Honestly, who isn’t knackered.

Show me a woman who is on top of everything right now and I will assume she is fibbing. The full list: school run, meal plan, email backlog, the boss thing, the daughter thing, the friend thing, the ageing-parent thing. Whether bloody peptides actually do anything. Whether jelly shoes are having a comeback. (I pray that they are not.)

And, somewhere in the middle of all that, we also need to be on top of AI as well.

The tools. The prompts. The pace.

That bloke in the gilet on LinkedIn with the wifi router, the two ChatGPT prompts and the screenshot of “another six-figure month, two tools changed my life, DM me for the playbook.”

The conflicting advice. The endless thinkpieces.

The “which one do I even start with?” question nobody answers cleanly.

The slight ick about whether any of it has been built for us.

Honestly? I have spent half this weekend scrolling reels of dogs and binging Rivals 2 (squeal, it is amazing), to ignore the overwhelm and confusion of the lot of it. Hand on heart. And the other half diving deep into Perplexity ‘Computer” and some new Claude updates!

But I want to make a case here, because I do not think it has been made well to anyone who looks like us.

This thing called AI? I think it is the washing machine of our generation.

Not glamorous. Not trendy. Just one of those once-in-a-generation tools that could genuinely give us our time, our brains, and bits of our lives back. If, and this is the if that matters, we get into it on our own terms.

Why a washing machine

I still remember the day my family got a washing machine in the 1980s.

End of doing endless rounds of washing and drying between me and my sisters. Suddenly we could eat dinner, stack the dishwasher, and be on the sofa in time for EastEnders. That tiny bit of time given back changed the entire evening. More Albert Square. Less drudgery. (Pat Butcher’s earrings, especially.)

It has also been widely reported that women’s housework fell from around 58 hours a week, in the early twentieth century, to 18 hours a week by 1975. Largely thanks to labour-saving devices.

A 40-hour saving. Which is, by remarkable coincidence, exactly the size of the working week we were then politely invited to step into.

The electrical appliances gave us back our time. The working week came along and lumped itself on top. (Please note this is not fact at all - just my pondering so)

We have not, as a category of human, been short of work to do.
We have been short of time, money, and recognition for it.

So this time, let’s make sure the time AI gives back goes where we want it to go. Not into another extra job that gets dumped on us. But into our businesses. Our children. Our health. Our writing. Our rest. Our investments. Our second careers.
Whichever of those is the one you actually need most.

Use this technology to solve your problem. Not someone else’s.

Just one more email

I do not live with many regrets.

But honestly. There were times when my children were young and I chose one more email over one more moment.

“Yes, yes, I’ll come play in a minute.”

And of course, you do not. Because you have been in meetings all day, and now your real work is starting. So you just need to finish the deck, send the email, tidy the thing, prep the note.

And then one day you go in thinking, right, now let’s sit down and play Barbies.

And she does not want to. Because she has grown out of Barbies.

If someone had come to me then and said here is a tool that can quieten the noise, speed up the grind, sharpen your thinking, and give you back some of your life, I would have bitten their arm off for it.

That is the why behind all of this.

Not a TED-talk why. The actual one. I am 53. I have three businesses, two children growing up too fast, a list of things I want to do before I am done, and a refusal to spend another decade muscling through work that a properly used machine could do for me in eight minutes.

I am, by way of credentials I am only going to give you once:

an AI enthusiast, not an expert. Tech-minded, always.

One of the last things I did at Google before I left was help launch Bard, now Gemini. So I came at this with a head start in interest, not in mastery, because nobody has mastery yet. The tools change every Tuesday.

What I do have is a year of testing 220-plus tools. £6,000 of training. Daily use. Every mistake going. And the willingness to say in public what worked and what didn’t.

The bigger gift is the thinking

There is something almost nobody is talking about loudly enough in any of the AI conversations right now.

This is not just a tool. This is a cognitive extension,

Not a replacement for our brains. An amplifier of them. I’m thinking differently, smarter, and deeper than I have in years because of the tools in my hands. I’m building apps and websites I never thought I could build. I’m learning faster, I am more curious, I am more creative. I am asking better questions, getting sharp second opinions, and pressure testing decisions in 20 minutes that used to take 20 days.

The time it saves is real, and it is wonderful. (Microsoft Research reports knowledge workers saving 40-60 minutes a day using AI well). The bigger gift, honestly, is the thinking: the expansion of what I can hold in my head, build in my hands, and ship in a week. The stretch in curiosity and in comprehension, finding pockets of my brain and my ideas that I hadn’t discovered before.

