ChatGpt - Two years in Review.
ChatGPT The Revelation
ChatGPT thrust itself onto the scene 2+ years ago and I was lucky enough to adopt it quite quickly, with my use increasing over time, to the point where it is now my most frequently used tool. It has replaced Google as my primary web tool and I now only use search engines for quick simple searches such as shop hours, restaurant locations, news headline searches. Anything meaningful that requires complex context then chatGpt is the go to tool in both my personal and professional lives. In fact it enables me to do things that were just not possible 3 years ago. Now I know that is not news, everyone knows how powerfull these new genAI tools are, but for the record, I wanted to demonstrate what I have learnt. There are always other people coming behind who can learn from your (my) experience. Though of course there are many others ahead of me on the AI path. I embrace this new technology and will continue to learn how to realise the benefits from it.
These are the things that have I used chatGpt for most.
Writing, Communication, and Thought Structuring
A significant portion of my use has been in structured writing and communication. ChatGPT has supported:
Drafting and refining professional narratives (CVs, personal website content, positioning statements).
Improving clarity, tone, and structure in business writing without diluting intent.
Preparing blog posts, guides, and long-form explanatory content where structure matters as much as content.
Iterating on messaging for different audiences (technical, business, public-facing).
Importantly, I do not treat outputs as “final.” Instead, ChatGPT acts as a first-pass editor and thinking partner, helping me converge faster on something that genuinely reflects my voice and experience.
Professional Problem-Solving and Technical Work
In my professional domain—data, technology, and product-adjacent leadership—ChatGPT has been most valuable as a rapid reasoning assistant. I have used it to:
Explore and validate technical approaches (APIs, data pipelines, schemas, edge cases).
Draft and refine Python, SQL, and lightweight JavaScript logic for real operational problems.
Scripts to compare data outputs from different versions of data services.
Trouble shoot web server configurations! Yes really, in a strange and imperfect situation I found myself administering a webserver with a wordpress site without the relevant skills to do it properly. It was almost 20 years since I last administered a website, things have changed. This was fine until I tried changing the configuration to apply a new SSL certificate. Somehow I managed to break the setup and despite my best efforts to bakup files before modification could not restore the site to it’s previous working order. Enter chatGpt, it took about 2 hours, but it guided me through exploring many different configuration options and eventually enabled me to restore the website to workin order.
This has allowed me to move faster from problem definition to viable solution framing, while maintaining a high bar for accuracy and accountability.
Personal Projects with Real-World Complexity
Beyond work, ChatGPT has been embedded in several substantial personal projects, including property purchase and renovation in France, short-term rental preparation, cross-border administration, and financial/tax planning. In these contexts, I have used it to:
Break down unfamiliar regulatory or administrative processes into actionable steps.
Create checklists, timelines, and decision frameworks.
Translate and interpret French documentation accurately and contextually.
Design practical artifacts (house guides, expense models, blog content, visual assets).
What stands out here is not automation, but cognitive offloading: freeing up mental bandwidth by externalizing structure, research, and iteration.
A lot of what falls under this section can be seen on my other website www.francofilestory.com which is dedicated to our journey purchasing and running a second home in France. In the @francofilestory blog on I used chatGpt to help with a lot of imformation and also to generate all the site logos. I even had a special blog about how chatGPT helped with the blog and other aspects of the house purchase.
Learning, Language, and Skill Development
ChatGPT has also played a role in continuous learning. I have used it to:
Support my ongoing French language learning by explaining grammar, correcting usage, and contextualizing errors.
Provide vocabulary and phrases around new situations.
Refresh knowledge in areas outside my daily work (legal concepts, finance, design basics).
Explore new tools and platforms (web publishing, basic front-end concepts, content optimization).
This has made learning more contextual and immediately applicable, rather than abstract or course-driven.
Creative and Visual Work
More recently, I have used ChatGPT as a creative collaborator for visual and multimedia work:
Generating concepts for images, icons, and diagrams. All logo imiages are generated by ChatGpt with the exception of one where I found Gemini to produce better results around a more complex request.
SEO setting and website branding for both this site and www.francofilestory.com
Iterating on visual layouts for blogs, guides, and social media.
Helping translate abstract ideas into concrete visual representations.
This has been particularly useful where I know what I want conceptually, but need help converging on execution.
Fun
Once you realise that chatGPT or other AI tools can produced tailored images it is obvious to use it to have fun.
This has ranged from generating avatars for myself or of friends, maybe making fun of them.
Cleaning or modifying photos
Generating word searches.
Converting photos to line drawings for children to colour in. That one was particularly well received.
