{"slug": "the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox", "title": "The AI project list is already in your inbox", "summary": "A lawyer and a finance professional, both non-tech workers, expressed frustration with AI at work, citing mandated AI project proposals, degraded AI writing tools, and worsening Google search results. Their complaints highlight a broader trend: general-purpose AI surfaces are failing users, pushing them toward fit-for-purpose tools like Westlaw, and the mandate to invent AI projects inverts how useful workplace technologies actually spread.", "body_md": "# The AI project list is already in your inbox\n\nI had dinner with two friends recently. He’s a lawyer, she works in finance. Neither of them works in tech, and the conversation kept coming back to AI, mostly with a sigh.\n\nHis boss wants everyone at the firm to propose AI projects. He thinks that’s silly. Her complaint was different: the AI features in her writing tools have gotten worse, not better. And they agreed on a third thing, that Google search has gotten worse. He even thinks he needs a Westlaw subscription for lookups he used to just google.\n\nIt would be easy to file the whole conversation under “AI backlash from people who don’t get it.” I think that’s exactly backwards. They’re both sharp and switched on. Their instincts are right on all three counts, and taken together the three complaints tell you more about the state of AI at work than most industry commentary does.\n\n## Nobody mandated spreadsheet projects\n\nStart with the mandate, because it’s the one that sounds most reasonable and isn’t.\n\n“Propose AI projects” inverts how every useful workplace technology actually spread. Nobody’s boss demanded spreadsheet projects in 1985. Accountants and analysts grabbed VisiCalc and then Excel because it made the work faster and easier: the model that took an afternoon to recompute by hand took a keystroke. Email didn’t need an adoption committee. Neither did search, while it worked. Adoption showed up as relief, not as an assignment.\n\nSo when a technology needs a mandate to find its use cases, that isn’t a sign employees lack imagination. It’s a sign the technology hasn’t been put where their work is. My friend’s instinct, that there’s something off about being asked to invent projects for a tool, is the correct instinct. Tools that fit the work recruit their own users.\n\nThe mandate also quietly assigns the hardest part of the job to the people least equipped to do it. Spotting which work is automatable is a real skill. It requires seeing the pattern across months of repetition, knowing what the exceptions look like, and judging what can be safely handed off. Asking every employee to do that cold, for a technology they mostly know from headlines, produces what it always produces: a few chatbot pilots and a slide deck.\n\n## The retreat to fit-for-purpose\n\nNow the other two complaints. Same mistake, a different symptom: not AI pushed where it hasn’t found the work, but general-purpose surfaces degrading until people leave them.\n\nWriting tools getting worse and search getting worse have a common cause: general-purpose surfaces optimizing for the platform rather than the person using them. Search results serve ads and content farms, increasingly drowned in AI-generated slop. AI writing features ship to check a box on a feature-comparison chart, then get tuned for engagement metrics rather than for the person trying to finish a document. The surface still exists, but it stopped being accountable to the user.\n\nAnd look at what my friend wants to do about it. He hasn’t quit looking things up, but he thinks he needs Westlaw, a tool built for exactly his job, one he would pay for and that does one thing. A lawyer who feels he needs to pay for legal research in 2026 to answer questions Google used to handle isn’t stepping backward into the pre-search era. And it isn’t a new split. Westlaw and LexisNexis are older than Google, and serious legal research never actually left them. Google got good enough to blur the line for a couple of decades, and now that the general-purpose surface is degrading, the line is snapping back into focus: general-purpose surfaces for browsing, fit-for-purpose tools for work.\n\nWe’ve argued before that this split is the shape of the whole era: the [second wave of software](/blog/ai-second-wave) is fit-for-purpose AI applications, not general chat bolted onto everything. My friend has never read that essay and doesn’t need to. He’s living the thesis, one subscription at a time.\n\n## What the boss should ask for instead\n\nHere’s what I would’ve said at dinner, had it not gotten late.\n\nThe AI project list his boss wants already exists. Nobody has to invent it, because it’s written down, every day, in the team’s message stream. The intake emails that get the same three questions answered every time. The recurring requests that follow the same path from inbox to done. The follow-ups that slip when the week gets busy. The document requests, the status checks, the scheduling back-and-forth. The repetitive slice of what already lands on the team is the project list, sitting in everyone’s inbox, sorted by frequency.\n\nThat reframing changes the ask from “propose AI projects” to something any team can answer: what shows up over and over? You don’t need imagination for that question, just a look at last month’s email. If you want a method for that look, we put together a [short guide to finding what to automate first](/guides/what-to-automate-first/). And it changes the starting point from a greenfield pilot to work with its context already attached, which is [where agents actually succeed](/blog/agents-stalled-or-misplaced).\n\nIt also changes the rollout. Start with one recurring piece. Keep a human approving what goes out. Let the team feel the relief of not doing that one thing manually anymore, and the second project proposes itself. That’s how spreadsheets spread, and email, and every tool that stuck: not by mandate, but by one person’s Monday getting lighter and the next person asking how.\n\n## Where we come in\n\nThat’s the approach we’ve bet on at this+that. It reads what arrives across email and team chat, turns the requests and commitments into tracked tasks, and lets you describe the recurring patterns in plain language and turn them into workflows, with approval gates where you want them. The AI project doesn’t start from a brainstorm. It starts from the work you already have.\n\nMy friend’s boss is right about one thing: the firm almost certainly is sitting on real AI opportunities. He’s just asking the wrong question to find them. The answer isn’t in anyone’s imagination. It’s in the inbox.\n\n## Key takeaways\n\n- Three complaints from one dinner (an AI-projects mandate, degrading AI writing features, Google declining until Westlaw started to feel necessary) are two symptoms of one mistake: general-purpose AI bolted on, instead of fit-for-purpose AI put where the work is.\n- Useful workplace technology has never spread by mandate. Spreadsheets, email, and search spread as relief. A tool that needs a mandate to find its use cases hasn’t been put where the work is.\n- Degrading general-purpose surfaces push professionals toward fit-for-purpose tools. The pull back toward Westlaw is the second wave of software happening at one lawyer’s desk.\n- The AI project list already exists: the repetitive slice of what lands on the team every day, sorted by frequency. Ask “what shows up over and over,” not “propose AI projects.”\n- Start with one recurring piece, keep human approval on what goes out, and let relief drive adoption. That’s the bet this+that is built on.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox", "canonical_source": "https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/ai-project-list-already-in-your-inbox/", "published_at": "2026-08-10 10:39:49.467225+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-10 10:39:51.197514+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Google", "Westlaw", "LexisNexis", "VisiCalc", "Excel"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-project-list-is-already-in-your-inbox.jsonld"}}