Drowning in AI Advice? Me Too. Here’s How I’m Sorting Through It
Written By: Alexandra Noland, Voiant Director of Revenue Operations
I’m not writing this as someone who has AI completely figured out. I don’t have all the answers. But I am working on it every day, learning as I go, and I am feeling the pressure that comes with being constantly flooded by content designed to make us feel behind.
No matter how much research you’ve done, how many experiments you’ve run, or how much expert advice you’re getting, there’s always another post, article, or tool that makes it feel like you’re already late to the party and you’ve already fallen behind.
Right now, I’m spending at least some part of every workday setting up AI workspaces, testing new projects, and refining prompts, tasks, and queries. It’s exciting and honestly a little scary at the same time. I also recognize that not everyone has the time or space to dedicate to this kind of experimentation, and I’m grateful that I do.
But even with that time, I’ve found myself overloaded with “best practices” and “top tactics” coming from every corner of the internet and it can be super overwhelming, so I wanted to share how I’ve begun weeding out some of the noise so far.
The Myth We’re All Being Sold
Whether you’re in a tech heavy role or not, most of us are being fed some level of fear based messaging around AI. The narrative is loud and consistent.
This will replace your job.
Everyone else is already doing this.
You’re falling behind faster than you think.
I won’t pretend that messaging doesn’t affect me. Sometimes it puts a pit in my stomach, but I think to weed through the noise, we have to ignore it the best we can.
Here’s a grounding datapoint that helps do that. In a recent Forbes study of 2,500 employees who reported using AI at work, only 5% could be considered “power users.*
As Voiant’s Director of Revenue Operations, I speak with incredibly savvy, advanced leaders across organizations that are actively rolling out AI. And even then, very few of them would fall into that “power user” category. Most are still experimenting, learning, and figuring out what actually fits their reality. That matters to me and I hope to you, because it means you’re probably not as far behind as the internet wants you to believe.
Agencies, Independent Research, Contractors. Where Do You Listen?
I’ve worked with agencies, independent contractors, done my own research, and collaborated closely with my teammates at Voiant to talk about how I should be using AI in my job and to figure out how Voiant as a company should be using and iterating with AI. Each perspective brings value, but taken all at once, it can feel extremely overwhelming.
Everyone has a different viewpoint, different stack suggestions, different incentives, and different assumptions. If you can sit with that discomfort long enough (longer than you might to) the information starts to coexist and become clearer for your own viewpoint and needs. What can actually apply to you and your team becomes clearer and clearer – that will lead to even more ability to ignore the noise.
This moment feels different from how we’ve solved problems in the past. I usually operate from realism, what a small team can reasonably execute based on experience, constraints, and timelines. That approach still matters. But this moment also requires giving yourself permission to think differently.
AI opens the door to possibilities that don’t always fit neatly into historical planning. It’s about trying something new, letting it fail a little, pulling it back, and shaping it into something that actually works in practice.
So, What Do I Actually Do?
This might sound contradictory, but despite how much time I spend working with AI, I actively choose to keep parts of my life and parts of my work intentionally AI free and human centric.
I try to live by what I call the 30% rule.
I want AI to automate or accelerate about 30% of my daily work, while keeping 70% rooted in human thinking, creativity, and judgment. That balance is where I believe real, strategic progress happens.
When I’m deciding what tools to build or what to add to my AI stack, I’ve been asking myself a few core questions:
Is this replacing thinking or accelerating it?
What I Actively Avoid
This part is personal, and everyone will have their own filters. There is simply too much information being shared to consume it all.
For me, I’ve learned to avoid:
Filtering these out has helped me focus and more quickly ignore. It might sound silly but even giving some of this content a minute or two here or there, it adds up and can take up too much space in my brain to allow for the larger strategic thinking.
Where I Lean In
I’m not anti AI. Far from it. AI is a major part of my role personally and something that Voiant as a company is and needs to be embracing as technology and management consultants. I’m leaning in as much as I responsibly can.
That said, I believe the best place to start is with specific, boring, administrative tasks. Which is really against a lot of the full transformation rhetoric that’s out there, but it’s just practical. Most companies are not in a place to roll out full AI strategies that are thought out from all departments and all levels, it’s just there and there’s so much to learn and organize still. I do think embracing AI in the ways that are practical and can save time quickly is super important, quick wins, larger more scaled and strategic plans to continue usage and adoption from there.
Things like updating simple CRM fields, daily or weekly tasks set up, meeting recaps, to-dos, all those small tasks that don’t feel like the flashiest or coolest ways to be setting up AI but over a quarter or a year, they add up to real time saved. Just make sure you’re using that time savings to continue to dig into the bigger picture for how to use AI in more strategic ways.
For Transparency. How I Used AI for This Article
I started with an idea and wrote a few rambling paragraphs into ChatGPT about how I’ve been feeling about AI. The pressure, the experimentation, and the overwhelm. I asked it to help me create an outline that might be useful to others in leadership roles feeling the same way.
It gave me multiple options. I chose one, opened a blank page, and wrote until I was done. Then I edited it myself and finally asked ChatGPT to help clean up grammar and reorganize sections for clarity. I took what AI gave me and rewrote it again where it took a little too much liberty or maybe didn’t appreciate my personal writing style.
I did my best to stick to that 30% rule because I still believe deeply in and love the creative process and am both an advocate for its importance in our society and in the responsible adoption of AI practices, and I’m coming to terms with those being able to coexist in our new reality.
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