In recent years, AI has advanced into something more than just a backend process. Now it is accessible to anyone to use for a myriad of purposes. Machine learning has been around since 1950 with Alan Turing's Bombe Machine, and the conceptual idea of AI was talked about by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in the 1840s. Of course, modern AI has evolved into something that neither of these pioneers could have imagined. AI is everywhere, and it will continue to find its way into every industry.

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Currently, widely accessible AI is still in its infancy. AIs such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude, and many others are just in their beginning stages. While these programs are advancing, the common person can take advantage of them to get ahead of the curve. It’s a competitive world, and the ability to utilize AI to speed up processes while maintaining your own critical thinking is key. It’s crucial to view your position as a self-starter, entrepreneur, or any other similar label as a company rather than a single person. AI is the rest of your employees.

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Google Gemini’s deep research feature is incredibly helpful, and one I use personally for research material. Say you have a client whose field revolves around security systems and they need a website built. You want to do some market research along with identifying the most effective design aesthetics for that industry. The prompt should reflect something along the lines of: “Do market research on the security systems industry, including research about common demographics, aesthetic trends, UI/UX trends, and the most effective website designs. All research should be catered towards the field of security systems.” The more detailed the prompt, the better. When you hit enter, Gemini will load a checklist of the process it will go through to create the requested document. You can either say yes or make adjustments. Once Gemini is given approval, it’ll take a few minutes and generate a document. You can then save it as a Google Doc, print it out, and now you have a 15–20 page document that you can reference and annotate. Gemini will also show you the sources it used to create the research, which you can cross-reference and verify.

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Vibe coding is a new approach to writing programs and generating coded material. It originated from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, where he made a tweet talking about utilizing AI for programming. Now it is a feature found in many code editors and website builders. This is a massive step forward in the world of design and development and should be utilized in every project to some degree. An important point to make is that using vibe coding by itself will not create an entire website for you or a fully developed app. Vibe coding is meant to be used when creating small parts of a larger project or to tweak repeating elements like classes or functions. Website builders like Squarespace and Webflow have started implementing vibe coding features, which are essentially their own AI models. Again, these models don’t build an entire website for you, but they can generate layouts and font combinations that you can use across other pages. Still, vibe coding and AI models found in various programs can assist greatly, especially by providing concept ideas and cutting down on time.

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It’s important to note that with all of this AI being injected into almost every program and piece of software, human creativity should not be dictated by the AI of your choice. AI is your employee until your business can be scaled up to afford a human counterpart but for the time being, your creativity, critical thinking, and human touch should not be stolen by AI. Maintaining the ability to cross-reference information and tweak design systems without the need for AI is crucial. Otherwise, what difference is there between you and a machine if you robotically comply with everything AI gives you?

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