My AI journey (so far): Real projects, real impact

It’s been a busy couple of years exploring the exciting possibilities at the intersection of AI and content. You might think I’ve just been creating and managing content all this time, but behind the scenes, I’ve been immersed in something much bigger - finding ways to empower people and technology to work better together, both at work and in my own time.

The bottom line? After all my experiments and real-world projects, I’m more convinced than ever: AI isn’t here to replace us - it’s a powerful tool to enhance what we’re already good at. My hands-on experience has shown me countless ways to use these technologies to amplify human expertise, not eliminate it. And this is exactly why I’m now moving deeper into Responsible AI - because making these tools work for people, not against them, isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s our responsibility.

These core principles guide my work and are deeply important to me:

  • Keeping human expertise alive: How do we capture the wealth of knowledge within experienced professionals and share it effectively in a digital world?
  • Making data insightful and secure: How can we unlock the value of the data we collect while protecting the privacy of the people using our products and services?
  • Maintaining a human touch, resonance: How do we ensure that online interactions feel helpful, personal, and not robotic?

If you prefer listening over reading, you can stop reading now. Here’s an AI-hosted discussion of my work. Fair warning - the AI hosts get quite excited about these projects. I managed to teach them how to pronounce “Reiner” (say Rye-nar) properly, but their American take on “Newcastle” might sound a bit “cringe” to your ears.

🎧 My AI projects - audio summary

A detailed overview of my motivations and approach to AI projects and how I focus on human-centered solutions in technology implementations. Delivered by two AI talking heads, powered by Google's NotebookLLM.

Duration: 22:03 • Recorded January 2025

How did I do this? Here is my approach to “reversed podcast to text content generation”.

Over the last two years, I’ve been working on a variety of projects that tackle these challenges. I decided to cluster them based on two key dimensions: quantity and quality. Some projects were about scaling up (like generating large amounts of content from scratch), while others focused on raising the bar (like merging data sources to create content that truly resonates with people and performs better in search).

While speed improvements came naturally, I still believe AI should primarily be about making things better, creating real impact - and when you focus on that, the efficiency gains usually follow. To give you a quick view, here’s a chart mapping these projects by their focus on quality versus quantity:

my projects

Here’s a snapshot:

  • Generating thousands of pages: Imagine needing to migrate thousands of dynamic web pages to static content in a very tight timeframe. It seemed impossible to the dev team, but I used an AI-powered script to generate localised content in seconds per page.
  • SEO evolution: Forget trying to “game” the system. Instead, I’ve been using AI to analyse content quality, making sure it actually resonates with readers, which ultimately leads to better rankings and user experience.
  • SEO content optimisation: Using AI to refine existing content for better performance.
  • Enhanced customer service: Building comprehensive support systems for companies to be efficient and human, including things like intelligent content matching and future-proofing with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for improved customer interactions.
  • Data fusion: Combining data from different platforms to provide actionable insights for content strategists.
  • Expert knowledge capture: Turning webinars and in-depth interviews into valuable articles and training materials.
  • Batch content: Automating the creation of large volumes of unique content, freeing up human teams for more creative tasks.
  • Content data fusion: Analysing the performance of content across different platforms for better content strategy.

You use it or you lose it. This is the reason I have written a much more detailed whitepaper about this. Whether you’d like to read it or have a chat about it, just let me know - knowledge is only valuable when shared.

These projects are more than just experiments with AI. They represent a new way of thinking about content and technology. Maybe you’re:

  • Struggling to keep up with the demands of content creation
  • Looking for a way to capture valuable knowledge within your organisation
  • Finding it difficult to give your customers a good support experience online
  • Overwhelmed by data

If any of these sound familiar, then I want to let you know that I believe AI can be a powerful tool for your business too. My work is always about finding real solutions for real people, and I’m always excited to discuss new challenges.

Like many others, I’ve been trying to keep up with developments across the entire AI landscape - from content generation to image and video creation, from commercial AI models to self-hosted ones, and various coding tools and frameworks. It’s been fascinating but also overwhelming.

While I’ll continue monitoring the rapid developments across AI (you have to!), I’m focusing my hands-on work in 2025 on a few key areas: turning raw data into actionable signals (think crawling, parsing, databases, and batch processing), making existing knowledge truly accessible (imagine confidently conversing with all your PDFs, PowerPoints, Word docs, and databases via AI), and understanding the real strengths and limitations of AI models in human interaction. The field is moving too fast to be hands-on in everything - but that doesn’t mean I’m not watching and learning.

I’m passionate about helping others leverage the power of AI to achieve their goals. If you’re thinking about your next project, and want to discuss how we can work together, get in touch!

Let’s chat