AI is a tool for solving repetition and complexity. It can do the same thing over and over and it can see trends, follow processes, and untangle dependencies.

In business, complexity and repetition are everywhere. Divisions, departments, groups, and people interact in a complex weave to others. AI applications are therefore more obvious and profound in business because they solve deeply intertwined problems at scale.

Personal lives, by contrast, are smaller worlds. Our everyday tasks—managing finances, cooking meals, tidying the house—don’t escalate to a scale that justifies complex AI tools. Yes, we might let AI plan a vacation itinerary or produce a grocery list, but these are hardly riveting displays of high-tech power.

Limited time, ability, and resources inherently cap how complicated an individual’s life can become. We don’t expand from a single-person “department” to a thousand-person one. At most, we might outsource some jobs—hire an accountant or a contractor—but that is a linear expansion, nowhere near the exponential growth that businesses regularly experience.

Yet as AI continues to advance, there’s a strong possibility our personal lives will grow more sophisticated. One day, it might be effortless to create our own video games or generate custom movies purely for personal entertainment. We may use AI to write novels, design board games, or meticulously document our experiences, all in ways that are currently difficult to envision.

The constraints that keep our personal lives simple—time, skill, and resources—will start to dissolve. When that happens, we might look back on the era of using AI solely for grocery lists and travel planning and wonder how we ever thought it was enough.

Right now, though, personal AI use cases can feel underwhelming precisely because people’s lives aren’t complicated enough to demand robust automation or insight. In the business arena, scaling challenges and interconnected processes make AI an indispensable tool. In our private worlds, that complexity is mostly absent.

But just as businesses have discovered transformative possibilities by embracing AI, individuals, too, will one day see their capacity for action explode. As we remove personal limitations, the boundary between business-like complexity and ordinary life will start to blur—and that’s when personal AI’s real potential will emerge.