How you picture AI decides what you ask of it. If you see it as a tool, you pick it up for a specific problem and put it down again: you hand it one-off tasks, one at a time. If you see it as a colleague who uses the tools, you hand it whole processes: preparing the weekly summary, going through the inbox every morning, turning a set of notes into a document.
That shift forces you to do what you would do with a new person on the team. You give them a manual on the first day: who you are, how you work, how you write, what they must never do without asking. You give them access to what they need, such as your email, your calendar or your documents. And you ask them to keep a record of what they have done, so tomorrow they don’t start from scratch. Give a colleague vague instructions and they don’t know what to do; AI is exactly the same.
From there on, capabilities stop being features you operate and become tools the colleague chooses. Some come in the toolbox already, like creating a document or a spreadsheet; others are specialists who bring their own methods, like reviewing a contract. It can even work at a fixed time while you do something else.
What tends to get overlooked is that a colleague has limits too. The more you delegate, the more it matters to decide in advance what it may do on its own and what needs your approval: drafting an email is one thing, sending it is another.