Cognitive extension needs confidence, as does embracing AI. Confidence comes through action, small, regular action. The kind that feels less scary when you do it alongside other women who are also doing it for the first time.

Why the bloke in the gilet got there first

Not because this is hard. Because nobody designed any of it for us.

The early evangelists were largely men. With a particular flavour. Half a gilet, a wifi router, two hours on ChatGPT, screenshots of their dashboards, and a confidence-to-competence ratio you could measure from space. They wrote the playbooks. They built the courses. They set the tone.

The tone is wrong. The examples are wrong. The use cases are wrong. The promises are wrong.

And the layer behind that. The tech companies building these tools are, almost without exception, run by men. Predominantly a male-led industry. With one wonderful exception worth flagging here: Anthropic, the makers of Claude, has a female co-founder and a senior female team across engineering and product. It is not a coincidence that Claude is the AI I keep going back to.

So a lot of women look at AI and (reasonably) decide this is not for me.

Then we layer on three quiet problems.

One. We think it might be cheating.
As if AI is a cheat sheet. As if writing with help is morally lesser. As if delegating the dreary bits of our jobs to a machine is not what every executive assistant in history was for.

Two. We are uncertain.
Not in a melodramatic way. In a perfectly reasonable, structural way. The technology is moving fast. The marketplace is loud. The information is conflicting.

Three. We are knackered.
Burnout is the perfect condition for being overtaken by a technology you do not yet understand. The people getting the most out of AI right now are the ones with the most time, the most encouragement and the most cover to fail. Statistically, that is not us.

I keep hearing the same three sentences from women, every single time:

I don’t have the time.

I don’t know what to start with.

How am I supposed to keep up?

Those are not laziness. Those are the perfectly reasonable responses of a generation of women given more to do and less margin to do it in, every single year, for as long as we have been working.

It’s time, ladies. It’s time.

Last month, Reese Witherspoon told her 30 million followers, almost verbatim:

She is right. The research backs her. Women use AI less than men. Less likely to be encouraged. Less likely to be recognised when we do.

And the bit I cannot let go of. Most of the women I speak to who do use AI are using somewhere between 1% and 5% of what these tools can actually do for them.

The upside of one of the fastest, biggest technology shifts of our lifetime is being unevenly distributed before it has even properly arrived.

This is why I think it matters so much. If we close the AI skills gap for women now, while the window is open, we have a shot at far more than time.

The wage gap.
The maths changes when you are more productive, more visible, more leveraged.

The pension gap.
Long-term wealth compounds from what you can earn and invest now.

The funding gap.
Less than 2% of UK venture capital goes to all-female founding teams. The thing money is usually for, at the start, is hiring. If you can build AI agents that get you to product and revenue before you need to raise to hire, you arrive at the funding conversation showing the work, not asking permission.

The progression gap.
Senior roles are inaccessible to women not because of capability. Because of the volume of extra work the seat demands. AI is the assistant you were never given. The one nobody can stop you hiring.

The visibility gap.
This is the one I work on every day. To be unmissable to the customers who could choose you, you need consistent, high-quality content showing up where they are looking. Visible to humans through brand. Visible to AI engines throughl AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation. The thing about content systems is that they require time you do not have.

AI lets you build a system that scales, while the writing stays unmistakably yours.

Tools to amplify, never to author.

Our greatest advantage is our humanity.

But not if we’re invisible.

Two choices, one room

Now, of course I also worry about AI. The environment. The jobs. Whose voice gets amplified. Whose data is in it. The children whose first relationships with creativity and research are being mediated by a chatbot.

I am paying attention.

But if we are not in the rooms where this is being built, the technology will be built without us. If AI engines and AI tools are part of the infrastructure of what happens next, and they very obviously are, I want us inside it figuring it out, asking the questions, deciding what gets built next.

Stand back and watch as the people who already had a head start get a free upgrade.

Or lean in. Learn together. Make this one work for us.

Every technological revolution before this, the loom, the printing press, the typewriter, the personal computer, the internet, was largely written, owned and shaped by men. The benefits got distributed unequally. The work that came with each of them got distributed unequally too.

This one is being built right this minute.

We can be in the room as it is being built, or we can be told what the rules are when it is done.

This time, we hold the pen (mouse).

Why me? Why not me?

This was not the direction I was expecting things to take in this era of my life!
For a while I assumed I wasn’t equipped to lead this work. Like every woman, I assumed I needed permission. Wasn’t expert enough. Wasn’t qualified enough. Wasn’t the right person.

