I learned to use AI tools working night shifts over three months and here is the honest breakdown of what is worth your time

I work night shifts in logistics. For about three months I used the quieter parts of my shifts to systematically work through AI tools, not courses, just using the tools on real tasks and paying attention to what happened.

Here is what I actually found. For writing tasks, summarising, drafting, restructuring, the tools are genuinely useful from day one and get more useful as you learn how to give better instructions. For research and fact-finding, they are useful but you will get burned if you do not verify, I got burned twice before I made verification automatic. For anything involving numbers or precise data, be careful, the confidence is not matched by the accuracy.

The thing nobody told me that I wish someone had: the quality of what you get out is almost entirely determined by the quality of what you put in. A vague instruction gets a vague output. A specific, well-framed instruction with context gets something genuinely useful. That skill of framing the instruction well is the actual thing to learn and it takes time.