Change your life by creating a personalized AI assistant
Learn the 4 levels of personalization you can use
A personalized AI assistant can and will change your life. Yes, it won’t magically make you rich or wash your car, but it will change your daily life.
I was right in the front row seat of the AI revolution. ChatGPT launched in November of 2022 and in early December I had used it to rebuild websites and adjust my clients marketing strategies.
I have used AI professionally at every stage of its evolution. From when simple prompting felt like a revolution to when ChatGPT passed the Turin test and then finally to when AI first clearly surpassed human capabilities with Deep Research.
AI is a personal experience, hence why we need to make personal assistants, well personal. We need to custom tailor them to who we are. This is what I have been doing ever since 2022. Now let me take you on a journey through the different levels of a personal AI assistant in the hopes that I will convince you to get on board.
Level 1 - Effective Prompting
We have all experienced ChatGPT (Claude, Gemini, whichever you use) giving us an answer that wasn’t satisfying. That is because we did not give it the information it needed to succeed.
Like I said, AI is personal, so not only does the AI need to know what you want to hear, but also how you want to hear it. The secret to getting good responses is to give the AI a comprehensive prompt.
This is the subject where people are building coaching businesses around. Where people write article after article on substack. I won’t go into the nitty gritty here, because to me, there are three simple things you need to do to get your assistant spot on every time.
Give the AI a clear role to take on related to the subject of your question. For example: “You are my doctor, specializing in A B C”
Give the AI background information about what you want to know
Always finish any prompt with: “Before you answer, do you have any questions you would like to ask me to be able to give me a great answer”.
If you follow these three principles the AI will be able to better personally assist you. All coaching and all paid offerings that focus on this, will end up teaching you those three principles.
Only by doing this you can already have quite the powerful personal assistant. Now you can get a great workout routine, nutrition plan, scheduling help, writing help, you name it.
Don’t be afraid to be personal. If you ever read a book on a subject and you trusted the book, you can basically trust the AI, because it literally read all the books. Just double check the sources. Parenting advice is not off the table, is what I am saying.
Level 2 - Contextual Prompting
To take your personal AI assistant to the next level you need to begin creating serious context. This is already where many people stop. And that is a shame, because the more context AI has, the more personal it can become.
Think of a coach for the gym, or an assistant for your office that handles emails and phone calls. What makes them great? When they know everything you told them, when they listen and give constructive feedback and when they do the things you want them to do properly.
To do that:
They need context
They need to know who you are
They need to learn about your routine
They need to understand your preferences
AI is no different. When you give it greater context it will take all of it into consideration. That means taking Step 2 from level 1 and taking it very seriously. The rule of thumb is, you cannot give your AI assistant too much context information.
When you want some advice for the gym, tell it everything about your current health routine or lack there of. You don’t need to hold back either, because unlike another human, the AI does not judge or care whatsoever. It is there to help.
Tell it what you are eating, how you sleep, how often you drink water, go all out. The same thing applies for any other subject you want to discuss with the AI. Give it as much context as possible.
Again, a personal assistant is no different. They need some time before they get really good at their job and before they are tailored to your needs, because they need to learn the context of their job.
The AI is the same way, except that when you give it context one time, it generally remembers it without needing to be told again (There are some exceptions to this when the context becomes too large, but this by now is over a million tokens. You will likely not get there unless you do some serious work with it).
Level 3 - Project Based Memory
Thus far we have been roaming around amateur land. Level 1 and Level 2 is where the herd hangs out. Now Level 2 is already much better than level 1, but it is still 1 off conversations. It doesn’t yet feel cohesive.
Level 3 is where things become assistant territory. You see AI’s have memories. ChatGPT illustrates this quite nicely, because it actually has a settings page where you can check what it remembers.
Next time you use AI ask it: “Tell me everything you know about me, remember about me or can recall about me”. This is an interesting experiment.
There are two types of memory. The first is simply your chat history. The AI can access all the chats you had previously. This means it can already infer things about you by accessing its own context about you.
Many people do not make use of this. You can literally store chats with the intention of talking about them later. ChatGPT even lets you create project folders for topics. Perplexity calls this Spaces.
Simply create a folder called Health and then store all your health related chats in the folder. Now at any time you can say: “Hey let’s go to my health project and talk about X”. This enables you to direct the AI quickly to all the information it needs to assist you best.
The second type is the settings page I mentioned earlier. You can tell ChatGPT to remember things while you are chatting. I do this every single day. Today while I was working out, I kept it updated about my routine, the weights I used and how many reps I did.
Next time before the gym it will give me a quick briefing about my last workout. This is a training tracker on steroids, because not only does it remember all my notes, but it can augment them, expand them, and give suggestions.
This is where the personal comes into play. Tell it specifically what to remember, to remind you, to build task lists around things. Tell it to remember things under specific titles so you don’t even need to recall yourself.
Level 4 - Connecting Your Applications
Up until this point we had the AI tell us what we should do based on its knowledge about us. Maybe it suggested to us how to write something, cook something, how to build an app, how to optimize our marketing.
But what about letting it do all this for you? What about not asking it to even help, but setting it up so that it just does the work for you? Is that even possible? Oh yes, it sure is.
A true personal assistant has access to your schedule. They can interact with your customers to reschedule appointments, can they not? This is the same idea. If you know how to code and use an API, then this is easy peasy.
If you do not know how to code you can use no-code tools like Zapier to build your own AI workflows. You can have the AI do something every day at 6am. Mine reads all my newsletters and filters them based on my preferences. It’s a pre-read so I only get to actually see what I like.
Yes, I had to train for a few days. Of course, your human assistant wouldn’t know what you want to read and what not. But like the human the AI learns, except it learns super quickly and doesn’t forget.
In this way you can connect AI to all your applications. Emails, calendars, CRMs, Advertising campaigns.. Anything. I mean literally anything. Now it will learn from all of it. You supervise it, correct it, teach it and then unleash it.
There are levels of complexity here too.
You can use linear automations that trigger AI for specific tasks
You can build Agents with n8n or Zapier that have access to some apps with a specific purpose.
You can build your own MCP server, connect all your apps and call your own custom GPT (sounds complicated, it is not. You can learn it in 3 hours).
Obviously 3 is where it’s really at, because now the AI has access to all applications without needing to be inside of a linear flow. You can prompt it and it will execute tasks in your apps. “Reschedule my 8am and move my lunch meeting by one hour. Make sure to email both and apologize based on my usual email style”.
Yep, it will do it.
Treat AI like a personal human assistant and you will be amazed
The secret to all these levels is to pretend AI is your new human assistant. Treat it exactly the same. Teach it who you are, what you need and what your preferences are.
Spend time with it to make sure it gets all the context it requires. Give it access to your emails, give it its own email if you want. Let it see your schedule, your routine and then just let it help you.
The sky is the limit.
I have been doing automation and business optimizations for a long time. In all my time, I have never seen so much impact from a single tool other than AI. It is remarkable how much time and money it can save people.
Just make sure you know who the boss is. People are afraid of losing their thinking capability. No you won’t, unless you let it. Let AI help you, not overtake you. Let the AI augment your creativity, not replace it. All that is in your control.
I use it daily and it makes me way more productive. I don’t know if it is 8x, 12x or 22x. Who cares? It is so much I can tell my life is much more efficient. And yours can be too.