Why aren’t we using AI for everything?

If you look around, it seems like every product and headline has AI baked in. But has it really changed much in your daily life?

The promise of AI is compelling: a true assistant that can chain tasks together, handle the small stuff, and free us to focus on the big things. Imagine your phone answering calls, setting appointments, sending emails, booking a haircut, ordering groceries, or organizing meetings, all without the friction. Anticipating what you want and need and then just doing it. That’s the future we’ve been shown in demo after demo.

But when you try to scratch beneath the surface, it’s still out of reach. Even with the advancement in MCP servers, it still feel clunky. They require complicated setups just to do something simple. And when they do work, response times can stretch into minutes. It feels like progress, but it’s not yet practical.

What people celebrate now is mostly busywork automation, the things that shave a few minutes off the day but come with the overhead of setup and maintenance. Useful, sure, but far from transformative.

Still, the promise is worth holding onto. The idea of an assistant that truly understands context and can act on our behalf isn’t here yet, but it feels closer than ever. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but when AI finally crosses that threshold, it could shift how we work and live in ways that actually matter.