You're going to see AI in my work, and I'd rather tell you exactly how than let you wonder about it.
I work with Claude. Every day, on purpose, and I'm not shy about it. It helps me think, research, and draft. It's fast, it's tireless, and it can find the answer to almost anything in about nine seconds.
Here's how the work actually splits, because it matters.
I bring the raw material. The stories, the frameworks, forty-seven years of judgment about what actually helps a person. The machine drafts from my voice, inside my guidelines. Then I read it, edit it, and rewrite it until it's mine, and nothing reaches you until it is. The machine drafts. I decide. Always me, last.
Your privacy is not negotiable. I never put your personal information into an AI. Not your name, not your details, nothing that could identify you. If numbers ever cross my screen, they are numbers on a page, never attached to a real person. These tools help me with my craft. They never touch your private life.
And no machine has ever decided anything about your loan. I run the numbers. I read what they mean. I tell you what I would do if it were my family, and then you decide. That has not changed and it isn't going to.
There is a whole side of this work a machine simply cannot do. It can't feel the pause before you answer. It can't hear the fear sitting behind a confident question. It can't sit across from you when the decision is hard, or build the trust that makes you willing to make it at all. That part has always been human, and with me it always will be.
I'm just Tom, and I'm your friend. The machine works for me. It will never replace me.
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*If you want the longer version of why I care about this, it has become the work behind the work. I write about it under The Essential Human — View that Here.*