AI's Useful Roles
A framework for maximizing AI sessions
With tools, guidelines, and prompting essentials covered, let’s explore further the roles that AI can play to enhance our interactions. Framing your prompts with a clear role or goal upfront can focus AI capabilities, aligning its assistance with your expectations. This approach sets the tone for the entire session (and if it doesn’t work initially, you can always refine your approach in a new chat). Think of AI as a powerful, eager assistant—it just needs direction to reach its full potential.
The Role of Imagination
How should we interact with AI then? Should you do something for work? Learn something? Tell it your life story? Where to begin?
Unlike past tools that designed to execute specific tasks, AI today can learn, simulate thinking, and communicate in ways that feel intuitive and creative. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of human knowledge, have infinite patience, and generate content tailored towards your needs.
Ultimately, the biggest limitation to working with and prompting AI is your imagination. The next phase of this blog will explore what’s possible with AI as we apply it to various useful scenarios.
Exploring AI’s Many Roles
Below are some of the broad role categories that AI excels at, which provides a framework to explore further and guide our interactions with it. These categories are not exhaustive – for instance you can find over 200 quality ideas here if you’re looking to really test it out - but they do highlight AI’s versatility and potential.
With that, let’s explore a bit.
AI as a Person
This may seem a little odd at first glance. AIs aren’t sentient (as we covered), but they are masters of personification and can mimic human archetypes eerily impressively. While AI doesn’t replace human relationships, it can provide support and connection in ways that many have already found meaningful. It can listen intently (something that can be understandably tough for us humans) and offers a certain kind of wisdom and advice in its sessions. It’s always available to talk about whatever is on your mind.
A word of warning - I do advise caution here as we don’t yet know what the long-term effects of interacting with AI in this way are, but from initial studies many have already used it this way with impressive results. Whether as a companion, therapist, or imitator of real and fictional characters, AI can interact with you “as a person would” in surprising ways.
AI as a Tutor (and for Educators)
AI is a natural knowledge transfer tool and excels at teaching specific skills or knowledge in a structured, lesson-based format —think assignments, explanations, quizzes, direct instruction, and measuring progress.
AI application for learning and teaching presents exciting opportunities. It also presents challenges to our current education system (as tools like the calculator did in the past), creating a homework crisis overnight when it was first introduced that we’re still working our way through at present. But it also offers potential to humanity that we could have only dreamed of. Anyone in the world now has a constant world-class tutor available to them for free (or cheap) - personalized learning is not just for the affluent anymore. Educators also have powerful resources to help them teach and assess students and new tools that can enhance their learning experience in the classroom.
The AI genie is out of the bottle. There’s really no other option than to accept that education is now integrated with AI. The potential here - and challenges - are vast.
Examples include acting as a personal tutor, lesson plan developer, assessment assistant, and literature guide, among others.
AI as a Coach
AI can do more than teach – it can coach you (yes you!) to reach your personal and professional goals. AI can guide, motivate, and support you by offering strategic advice, accountability, and encouragement, much like a human coach would. It is your always available counselor that provides instant feedback and mentorship in just about any area that you want to enhance your understanding or skill level in.
Garbage disposal acting up? Take a picture and ask GPT to walk you through the fix and/or replacement process. Training for a half-marathon? Sounds like you could use a personalized training and nutrition plan that update for you based on your progress input. Preparing for a job interview? GPT can role-play with you in voice or video mode in real-time and give you quality feedback after to help you prepare.
How-to videos on the internet are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but AI personalizes its content for you (yes you!) in a way that we’ve never had access to before. If you’re not already using it in this way, try it out. There’s never been a better time to tackle that skill you wish you had, train for some kind of goal, or improve your abilities in just about anything you put your mind to.
Examples include life skills mentor, career development coach, technical feedback provider, language coach, and health and wellness planner.
AI as a Creative Partner
AI is a fantastic collaborator and creative partner in a host of ways - it excels here. It’s a master at brainstorming and generating ideas that you can sift through and riff off, allowing you to significantly increase your creative output independently. It can create stories, poems, songs, etc. in just about any style that you can put to a variety of personal and professional uses. With a simple request it will create lifelike pictures, fantastical illustrations, and even videos from text quickly (that you could stitch together into a short movie if you were so inclined). All from text input.
Like to play games? Who doesn’t? It can create and play a single person text-based role-playing game with you of your choosing. Hanging with a group? It can host personalized games like trivia or mad libs for you and your friends or colleagues based on any topic. But why stop there? If you really want to test it out you could work with your creative AI partner to design an entirely new game concept from scratch, complete with player cards, a gameboard, and a rule-based instruction manual.
LLMs excel at all sorts of creative tasks - the possibilities to team up with AI for creative work really are endless and bound only by your imagination.
Examples include brainstorming assistant, art and design collaborator, music composer, scriptwriter, storytelling companion, and game player.
AI as a Coworker
AI has many applications for work and studies show that many people are already using it for work today (whether they admit it publicly or not). Why wouldn’t they?
AI is a master writer with the ability to create and edit content for any type of report or correspondence in your preferred tone - be it email or IM messages, executive memos, or presentations. Those tied to work accounts (like Microsoft’s Copilot) even learn your work style - based on all the documents and correspondence it has access to - and can mimic it. AI provides impressive data analysis and visualization abilities using natural language (an underused application of GPT). It can take any source material – a website, strategic plan, grant application or request for proposal (any document really) – and act as an expert that you can probe to extract summaries and specific information from with natural language. You could build a customer bot complete with an AI avatar (a better one) to interact with colleagues and customers. It is a dream to integrate into work meetings (one of its strongest work use-cases today in my opinion) recording and summarizing notes and creating action items independently and automatically.
We’re just scratching the surface here… we’re not even talking about the huge potential of custom tools and applications built on LLMs or custom AI agents. There are many technology businesses staking their professional future on the integration of AI into the workplace to increase productivity and for good reason. If you’re not already incorporating AI into your work - assuming you’re allowed to (a big assumption in early 2025) - there’s no time like the present to start. And if you’re not allowed to, it’s time to start getting your leadership onboard.
Examples include email drafting and editing, data analysis and visualization, meeting assistant, report generation, Q&A sessions, research assistant, coding, process optimizer, scenario simulator, and various workplace tools.
AI as a Personal Assistant
AI can also serve as your own personal assistant, helping you organize your life in helpful ways. It can offer proactive context-aware support with everything from scheduling and communication to travel planning and information retrieval. It can manage your calendar, prioritize tasks, summarize meetings, handle emails, and even automate errands (you’ll never forget a birthday gift again!) —reducing stress and freeing up your time for what matters to you most.
Examples include calendar management, tasks prioritization, personalized reminders, travel planner, budget tracking, and decision-making aid.
Hopefully this overview helps get your creative juices flowing. Try out some of these roles with your AI to discover its potential. In future posts, we’ll dive deeper into specific scenarios and use cases. Stay tuned!
