This essay is based on a conversation with Hally Peck, a 30-year-old chief marketing officer at New York-based Addition Wealth. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We try any way my husband and I can automate things or save time.
I have two children and my husband also works full time. We both have very demanding jobs, which means time is our most important resource.
Before I used an AI agent to power my calendars, I would plan my life days or a week in advance when I actually wanted to plan months. I was a little frantic trying to figure out how to get this all done.
I’ve learned with AI that some of these automations take a lot of time to set up and run, but automating some of these life tasks has given me more time on the weekends with my kids and has been a real win for me.
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I automate all of my grocery orders with AI
As a working mom in New York City, getting to the grocery store can be a challenge. That’s why I’ve now started giving my shopping list to an AI agent that orders all of our groceries online for me.
I use Perplexity for my shopping and Claude Cowork for most other tasks I do with agents.
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We usually have our groceries delivered every Sunday evening. I tell my agent what we’re expecting, and he knows what brands we like and have ordered from in the past, as well as things like the types of meat, cereal, and fruit we typically get.
The agent puts everything in the cart, marks any items that were out of stock, and suggests good replacement items. Then I select a delivery time slot and receive the final approval of the order.
This wasn’t a huge, time-consuming vibe coding project. The first time I did it, it only took five to ten minutes to set up. What used to be a pretty pointless 30-minute task is now done in about two minutes.
I use AI to prevent our family calendar from falling apart
Every parent knows how difficult it can be to manage work calendars, school schedules, activities, birthdays, and childcare logistics. I now have an agent who summarizes everything for me in my Google Calendar, so I can better keep track of what’s happening, when and where.
I give Claude links to websites, spreadsheets with the details of our work meeting, screenshots of the kids’ activity schedules, school calendar webpages, and family and friends’ birthdays and have them all added to my calendar.
I also added the little things that are easy to forget, like ordering Halloween candy, Valentine’s Day cards for the class, and end-of-year gifts for teachers – things I would otherwise only remember by running to CVS the night before.
I recently gave Claude my children’s school calendars, with all the holidays, vacations, parent-teacher conference dates, and everything else for the school year. I also aligned school events with my existing calendar and found some conflicts with business trips that were already scheduled.
By identifying potential scheduling conflicts months in advance rather than days or weeks, we can either resolve them or better manage them.
I run these two prompts every day
I also have two prompts that run consistently for me every day. One is a meeting prep assistant who sends me a Slack message before every meeting with the meetings I have at work that day, as well as any relevant documents and context I need.
The other is a notification I receive every night at 9:30 p.m. asking me to check off something on my personal or work to-do list.
I write down everything that’s on my mind and what I didn’t get done that day so that it’s documented somewhere. Then the next morning it sends me a reminder so I can refer back to it.
My AI agents take care of school and warehouse logistics
When school ended and summer camps began, I entered this transitional phase where the mental strain was heavy and I always felt like something was falling through the cracks.
This year I had a Perplexity AI agent help me register my kids for camps and fill out these forms. I helped by providing the agent with all the basic information such as names and date of birth. I also have some saved files with personal information as access points for the agents, and they run alongside the browser so I can intervene if necessary.
Having an AI agent do this in a separate browser while I’m working on something else is helpful and means I’m actually completing the forms and not forgetting anything.
I still need to find the time to automate more tasks
It would be amazing to say that everything is 100% AI, but you still have to put in a lot of work to achieve the desired result.
Next, I need to set up a separate email address for my AI agent so I can forward things there. I think it might help me centralize things better and simplify the prompt. At the moment I give my agent a lot of screenshots, but I think if I gave him an inbox and set up a forwarding mechanism based on filter criteria from my emails, that would make things even more efficient.
There are definitely tasks on my to-do list where I think, “Oh, I would really like to have the AI do that,” and it can. I just have to take the time to set up all the systems I need to deliver the output I want.
Can you share a story about AI life hacks? If so, please contact the reporter at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
https://www.businessinsider.com/working-mom-ai-agents-handle-groceries-camp-forms-school-calendars-2026-7
