Emilie Schario is a mother of 3 (5 & under!) and an AI expert in the tech space, as VP of engineering at Kilo Code. She’s also a BLPA alumnus who still loves to plan on paper!
Emilie joins me on the show today to talk planning, productivity, and how she uses AI tools every day in her planning and life management systems. She shares her own simple (and very appealing!) use cases and ideas for how even the least tech-savvy can get started.
Paper planner that Emilie currently uses is from Sprouted!
Find more from Emilie at LinkedIn or her substack, and feel free to leave questions for Emilie here!
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24 Comments
I LOVED this episode! As a mom who embraces AI myself (and who recently started an AI enablement practice), this was a really helpful episode – both n how Emilie uses analog + AI (very similar to me) as well as her use cases. I have my home ‘Chief of Staff’ agent (Clem) as well as my work Chief of Staff agent (Pepper) both set up in Claude, and they help me out dozens of times a day.
So glad that this resonated with you! Chad and Clem should exchange notes!
Thank you for the episode. I am curious what your thoughts are on the environmental impact of AI with everyday people now adopting AI for so many things such as summarizing emails from school, asking AI what to make for dinner, etc. My understanding is that the amount of water used to answer one AI question (cooling data centers) is the equivalent to dumping out an entire water bottle.
This is most definitely not an attack on anyone, I am truly trying to understand how people are so quickly adopting these into the all the aspects of their life that they would prefer not to do (I totally get why it would be lovely to not get all the emails, texts and WhatsApp notifications from school on a daily basis) while understanding how incredibly negative the impact is on our environment.
I’m all for AI in areas such as medicine, scientific breakthroughs that save lives. I understand the justification of resources then, but it just seems to be permeating everywhere now and I don’t see the tradeoff being worth me not having to deal with tasks I would like off my plate. Perhaps someone has new data that disputes my one bottle of water per question, I would love that as well.
There are a couple of papers that try to estimate the water usage of LLMs.
– This paper found that approximately 10-50 medium-length prompts with ChatGPT-3 uses approximately 500 ml. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
– More recent work at Google looking at Gemini specifically found a median-length prompt uses approximately 5 drops of water. https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_environmental_impact_of_delivering_ai_at_google_scale.pdf
Resource use varies greatly depending on what you’re asking an LLM to do. Summarizing a few emails won’t be as resource-intensive as analyzing a big dataset.
Any individual’s resource use from LLMs also pales in comparison to their resource use from air travel, transport, heating, diet, and consumption (especially clothes), unless someone is a really extreme outlier with respect to conscientious consumption. It’s entirely possible someone wanting to minimize the environmental impact of their own decisions could still choose to use AI, to free up more capacity for optimizing in other areas (or organizing for the systems change truly required to avoid climate and environmental crisis).
I wrote a separate reply that hasn’t appeared, but is hopefully just stuck in moderation. Thinking about this more, though, another perspective is that it would take thousands of “average” LLM prompts to match the resource use of shipping a package from Japan to the US. Which isn’t to simply condemn international shopping or condone the use of LLMs, but just make the point that I think critiques of LLMs based on resource use miss just how hugely unsustainable modern consumption in general is.
ep – stuck! approved!!
Awesome, thanks! I also really enjoyed this episode! It’s given me lots to think about. 😊
Hey Michelle!
You’re right that AI has real environmental costs, and that’s something we should be thoughtful about. The below comment has some good data that stands up well. The impact varies a lot depending on how and where the systems are run, what models you’re using, and how you approach leveraging them. There is a whole “ethical AI” movement that focuses on this as a priority area.
More broadly, every major technology starts with people experimenting, often on small or even “trivial” use cases. That’s how we figure out what’s actually valuable over time. The internet followed the same path.
Using AI well is a skill set that will be required in many industries, so starting with ways that are personally beneficial both allows you to solve an issue AND develop the skill.
This was a fantastic episode thanks Sarah and Emilie! I love how you frame AI as a purely a tool and like any tool it can be put to good use making work easier, but the strategy for what to use it for must make sense for you.
