When people talk about AI, they have different things in mind. Some think it generates text out of thin air. Others imagine it sifting insights from mountains of data. Then there’s the intelligent robots crowd, and the automation lot. But hardly anyone really knows what automation means in practice — or how to actually do it.
When I hear “automation,” my brain conjures up invisible digital hands that can grab things, move them around, maybe even look at them, and place them somewhere else. Perhaps even reshape them into something new. It’s all very abstract, and I reckon that’s exactly why everyone talks about automating things but nobody actually does it.
Focus on the unglamorous tasks
I’ve made it my mission to use AI for the tasks that feel boring at first glance. But these boring tasks are often so difficult that nobody touches them. Everyone talks about wanting things to be different, yet they’d rather kick off flashy projects that don’t actually move the needle on productivity or quality of working life.
Take images. You’ve probably got thousands of files on your hard drive named something like p735xyz.jpg. Until recently I worked at a platform that stored massive amounts of images. Every single one had a different cryptic name.
The unnamed file problem
Looking for an image? There was no image database — that would need maintaining, and besides, it didn’t exist. So I’d go into a folder full of these beautifully named files and either scroll through the thumbnail view hoping to spot the right one, or click through them one by one. Honestly, nobody does that anymore.
But the work of clicking every image, figuring out what it actually is, noting the context, the dimensions, and more — nobody does that either. Thirty-four years ago, my very first job during uni was at a computer publishing house, and my first task was to sort the photo archive. Back then it was slides. They had to be painstakingly catalogued and sorted into a spreadsheet.
A memory from the analogue world
When I sat down to tackle this problem, I thought back to my life in that photo archive. It was incredibly boring and I didn’t get very far. There were still several stacks of slides waiting when I got pulled onto other tasks.
But this is exactly where AI can help — if you do it right. Imagine you could dump all your images into one folder, completely unsorted. You’d run a script and then, magically:
The magic AI solution
Every image gets automatically sorted into a category you’ve defined in advance. The file dimensions are noted, and the filename becomes a short description — five words max, like “dog on a bicycle.” So the file would be named something like: Nature, 1200x800, mountain behind crystal lake. The original cryptically named file moves into a Processed subfolder.
On top of that, you’d get a spreadsheet with the file location, old filename, new filename, a longer description, and five keywords. For the adventurous types who want to go further, everything also gets written into a database.
Flexibility through different AI models
And it gets better: you can use different AI models, even ones running locally on your own machine. This is a project no human would ever tackle manually. It would simply take too long, and the error rate would be through the roof — because everyone describes and classifies images differently.
Of course, there’s an art to it: you have to explain very precisely what you want the models to do and, crucially, make sure the output is sensible and consistent. I’ve built a prototype, and I reckon it’s already running pretty reliably.
A prototype with potential
Sure, there are plenty of knobs to tweak, but it works. If you deal with images and want to bring order to the chaos — and then, once everything’s classified, sorted, and described, write it all into a special database so you can find images not just by description and keywords but also by visual similarity — I’d love to chat about what we could build.
Because this is just one example of genuinely boring stuff that actually improves everything. And I believe it does far more good than anything flashy.