Exactly what the hell would I use AI for?
You’re not the only one asking.
A couple of weeks ago, I told you about my green skin and seven horns.
The wall that goes up when I mention AI at a dinner party. The particular face — shoulders, eyes, the closing — that happens before a word has left either of our mouths. The staff member who uninstalled Copilot because it annoyed him. The besties who quote The Matrix. The son who wonders what on earth a middle-aged woman would need AI for.
I know that face. I’ve been on the receiving end of it enough times to have developed a certain equanimity about it.
But here’s the thing I want to say to you, if you’re the person standing in front of the tool with a complete blank where the use case should be: you are not unusual.
You are not behind. You are not the only one.
You are, statistically speaking, the majority.
The numbers
Here’s what the data actually shows in 2026.
In Australia, roughly half of us have tried a generative AI tool in the past twelve months. Which sounds like a lot — until you notice that it also means roughly half of us haven’t. And of those who have tried it, regular meaningful use is considerably lower. The people using AI every day, in ways that have genuinely changed how they work or think or solve problems, are still a minority.
Globally, only about one in five working-age adults uses AI regularly — defined as at least ninety minutes a month, which is not a high bar.
The UAE leads the world at seventy percent. Singapore follows at sixty-three. The United States, home to most of the world’s leading AI companies, ranks outside the top twenty for population-level usage.
Australia sits near the top of the rankings, which is worth knowing. We are not a nation of AI refusers. We are a nation that is, quietly and pragmatically and without much fanfare, getting on with it.
But the person drawing a complete blank on what they’d use it for? That person is everywhere. That person is at every dinner party. That person is, in many cases, the person sitting next to the one with the green skin and seven horns.
You are not unusual. You are just early in a process that most people are also early in.
What the blank actually means
Here’s the thing about the blank that nobody says out loud.
The blank isn’t ignorance. It isn’t a sign that you haven’t been paying attention, or that you’ve missed something everyone else already understood. It’s a completely rational response to a tool that has been sold, consistently and loudly, as everything to everyone — and has therefore felt like nothing specific to you.
The use case doesn’t arrive before the conversation. It arrives inside it.
The people who know exactly what they’d use AI for are the people who’ve already started. They didn’t begin with a plan. They began with a first conversation — small, specific, slightly awkward — and the plan arrived somewhere in the middle of it.
The blank is not a barrier. It’s the starting point.
The cast
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to introduce you to some people.
They’re not extraordinary. They’re not early adopters or tech enthusiasts or people who had any particular reason to feel confident about any of this. They’re people who had the blank — the same blank you might be sitting with right now — and then found, one ordinary Tuesday, something specific that mattered.
There’s a teacher who loves teaching and is drowning in everything that isn’t teaching. A tradie who is extraordinary at the work and exhausted by the business of running it. A parent sitting at the kitchen table at nine on a Sunday night, homework spread across the table, no tutor available, a child who needs the explanation repeated one more time in a different way.
There’s a football dad who watches every match and can see something but can’t name it. A woman supporting her sister through a diagnosis she doesn’t have the language for yet. A man who has mastered Facebook Marketplace and has no idea that the skills he built there are exactly the skills that transfer.
A forty-something who has been going through the motions and can feel it. A retired woman whose hands know how to be busy and currently aren’t.
None of them started with a use case. They started with a situation. And the situation, it turned out, was enough.
The invitation
You don’t need to know what you’d use AI for before you start.
You need a situation. Something specific, something real, something that is actually happening in your life right now. Not a grand project. Not a career transformation. Just the thing on the desk, or the conversation you’ve been avoiding, or the question you’ve been embarrassed to ask anyone who knows you.
Start there.
The use case will arrive. It always does.
And when it does, you’ll understand why the people with the green skin and seven horns find it so hard to explain to everyone else. Not because it’s complicated. Because by the time you understand it, it feels so obvious that the blank seems almost impossible to remember.
You don’t need a use case. You just need a question.
Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.