My AI breakthroughs at work started at home

It began with a mermaid skeleton.

I spent hours searching the internet for mermaid audio clips. That’s how I’d built my parrot animatronic’s voice — find clips, edit them, make do. But this mermaid had a voice in my head, and nothing online matched it.

I posted in Halloween forums asking how people made voices for their animatronics. The impressive ones had YouTube-creator audio setups and a friend who was good at voice acting. I had neither. Then someone mentioned creating custom voices in ElevenLabs.

I tried it and was hooked. Every animatronic got a custom voice. Not five signature sayings each — fifty. AI generated the scripts and the recordings. Fifty sayings make a character feel alive in a way five never can. Before AI, that would have been so time-consuming and expensive it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try. The extra forty-five weren’t just free — the idea itself was free for the first time.

I kept going. I had half-formed ideas about who the mermaid was, and AI helped me shape them into Bettie, Siren of the South Seas. Half bones. Half bombshell. All trouble.

My Home Depot 6-foot skeleton became Big Joe, Gator Hunter. The pirate I built next became Silas Scarface. And when I was trying to figure out how to make Silas’ hand removable and poseable, AI suggested an inexpensive camera mount. Brilliant!

Somewhere along the way, reaching for AI became a reflex — as natural as reaching for a tool on my workbench.

The first time the reflex crossed into my work, nothing dramatic happened. A slide headline wasn’t landing the way I wanted and I didn’t know why. I reached for AI the same way I would have at home.

Outside of work, I’m a maker — someone who builds things for the joy of it. Animatronics, props, an annual Hulaween party with a talking mermaid. At work, I’m a manager of managers and a SME. I used to think home and work were separate identities. My company has thousands of developers, and I’m not one of them.

Here’s what surprises me looking back: at home I was using AI to build things, but what crossed over to work was using AI as a thinking partner. At work, I was using AI as an editor and a search engine. Building belonged to the developers. But critical thinking is a core capability of my job, so that’s where the AI reflex showed up first in a way that had consequence. Building with AI at work followed, but much later.

I didn’t make a decision to use AI more at work. I built a reflex at home where nothing was at stake, and the reflex came with me to work.