I’m what they call a late-early-adopter. I’m a tech enthusiast, but I’m also a bit of a cynic, and 30-odd years of following tech trends hasn’t done anything to improve that. I tend to roll my eyes at whatever the Big New Thing is, which explains why I spent most of the last few years shrugging my shoulders at AI. Sure, ChatGPT could do some cool things, and some of the tech was genuinely really interesting, but it wasn’t really obvious how it could actually add value to my life. And the hallucination problem was a real concern — how could I trust it to do useful work if it constantly made things up, and failed at basic things like counting the number of R’s in the word strawberry?

I tried to drum up some enthusiasm for using Copilot at work in 2025. The less said about that hopeless experience, the better.

And then, early in 2026, I encountered Claude. And I was blown away. My cynicism evaporated and I’ve now gone full throttle on AI adoption.

The difference? Claude (made by Anthropic) doesn’t just respond to your questions. It can use tools, pull in extra information, and actually do things — not just tell you about them.

I’m lucky enough to have access to Claude at work, and I first got to play with it in a training session at the end of February. From the off — seeing it competently assemble a branded PowerPoint deck with minimal instruction — I was hooked. I’d asked Copilot, built into PPT, to do something similar the week before and it had decided that the right approach was to give me a list of instructions on what to do! I already knew what to do — I wanted to get it done faster.

The rest of the session took us through Claude Code, and I’ve not looked back since. I’m even putting my money where my mouth is, paying for a Claude subscription at home as well as using it at work.

I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t tried AI yet, or who hasn’t used it since it first came on the scene, to give Claude a go. But when I talk to friends and former colleagues about how they’re using AI, the picture is very mixed. Some people are afraid of it, some have never tried it, or tried it once a couple of years ago, back at the height of my cynicism. I think this tech will be transformative, and I think it has the power to be transformative in incredible ways. I’m really excited about it, and I’m going to try and share that excitement here.

I’ll be writing about the things I’m doing with Claude, for fun, for profit and for things in between. I’ll share what I’ve learned, what I like and what I still find frustrating. And I’ll hopefully give you some ideas and inspiration for things you can try yourself.

If any of that sounds interesting, stick around — and leave a comment below to say hello.