I started my Digital Marketing degree in 2022, the same year ChatGPT was released.

Four years later, I graduated with first-class honours.

I thought finishing college would feel like reaching the beginning of the secure career I had worked towards.

Instead, I found myself looking at how quickly AI was developing, and at the work I had trained to do. It made me question what that career might look like five or ten years from now.

In the weeks around graduating, I turned down one job, declined an interview for another and was asked to apply for another role.

That probably sounds strange after spending four years getting the qualification.

But I’m also just after turning 35.

And I can’t afford to keep starting over.

I have children depending on me. I went back to college because I wanted more stability, more options and a future I could actually build on.

So the idea of getting five years down the road and realising the industry had changed underneath me genuinely frightened me.

Rather than ignore that feeling, I decided to understand the thing that was causing it.

And that question quickly became bigger than my career.

If AI is going to change how we work, learn, create and organise our lives, I want to know what actually happens when an ordinary person starts using it seriously.

There is another reason this matters to me

In 2019, I lost my daughter.

Afterwards, I made her a promise: that I would live my life to the fullest of my potential.

At the time, I meant it completely.

But life doesn’t move in neat straight lines. There have been years of raising my children, starting again, going back to college, dealing with things I never expected and simply trying to keep everything moving.

And now, at 35, I’ve found myself asking a difficult question:

Have I actually kept that promise?

There are things I’m incredibly proud of. I’ve raised my children. I went back to education. I completed my degree and graduated with first-class honours. I kept going through periods of my life when stopping would have been much easier.

But there are also parts of my life I’ve been saying I’m going to change for years.

I want to take better care of my health.

I want to be more organised.

I want to build something of my own.

I want to learn more, create more and follow through on more of the ideas that usually stay inside my head.

I want to stop continually waiting for some future version of myself to finally get everything together.

That is where the personal side of AI Life Experiment comes from.

The career uncertainty explains why I want to understand AI now.

But this promise explains why I want to change my life at all.

I don’t expect AI to fix me, make decisions for me or magically turn me into somebody else.

What I want to understand is whether it can help me close the gap between knowing what I want and actually doing something about it.

Can it help me build systems around the way my brain works?

Can it help me follow through?

Can it help me learn faster, organise the parts of life that overwhelm me, look after myself better and create opportunities I might otherwise never act on?

And, just as importantly, what happens to me while I’m using it?

Because I don’t want this experiment to become a year of outsourcing my life in the name of efficiency.

I care about creativity.

I care about thinking for myself.

I care about learning things properly.

I care about human judgement, relationships, mistakes, effort and all of the messy things that make a life feel like your own.

So the question behind this experiment is bigger than:

“What can AI do?”

It is:

“Can I use this technology to help me live more intentionally without giving away the parts of being human that matter to me?”

For 365 days, I’m going to try to find out.

And somewhere underneath all of it is a promise I made six years ago:

to make the most of life.