Why everyone will soon have their own customized AI

The phone rings at an unlikely moment. Martijn Aslander is on my screen. He only calls when he has a great story about how to use knowledge more intelligently, or to share his latest discoveries in AI automation. And, as always, our minds are racing when we’re brainstorming. Once again, the insights are too big not to share.

Because what Martijn and I are now doing with AI shows exactly where we are headed: building personalized, customized software that increases your capacity, without you having to be able to program.

From theory to practice: letting AI code for you

A few months ago, I explained to Martijn how he could have AI write code for him. Martijn is definitely not a nerd. In fact, Martijn actually hates computers. But even he immediately saw the potential.

Why? Over the past few years, Martijn has digitally recorded everything he has learned and done in his personal knowledge management system (PKM). He is an absolute guru in this field and was quickly able to extract new information from years of data. All thanks to smart scripts he wrote with AI. Without any programming knowledge!

Building your own app without knowing how to code

This time, Martijn called because he has taken things a step further. He has developed his own smartphone app that makes everything he does easier and smarter. And he did this without knowing how to code and without being an app developer. He managed to do it using AI tools that automate tasks for him.

Practical examples of personal AI automation

The app touches on various aspects of his life, both personal and professional:

• Groceries: the app translates recipes into shopping lists via the ideal route through his local supermarket.
• Content management: the app creates perfect playlists for videos he has collected via URLs on various topics.
• Financial travel administration: the app automatically generates overviews of travel expenses within different projects.

And those are just a few examples of how he has used AI to automate and optimize his work and life.

How I apply AI automation in my workflow

I too have recently been experimenting with automating tedious work tasks. I write articles on a regular basis, but I am severely dyslexic. Publishing has always been a hassle.

Do you know how it normally works? You write something in a text editor. Then you copy it to WordPress or another CMS. You fiddle with formatting that never cooperates. You fill in metadata. You click through ten menus. Then you open LinkedIn, write an announcement, and hope that the link preview works. Oh, and that LinkedIn post will contain all the mistakes, because of course I forget to have it checked for grammar and spelling.

Each step may only take five minutes, but there are fifteen of them. And none of those steps add anything to the work that matters: the writing itself.

From manual work to workflow automation

So I automated the entire process. I write in my own text editor. A simple screen without distractions. When I’m done, I press a few buttons. A combination of workflow tools, self-written code (by AI, not me) and AI agents do the rest: spell checking, HTML conversion, publishing to the site, preparing a LinkedIn post.

But the best part? I no longer have to navigate other people’s interfaces. No WordPress dashboard. No LinkedIn editor that messes up my formatting. No cookie banners and notifications screaming for attention. I just stay in my own environment, and the rest happens in the background.

The result? A fully automated publishing workflow. And I can focus on what I enjoy: researching and writing.

The bigger picture: augmentation instead of just automation

You might be thinking: it’s great that you can do this, but so what? But if you look further, you’ll see what’s really happening here.

Not only are Martijn and I automating boring parts of our work, but more importantly, we’re using custom software developed specifically for us and by us to increase our personal capacity.

We are augmenting ourselves. It essentially means that we are using smart custom software to increase our capacity. Not only to work faster and more effectively, but above all so that we have more time for the interesting aspects of our work and life.

The democratization of custom software

I understand that Martijn and I are going further than most people in this regard. Automating in this way still takes a relatively long time at the moment. But the AI tools we use are getting better and smarter, and therefore faster.

The building blocks we are currently writing can be seen as technical Lego. You can share this Lego, and other people can use it too. The question is whether that will be necessary, because as the tools become smarter, it may well be that you will soon be able to add ad hoc functionalities with a simple question.

What does this mean for the future?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the future, we all have our own personalized custom software. Completely designed to make life easier. Both at work and in our private lives. This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening. The main question is: when will it become simple enough for everyone to use?

But just think about what this means. Your custom software won’t need any other apps. It will order the groceries you need from the supermarket without needing the official supermarket app, to give just one example.

The implication for businesses

What would this mean for your business? If your value lies primarily in your interface—how attractive your app looks, how smart your menus are—then you have a problem. Because that interface will soon be bypassed.

But if your value lies in what you deliver—the groceries, the data, the network, the physical service—then it doesn’t matter how the customer gets to you. So the question is not “how good is our app,” but “how indispensable is what we deliver if the app no longer matters?” And an important follow-up question: are you doing this better than the competition every day? As harsh as it sounds, you are incredibly easy to replace. Something to be very aware of right now, I think.

What are we freeing time for?

Yes, AI automation makes us much more productive. Martijn and I get more out of our days than ever before. But what for, really?

Above all, I hope that we don’t spend the time we have left doing more, but calling each other more often. Taking more time for each other and for learning.

I’m willing to invest some automation time for that.

These are my previous articles on the topic of AI

• Smart AI for your business
• The AI-hype unraveled: what does AI really add to your business?
• From thinking to doing: how AI agents can finally do work for you
• How AI reduces development costs by 2900%
• Programming with AI: clever cheating
• 19 tips for successful programming with AI and Claude Code
• The future of programming: why English is becoming the new programming language