Then I remembered what I tell other women, repeatedly, on stages and in podcasts and in DMs.

Nobody is coming.

You do not need to wait to be invited.

The only question worth asking is, why not me?

So. Why not me.

I have the AI comprehension and the skill. I have the ability to build community (Glittersphere is my evidence). I have the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the slightly-delusional optimism this work needs in order to convince enough women that AI is genuinely the greatest opportunity to come our way in a generation. I am relentless about making a difference.

And, very practically, I cannot do the work I already do, helping women become unmissable to the customers and audiences who could choose them, without the AI fluency piece.

The two halves of the mission are not separable. They never were.

So here we are.

I have seen this shape before, by the way.

A few years ago at Google, I led a programme called Digital Garage. A brilliant programme, originally built by a number of different people inside the business. It provided free digital skills training, in person and online, to many thousands of people across the UK. We even, at one stage, had real physical garages: shop fronts on the high street where people could come in and train. Brilliant to meet, first-hand, the people walking through the door. We never targeted it this way, but 70% of the people who came across the threshold to take up that free training were women.

I saw what those skills did to those lives. Up close. With evidence. Women who got their first business off the ground because they finally understood SEO. Returners who got the job because they could build a website. Parents who reskilled because they finally understood what was on the other side of digital marketing.

This thing now happening with AI is the same shape. Same gap. Same window. Same opportunity. Just bigger and faster.

That is why I care so much. Because I have already watched what happens when women get a real shot at a new technology with the right support. They do not just catch up. They go past.

So. Switched On.

Switched On is what happens when women decide they are tired of being told what AI is by men who have used it for six weeks. We want to switch on and get switched on..

It is currently built by me, for the rest of you, but it will grow and evolve because we will all build it and shape it. It is part newsletter, part workshop, part course, and mostly a sense of community. The kind where you can fire off “this prompt just changed my life, look” at 11pm and three women reply with their own. The kind where you can ask the daft question. The kind where the answer is not “google it,” the answer is “hang on, let me show you.”

Switched On is the AI fluency part of the Sparkle and AI promise of Glittersphere, my community for unapologetic, ambitious women. Glittersphere is the space to build visibility, AI fluency and connection. Together is how we achieve financial and time freedom.
I can’t wait to be able to kick-back on a beach, Pina Colada in hand!

I am learning alongside you, properly. I am not sitting above this telling you what is true. This weekend I was wrestling Claude into doing the thing I wanted, clocking the latest changes, creating systems and sketching the first three weeks of the 30-day challenge I am running.

The technology never sits still. The community is what makes that survivable.

So, what happens next

First, I am handing you my Tools Handbag.
I am not often one to share my handbag with anyone (the lipstick collection alone is a thing of beauty), but this one feels important.

220 tools tested. 28 selected. I am still swapping them, adding to them, occasionally binning them as new things turn up. It is a great place to start. Wispr alone has already transformed lives, I am not exaggerating. The handbag is available when you subscribe (which is free for now). For those who have already subscribed to my Substack (thank you) - you will find the link in ‘chat’!

Second, the free 30-Day AI Confidence Challenge.
Kicks off Thursday 20 May. One specific thing a day, for 30 days. Built for building a habit, not impressing the gilet brigade. Free to join at nishma.co/30daychallenge

Third, the workshops, the online training, the cohorts.
Because what I keep learning is that it is so much easier (and more fun) to learn alongside each other than alone. Details on those coming soon.

One last one last thing

Absolutely no gatekeeping here.

If this lands for you, send it on. To the friend who’s knackered and needs help. The friend who keeps saying she doesn’t know which AI tool to try first. To the colleague who is one prompt away from a properly different week. To the woman in your group chat who will lose her mind over the time she can have back or the work she can create.

The cognitive power and extension is what excites me the most about AI, as well as the time-save!

Forward this email. Share the post. Tag her in the comments.

Let’s make Switched On the space for all of us.

This time, we hold the pen/mouse.

For 25 years the internet rewarded scale, budget and backlinks. Women, small businesses and personal brands were structurally disadvantaged from the start.

This shift is not like that one. It cares about clarity over scale, specificity over reach, the brain you bring, not the budget you can afford.
It is the most under-priced equaliser I have come across in years.

If you have ever felt like the rooms got smaller as the technology got bigger, I am telling you, hand on heart, this is the room.
We are the people. Now is the moment.

It’s time, ladies. It’s time.

Nishma x

Powered by glitter. Opinions all mine.