I’ve struggled to find much use for AI. It’s not that I’m not motivated – it’s my job to try out new technology and point out useful ways to use it – but I rarely, if ever, stumble across something the AI can do that I can’t do faster and/or better with another tool.

I recently took a long trip with multiple flights and wanted to add those flights to my calendar. I was annoyed to find that the airline didn’t offer a button to do this, or even an iCal download. All I got was a list of the flight times. So I thought I’d try AI.

I copied the times into Claude, an AI tool similar to ChatGPT. I asked the bot to convert the dates into an iCal file, and it worked. All I had to do was download the text file it provided, change the file extension to “ics,” and add it to my calendar. It worked perfectly: the times were even converted to account for the time zone differences in each location.

Now, not every AI seems to work for this. I tested it with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude. Gemini gave me a tutorial on how to create an iCal file, which wasn’t what I wanted; ChatGPT gave me a tutorial with a partial iCal download that missed most of my events. It’s possible I could get better results by tweaking my prompt, but with Claude I didn’t have to: it gave me a perfectly formatted iCal file, complete with a download button. All I had to do was rename the file extension after downloading, and it opened in the Calendar app on my Mac.