Artificial intelligence looks flashy, but the real question is: does it make our work more effective, little by little, every single day? Work should feel simple. Clear. Focused.
But too often, it doesnʼt.
Coda AI changes that. When AI lives inside the place where your team already plans, creates, and decides — work begins to feel different. Itʼs about making the daily flow of work less wasteful, more accurate, and more productive. Over time, those small savings compound — like interest on a good investment.
Here are ten moments from my day-to-day as an IT consultant where AI makes all the difference:
We all know the dread of a blinking cursor. A client pings you asking for a quick update, and suddenly youʼre sweating over whether to sound too formal or too casual. I used to spend twenty minutes polishing two paragraphs. Now I jot down rough bullet points — “project on track, need client input on integration, testing
starts Thursday” — and AI turns it into a polished email that still sounds like me. I hit send in under two minutes, and my clients never know I had help.
Before a client steering committee meeting, I used to block off an hour to review past decks, scan my inbox, and pull talking points. Now, AI does it for me. Iʼll open my calendar and see a short, auto-generated brief: “Last meeting: agreed to 3-week extension, open issues: testing environment not provisioned, CFO cares
about cost controls.” Itʼs like having a chief of staff who whispers the highlights in my ear before I walk in.
The meeting ends, and everyone rushes off — but the real work is turning the conversation into action. AI gives me a clean debrief with three parts: (1) what was decided, (2) who owns what, and (3) open questions that didnʼt get resolved. Then it nudges me: “Want to push these tasks into Jira and Asana?” Suddenly, weʼre not just having meetings. Weʼre driving outcomes.
As consultants, we sometimes forget clients didn’t sign up for acronym soup. Try telling a CFO that the “ETL job failed due to schema drift” and watch their eyes glaze over. AI helps me reframe those updates: “Some of the data formats changed, which caused last night’s upload to stop. We’re fixing it so reports stay accurate.” Same message, but now the executive is nodding instead of panicking.
RFP season is where weekends go to die. I’ve pulled too many late nights trying to spin up boilerplate, chase references, and make the language sound compelling. With AI, I feed in the client’s requirements and some past proposals, and I get a solid first draft. I still fine-tune the strategy and polish the story, but I’m starting from 70% instead of 0%. That time saved doesn’t just protect my sanity — it often wins the deal.
My calendar used to be a graveyard of back-to-back calls, leaving me no time to actually do the work. AI has started to feel like a silent partner: it notices I’ve booked six straight hours and prompts me to hold a two hour block before my next demo. It also nudges me before key meetings: “Want a quick prep brief?” or “You need 30 minutes to finish that deck beforehand.” Instead of letting the week happen to me, I finally feel like I’m in control of my time.
Early Scope creep is sneaky. A client asks, “Could you also build a quick dashboard?” and before you know it, you’ve doubled the work with no change order. AI helps by scanning meeting notes and project plans and flagging anything that looks out of scope. It’ll say: “This request isn’t in the original requirements. Add it to the change log?” That one small prompt can save weeks of painful renegotiation later.
As a consultant, I need to track emerging tech — new AI tools, compliance updates, cloud features — but I don’t have time to live in twenty newsletters and Twitter feeds. With AI, I can curate the noise into a weekly “Emerging Tech Brief” tailored to me. It reads like a custom newsletter: just the highlights, written in plain English, tied to the industries I work in. I skim it with my morning coffee and feel sharper in every client conversation.
Every project creates a trail of random documents, Slack threads, and half-baked notes. The problem? When the project transitions, no one can find anything. I’ve spent more late nights than I’d like stitching that chaos into a SharePoint site. With AI, I can drop all the raw material into a doc, and it pulls out FAQs, groups related information, and creates a living knowledge base. Instead of sacrificing my weekend, I’m done before Friday happy hour.
Let’s be honest: consultants are professional note-takers as much as problem-solvers. But after a 90-minute client workshop, my notes always looked like chicken scratch. Later, I’d spend an hour trying to remember what “DB–Q4??” was supposed to mean. Now, AI transcribes the call, highlights key decisions, and even flags risks. The difference is huge: I actually leave the call ready to act, not stuck deciphering my own handwriting.