Joel Comm on Making AI Fun, Simple, and Actually Useful

What if AI stopped feeling like a future threat and started feeling like a useful friend?

I walked away from this conversation feeling oddly optimistic. Joel Comm, a veteran tech storyteller, argues that artificial intelligence can be reduced to three things: curiosity, a few practical tools, and a little playfulness. He doesn't promise sci-fi miracles. Instead he hands out small, tactical wins that suddenly make AI feel less like a looming takeover and more like an everyday helper.

AI as a practical personal assistant

Think of AI as a faster, smarter answer engine that skips the messy middleman of search results. Joel gave a simple example: take a photo of a flower, ask Grok what it is, and get a full, instant briefing. Simple. Immediate. Useful. That move from link-chasing to direct answer changes the hour-long research chore into a few seconds of decision-making.

John Lee Dumas shared his own jaw-dropper: a 63-page legal document summarized by ChatGPT in thirty seconds. That quick diagnosis saved both time and potential legal fees. Hearing that, I felt the practical value land hard—this is not about replacing experts; it’s about triage and empowerment.

Designing AI for people over 50

Joel’s new project, targeted to listeners aged 55 and up, grew out of a single observation: many presentations about AI frighten seniors. He picked a different tone—short, snackable episodes and demonstrable tools—that treats older adults as curious practitioners, not scared observers. I liked how he frames learning as reclaiming agency, not keeping up with an ever-accelerating treadmill.

There’s tenderness in the anecdote about his mother animating old family photos and suddenly feeling connected to the past. That’s not novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s emotional technology at its best.

Tools that concretely change your day

• ChatGPT, Claude, Grok: pick one and build a project workspace to centralize tasks and prompts.
• Suno: generate a song in under 30 seconds—creativity as a dinner-table trick.
• Kling: animate old photos and transform static archives into moving memories.

Joel suggests creating a custom agent—his Merlin—for pulling together everything you’ve written, posted, or published. That felt clever to me: treat AI like a librarian of your life, not a random oracle from the internet.

Three practical ways entrepreneurs can deploy AI today

Start small and purposeful. Joel recommends: set up project workspaces for each initiative, build a custom agent that knows your voice and content, and use snackable tools to prototype ideas fast. Those steps convert anxiety into action.

Where caution is actually kindness

The single safety story that stuck with me was about voice-cloning scams. AI can now mimic familiar voices convincingly. Joel’s advice was both pragmatic and humane: pick a family safe word, and don’t broadcast it online. That small ritual—like buckling a seatbelt—felt like a useful habit everyone should adopt.

What I loved most

There’s a consistent through-line: reduce friction. Whether it’s diagnosing a contract, writing a kids’ story with Gemini’s storybook tool, or spinning up a marketing plan inside a ChatGPT project, the promise is less friction and more time for human priorities. I left the conversation less dazzled by possibility and more interested in practical next steps.

Final thought

AI becomes less threatening when we make it smaller, friendlier, and task-driven. That nudge—from overwhelming to approachable—feels like the only sustainable way forward. If we treat these services as helpers rather than gods, we might find they simply make space: for creativity, for memory, and for the small human things that matter most.

Actionable insights

• Start a project workspace in your chosen AI app to organize tasks and reuse prompts.
• Build a custom agent that aggregates your content so AI answers reflect your voice and priorities.
• Use free tool trials—Suno and Kling—to prototype creative outputs before buying subscriptions.
• Adopt a family safe word to defend against voice-cloning phone scams.
• Prioritize snackable learning: five- to ten-minute lessons beat long, abstract lectures for retention.