) doing it. Looking for a UX lead to be based at our HQ in Copenhagen. lnkd.in/ex99Ss9