Productivity

AI Agents and Google Slides: When Promise Meets Reality

I’ve been experimenting with AI agents to help create Google Slides presentations, and I’ve discovered something interesting: they’re great at the planning and ideation phase, but they completely fall apart when it comes to actually delivering on their promises.

The Promising Start

I’ve had genuinely great success using ChatGPT to help with presentation planning. I’ll start a conversation about my presentation topic, share the core material I want to cover, and ChatGPT does an excellent job of:

When AI Assistants Fail: The Meeting Scheduling Reality Check

I recently tried to use AI assistants to solve what should be a straightforward problem: scheduling a meeting with three other people at my office. We’re all Google Workspace users, so I figured this would be a perfect use case for AI—especially given all the hype about AI assistants being able to handle calendar management and scheduling.

Spoiler alert: both ChatGPT and Gemini failed spectacularly.

The ChatGPT Experience

I started with ChatGPT, thinking it would be able to help coordinate schedules. My request was simple: find a time that works for me and three colleagues for a meeting.

Building a Second Brain: A Review on Knowledge Management

I’ve been drowning in information for years. I’m constantly consuming content—technical documentation, team meeting notes, one-on-one conversations, architecture decisions, industry articles, conference talks, and the list goes on. The problem isn’t the volume; it’s that I’ve never had a good system for capturing, organizing, and actually using all of this knowledge when I need it.

That’s why Tiago Forte’s “Building a Second Brain” caught my attention. The premise is simple but powerful: create a system outside your head to store and retrieve information, so your actual brain can focus on thinking and creating rather than remembering.