Side note – slightly shocked at how many emails you get relating to your kids! I have four and don’t get anywhere near enough for me to need to automate it.
I have got Gemini to add a bunch of calendar events automatically for me when the new school calendar came out. I also add drive time buffer as I live 30+ minutes from everything – I started doing this after the episode with Cal Newport (when I first discovered this podcast!).
I do like Todoist’s newish AI “ramble” feature so I can talk hands-free to the app while driving and add tasks as they come to mind.
I would love to know if there’s a collection of other super practical low-key ways people are using AI to make planning better out there for me to get ideas from? Perhaps more of this in the future?
Side note 2 – I want to get a Hobonichi for next year. Sarah, you’ve done a great pitch job on me! As a left-hander I was put off before but perhaps I can make it work too. I currently use a Full Focus Planner.
love this Rachel! I agree there are probably 9849384 zillion other use cases. re: Hobonichi – I eventually got used to using it just by figuring out where i would smudge and kind of covering up as i’m writing w another piece of paper -it’s now second nature! But before that, I just used jetstream ballpoints in it – they wrote quite nicely and never smudged!! full on lefty/Hobonichi user since 2014!
Big fan of Todoist ramble too!
Thanks for the episode – very interesting. Wondering whether Emilie has some further info on ‘the adult who need to know’ about the kid stuff. It wasn’t clear whether that is just you and your partner, Emilie, or do you get your agent to send stuff to a nanny / nannies too? Just interested to know how it lands with an employee to receive instructions from AI if so – could see it going both ways. Any ethics around this area that we need to consider?Thank you!
It does take many adults to help get the kids where they need to. It’s me and my husband at a baseline. Sometimes, also a nanny. Sometimes an aunt or uncle too! It depends.
I think transparency is what’s important here. But everyone just laughs when they get a message from Chad.
SHU – what a great topic handled with care!
Emilie – do you have any AI newsletter recommendations that would be good to subscribe to? I currently read Cal Newport’s newletter and Beck on Tech on Substack.
Ooh I second this!! I would definitely take Emilie’s rec here.
Hey Brooke! Glad you liked it!
1. Claire Vo https://www.youtube.com/@howiaipodcast
2. Hilary Gridley https://hils.substack.com/
3. Technically https://technically.dev/
Selfishly, I think we also do a lot of really good writing at Kilo (blog.kilo.ai)
I ADORE my Sprouted planner; love hearing that other people do, too <3
This was a great episode! I am a non-technical person who recently joined a tech company in marketing and so I’m catching up to engineers. But even I was able to set up an openclaw (btw it got very expensive!) While I still have much angst around the impact of data centers and water use, I can see that the path to lasting climate action will likely come through AI usage. I still use my Hobonichi, Things, Notion and Claude Cowork in conjunction.
Love it! I agree the OpenClaw can get expensive. The best hack right now is to use a ChatGPT subscription!
Really interesting episode! I would like to know what tool is recommended to create our own Chad? Is there a cost to this type of agent?
I personally use Kilo.ai (I work here!) but there are lots of options out there.
I loved this episode!!! I do have a question for Emilie (also, thank you for generously offering your time and help!)
I get a lot of emails from newsletters and other subscriptions, and I’d love something that goes through and pulls out info on (1) upcoming events/activities in my city and (2) psychology [i am a clinical psychologist] related webinars, events etc….. and then organizes them by date with info (like event description, price, dates, etc.). I’m thinking maybe like a daily digest of all the emails that came in from the previous day? Or perhaps a Notion document that it continuously updates as emails come in/ get deleted. It’s just hard for me to check all these emails one by one… it ends up taking too long and then I dont do it at all and I miss out on great events. Im not sure if AI is there yet. I use chatgpt often for more informational/ copyediting/ inspiration but I am very new to the whole world of agents~
Yes! Joanne, if you want to email me emilie (at) kilocode (dot) ai, I will happily work with you on how to set this up over a 30 minute call. Lots of very easy, low-lift ways to do this!
Will do, thank you so much!!