🤖 Building custom AI assistants and automations with no code

Behind the scenes: what I'm working on and how you can help + a gift

Feb 02, 2024

Welcome back to Year 2049, your source of practical insights, case studies, and resources to help you embrace and harness the power of AI in your life, work, and business.
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Hey friends 👋

I want to share some preliminary plans and ideas for an exciting project I’m starting.

The most common question I get in my email inbox and social media DMs is:

“How can I use AI in my work?”

Everyone is well aware of AI’s capabilities. The ChatGPT hype has created unprecedented excitement (“This is amazing!”), but also a sense of anxiety (“How does this affect me directly? How do I leverage this for my work?”).

When people say “AI has endless possibilities”, it makes it even harder to imagine concrete and tangible applications that are relevant to your daily work or company as a whole.

While those questions were tough to answer last year, I believe we’ve reached a stage where every person can start experimenting and building custom AI solutions for their specific use cases. Custom GPTs are one example. But providers like Google and Microsoft are also making AI customization available through their suite of tools.

I’m biased here, but I think finding valuable use cases and applications of AI in the existing world requires a combination of human-centered design practices and a deep understanding of AI’s capabilities.

Thankfully, those are the two areas that I’ve obsessed over for the past 5 years. While they always felt like two separate areas of my brain, I’m realizing the power of combining them.

After all, the technology-first approach of trying to slap AI onto anything and everything is like throwing a dart in the dark and hoping it lands on a triple 20. Even Michael van Gerwen wouldn’t take those odds. It’s costly, time-consuming, disappointing, and doesn’t guarantee any value.

These are “solutions in search of a problem”.

The truth is that AI isn’t useful for everything. But, we can find incredible opportunities to leverage it if we clearly identify problems we’re trying to solve and match them to a solution.

For that reason, I want to combine all the knowledge I’ve gained along with everything I’m still learning to help those who have the same excitement, anxieties, and questions as I do.

I’m still determining what that will look like, but I imagine it will be a combination of:

Tactics and frameworks to find, evaluate, prototype, and implement custom AI solutions
Hands-on tutorials and deep dives into AI tools or software that allow you to build these solutions with no code (or low code at most)

I have initial ideas and goals for what this “course” should cover, but it would be a waste if I didn’t build it with your questions and needs in mind.

I have a few questions that would help me A TON with this. I know people hate surveys but I promise you’ll get early access and a 50% discount if you answer these 10 short questions:

Get on the waitlist + 50% off

🎁 A gift for you: Free AI Resources 2.0

I put together my popular list of free AI resources into a well-organized table that I’ll keep updating with time. I sent this list back in May 2023, so many of you may have lost it in your inbox or not even received it.

Every Year 2049 member will receive the link to the Free AI Resources database in their welcome email. Become a free subscriber and you’ll get the link in your inbox in seconds 🎁👇

I’m also thinking of creating a separate database for AI tools where you can filter by name, use case, type, cost, etc. If you would find that useful, just hit “Yes” or “No” on the poll below.