I joined a company with an AI mandate. I was daunted at first, but I've saved hours by solving a big, boring problem.

This as-told-to-essay is based on a conversation with Komal Amin, 39, who is the head of growth and marketing at Mighty Bear Games and based in London. Her employment has been verified by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm more creative than technical, so the prospect of joining Mighty Bear Games — an independent gaming studio that has had a company-wide AI mandate since 2022 — was daunting.

Now, 20 months after I joined in March 2024, I use AI all the time, both in and outside work: from aggregating news to sending invoices, and planning dates.

The mandate, which requires employees to use AI tools to generate half of their output, encouraged me to find smart ways to focus less on the work I don't like doing and unlock more time to get creative.

The pandemic ended my acting career, but made me a marketer

I wanted to be an actor since I joined a local theater group as a child. Acting was a great way for me to express myself creatively. I went to drama school and for a decade performed in theater, movies, and on TV.

I found other work to pay the bills between jobs. I started by offering theaters and small theater companies help with marketing and social media.

Then COVID-19 hit and I suddenly had loads of time on my hands, which I used to learn about cryptocurrencies and NFTs. I fell in love with the idea of cryptogaming — gaming that uses blockchain technologies — and started creating content about it.

I met Simon Davis, the cofounder of Mighty Bear Games, through an investor I knew. Simon told me the company makes gaming experiences optimized by AI, which speeds up creating content. You play the games on Telegram, be it Solitaire, tower-defense games, or ones where you can win prizes.

I loved the sound of it and joined the company as head of growth in 2024, with the goal of finding users, launching a token, and improving their marketing.

Adopting AI was intimidating at first

When I first discovered an AI content-generation tool, before ChatGPT was released, it felt like I'd discovered some magical universe.

Joining a company where AI use was mandated was mostly exciting — I've always loved being at the forefront of technology — but also intimidating for someone without a technical mind. I'd previously tried to learn to code twice, but I got bored easily.

In my early days on the job, I remember hearing about Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant that lives in the command-line window of your computer. It seemed challenging, but Simon helped me set it up and explained how it works. I just needed that push to start using it.

I think the tipping point was when I saw people at the company doing amazing things with AI and realized I could do it too. It inspired me to do more research. I discovered Lindy, for example, which allows you to use plain English language to automate workflows.

I started to see AI as a way to solve some of the pain points in my job.

Komal Amin, left, with the team at Mighty Bear Games. Courtesy of Komal Amin

I've automated boring tasks like invoicing

One major pain point of mine was boring things like monthly reporting or sending invoices. With the help of AI agents on Lindy, I automated those tasks. It enabled me to focus less on rote and process-driven tasks and unlock more time to research the market by seeing what people were sharing on X or TikTok.

I've also saved at least an hour a day by automating a daily scan for the most impactful news related to the gaming industry, AI, and in Telegram channels. This news aggregator summarizes the information and gives it a title, provides source links, and puts it in a dedicated Telegram channel.

My "sentiment scraper" was meanwhile born of trying to get more people onto Telegram by understanding their sentiments about it and whether they knew it was also for gaming and mini-apps, not just chatting.

It scrapes TikTok to find all the posts about Telegram from the past year, captures the content, transcribes it, and sends the data to Google Sheets.

In the past, we would have had an intern scrolling through TikTok trying to make an assessment, but this is a way for us to quickly extract high-level themes using AI tools. It's allowed my team to focus on the next big things without being bogged down by smaller, onerous tasks.

There are downsides to AI but I'm optimistic

I use a variety of AI tools, from Lindy to Claude Code to ChatGPT. I've come to see that AI isn't great at everything. It can hallucinate, and of course, there's a lot of hype about how it's going to take our jobs. It would be naive to say I'm not worried about it taking jobs like mine.

Still, I'm cautiously optimistic. There's so much knowledge required to do a job, and you need experts in every industry. In my line of work, if you're using AI to create memes but not spending time at the source content, how do you know the meme is funny?

I think it's better to do your own research and come to ChatGPT with specific questions rather than using it to create ideas — don't stop using your brain altogether and completely outsource things.

For example, if I want to write something for my blog, I do a mind dump and, knowing that my grammar and syntax are terrible, ask AI to organize my thoughts while preserving the essence of how I write.

Outside my job, I've used ChatGPT to get advice on trading stocks and even to plan dates with my partner. I'll ask it for fun, romantic things to do in London, and I'll prompt it again, suggesting something without alcohol or that's more sporty. I absolutely love it, and it works well for us.

I have more hours in the day now I use AI

Nowadays, thanks to AI, I simply have more hours in the day to follow rabbit holes of my choosing.

I'm constantly experimenting with new tools. I've got about 20 failed experiments behind me, a reminder that there are still limitations to the power of AI. There's still a lot of AI slop out there.

You need to know which guardrails you need, and the output still needs to be authentic to you. But ultimately, thanks to the mandate, I've unlocked more time to be creative.