When Life becomes the Teacher (5): AI as a Daily Companion: What Changed in Our Work

From Tool to Teammate: How AI Reshaped Our Work Culture

During my extended stay in Germany last year, my work situation changed quite radically. I was suddenly reduced - almost unwillingly - to conducting online trainings and supporting our India-based team primarily through content preparation: designing sessions, shaping client offers, working on proposals and pitches.

This meant that, day after day, I worked very closely with various AI companions that now support our work. What struck me over time is this: AI is everywhere in social media, blogs, and conferences. There is endless discussion about its impact, its risks, its promises. And yet, what I see very little of is people sharing how they actually use AI in their daily professional lives - beyond treating it as a smarter search engine or a replacement browser.

In our L&D work, AI has genuinely turned our way of working upside down.
It has become a daily companion in content creation. And interestingly, we are beginning to realise that we are not light users or cautious followers - we are actually quite far ahead of the curve.

Now, let me be clear about two things:
No, our courses are not “generated by GPT.”
No, our programs are not copy-pasted from AI outputs.

All of us in the team are well-educated, experienced, and critical thinkers. What we do is this: we use AI to create first drafts - for proposals, program outlines, conceptual structures. And then the real work begins.

·      We review everything carefully.
·      We challenge assumptions.
·      We go deeper where sources are unclear.
·      We correct, refine, and enrich with our own experience and judgment.

The impact is significant. We are dramatically faster. We have far more time to think about the flow of sessions, the learning journey, the relational dynamics. And paradoxically, the quality of our work has increased - not decreased. AI has not replaced thinking in our work. It has created more space for thinking.

This experience has shaped my view very clearly: the question is not whether we use AI or not. The real question is how consciously we integrate it - and where we draw the line.