Are we focusing too much on what AI can do for us, and not enough on what AI can help us build?

I've been thinking quite a bit about how we approach AI adoption in HR. There's a lot of encouragement to use AI, automate tasks and become more efficient. But I wonder if we're sometimes looking at it from the wrong direction.

We tend to start with questions like "What can Copilot or Claude do for me?" rather than "What's not working in our processes, and how could we improve it?"

This really hit me while working on a recent HR project. I ended up building six Power Automate flows and a Power App, with practically no previous experience of either tool. Without AI, I wouldn't even have attempted it.

At first, I was just following AI-generated instructions without really understanding what I was doing. But as the project progressed, I started understanding the tools, troubleshooting problems and making more of the design decisions myself. Eventually, I wasn't just asking AI what to do next. I was telling it what I wanted to build and how I wanted to approach the problems we encountered.

I'm certainly not a developer now, but I understand much more about what these tools can do. More importantly, the experience has changed how I think about process design.

And that's what got me thinking.

Just because AI can't perform an entire process for us doesn't mean it can't help us improve it.

Maybe parts of the process can be eliminated. Maybe some steps can be automated using tools we already have. Maybe AI can help us learn to use those tools, even if we don't have the technical skills ourselves.

In my project, much of the actual automation runs through Power Automate, not AI. AI helped me build it.

I think there's an opportunity here that we don't talk about enough: using AI not only to improve productivity, but to expand what employees are capable of doing.

Rather than just encouraging people to use AI more, perhaps we should encourage them to look at their everyday work, identify problems and explore what better ways of working could look like—with AI as a tool to help them get there.

I'd love to hear how others are approaching this. Are you using AI to help you build solutions with other tools, rather than just using AI to perform tasks directly?

And in the spirit of transparency: yes, I used AI to help turn my rather scattered thoughts into this post. 😄 The thoughts and opinions are mine, but AI is definitely better at getting them onto paper (or screen!) in a coherent order.