I joined a company with an AI mandate. I was discouraged at first, but I saved hours solving a big, boring problem.

• Komal Amin joined Mighty Bear Games in 2024.

• Introduced a company-wide AI mandate in 2022.

• She was discouraged at first, but says now AI is buying time to get creative.

This essay is based on a conversation with Komal Amin, 39, who is the head of growth and marketing at Mighty Bear Games and is based in London. Her employment was verified by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m more creative than technical, so the prospect of joining Mighty Bear Games—an indie game studio that has a company-wide AI mandate from 2022—was daunting.

Now, 20 months after I joined in March 2024, I use AI all the time, both at work and outside: from news aggregation to invoicing and data planning.

The mandate, which requires employees to use AI tools to generate half of their output, encouraged me to find smart ways to focus less on work I don’t enjoy doing and free up more time to be creative.

The pandemic ended my acting career, but it made me a marketer

I wanted to be an actor since I was little in a local theater group. Acting has been a great way for me to express myself creatively. I went to drama school and for a decade I acted in theatre, films and television.

I found other work to pay the bills between jobs. We started by giving theaters and small theater companies help with marketing and social media.

Then COVID-19 hit and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands that I used to learn about cryptocurrencies and NFTs. I fell in love with the idea of ​​cryptogaming – games that use blockchain technologies – and started creating content about it.

I met Simon Davis, the co-founder of Mighty Bear Games, through an investor I met. Simon told me that the company is making AI-optimized game experiences, which speeds up content creation. You play the games on Telegram, whether it’s solitaire, tower defense games or those where you can win prizes.

I liked the sound of it and joined the company as Head of Growth in 2024 with the aim of finding users, launching a token and improving their marketing.

Adopting AI was intimidating at first

When I first discovered an AI content generation tool, before the launch of ChatGPT, it felt like I had discovered a magical universe.

Joining a company where the use of AI was mandatory was mostly exciting – I’ve always liked being on the cutting edge of technology – but also intimidating for someone without a technical mind. I tried to learn to code twice before but got bored easily.

In my first few days on the job, I remember hearing about Claude Code, an AI-based coding assistant that lives in your computer’s command line window. It looked like a challenge, but Simon helped me install it and explained how it works. I just needed that push to start using it.

I think the highlight was when I saw people in the company doing amazing things with AI and realized that I could do that too. It inspired me to do more research. I discovered Lindy, for example, which allows you to use plain English to automate workflows.

I started to see AI as a way to solve some of the pain points in my work.

We automated tedious tasks like invoicing

A major pain point of mine was boring stuff like monthly reporting or sending invoices. With the help of AI agents on Lindy, we’ve automated those tasks. It allowed me to focus less on memo- and process-based tasks and free up more time to research the market, seeing what people were sharing on X or TikTok.

We also saved at least an hour a day by automating a daily scan for the most impactful news related to the gaming industry, AI and Telegram channels. This news aggregator summarizes the information and gives it a title, provides source links and puts it in a dedicated Telegram channel.

Meanwhile, my “feeling scraper” was born out of trying to get more people on Telegram by understanding their feelings about it and if they knew it was also for games and widgets, not just chat.

It scours TikTok to find all Telegram posts from the past year, captures the content, transcribes it, and sends the data to Google Sheets.

In the past, we would have had an intern scrolling through TikTok trying to do an assessment, but this is a way for us to quickly extract high-level themes using AI tools. It allowed my team to focus on the next big things without being bogged down by smaller, onerous tasks.

AI has downsides, but I’m optimistic

I use a variety of AI tools from Lindy to Claude Code to ChatGPT. I’ve come to see that AI isn’t great at everything. He may be hallucinating, and of course there’s a lot of hype about how he’s going to take our jobs. It would be naive to say that I am not worried about taking jobs like mine.

Still, I’m cautiously optimistic. It takes so much knowledge to do a job and you need experts in every industry. In my line of work, if you use AI to create memes but don’t spend time on the source content, how do you know the meme is funny?

I think it’s better to do your own research and come to ChatGPT with specific questions than to use it to generate ideas – don’t stop using your full brain and completely outsource things.

For example, if I want to write something for my blog, I take a dump and, knowing that my grammar and syntax are terrible, I ask AI to organize my thoughts while keeping the essence of how I write.

Outside of my job, I’ve used ChatGPT to get advice on stock trading and even plan dates with my partner. I’ll ask her for fun and romantic things to do in London and I’ll ask her again, suggesting something non-alcoholic or more sporty. I absolutely love it and it works well for us.

I have more hours in the day, now I use AI

These days, thanks to artificial intelligence, I simply have more hours in the day to pursue the pits of my choice.

I am constantly experimenting with new tools. I have about 20 failed experiments behind me, a reminder that there are still limitations to the power of AI. There’s still a lot of AI slop out there.

You have to know what railings you need, and the result still has to be authentic to you. But ultimately, because of the mandate, I unlocked more time to be creative.

Read the original article on Business Insider