Before adding AI, take inventory of your tools 🧰

In a previous article, I talked about someone who wanted to go further with AI to save time at work.

My advice was not to start by hunting for a course or the best AI tool.

Start instead by looking at what you do every day and what could be automated.

But there’s an important step before that.

Understand the tools you already use.

🧰 Take inventory of your toolbox

Over the years, we pile up a lot of services.

• One for email.
• One for accounting.
• Another for invoices.
• A calendar.
• A place to store documents.
• A video conferencing tool.
• A task manager.
• A few subscriptions we’ve sometimes even forgotten about.

Just grab a sheet of paper and list them.

For example:

Need	Tool you use
Email	Gmail
Calendar	Google Calendar
Documents	Google Drive
Tasks	Trello
Accounting	QuickBooks
Meetings	Teams
Invoicing	?
CRM / clients	?

Also add what you pay every month or every year.

You might already find a few surprises. 😉

🔎 Above all: understand how they work together

The goal isn’t only to make a list.

Ask yourself a few simple questions:

• Where do client requests land?
• Where are my tasks?
• Where are my invoices?
• Where are my documents?
• Where is my calendar?
• Do I copy information manually from one tool to another?

That’s often where you spot the best automation opportunities.

🤖 And that’s when AI agents get interesting

Now imagine an AI agent could use some of these tools.

You could ask it:

“Look at my new email and tell me which messages need action.”

Or:

“Which clients have overdue invoices? Draft the follow-up emails.”

Or:

“Look at my calendar, email, and tasks and help me plan my day.”

An AI agent becomes much more useful when it can work with the tools you already use.

But to let it do that, you still need to know where your information lives and what each tool does.

🧹 You might also discover you have too many tools

Doing this inventory can reveal something else.

• Two tools might do exactly the same thing.
• You might still be paying for a service you barely use.
• Or your Microsoft or Google subscription might already include something you’re paying for elsewhere.

Before adding new AI tools, it can be very helpful to do a little cleanup.

Takeaways

Before you ask:

“Which AI agent should I use?”

Start with:

“Which tools do I already use, where is my information, and what am I still doing manually between them?”

Your current tech environment is the starting point.

Understand your toolbox before adding new tools to it. 🧰

And then you can start asking a much more interesting question:

What tasks could I hand off to an AI agent now? 🤖

Tech, simply.