Testing it herself before bringing it to the team

Debra, in a leadership role at a growing company, has a habit: before recommending any tool internally, she tries it herself first. That's how she approached the AI integration in xTiles — testing it personally, on her own daily routine, before deciding whether it was worth introducing more broadly.

A long-standing problem with how information gets displayed

The underlying problem wasn't new for her. She'd tried Notion with her team a while back and found that, for their needs, it didn't stick — not because the tool was bad, but because the format never solved the actual bottleneck: getting information in front of her fast enough to act on it, rather than something she had to keep building and maintaining by hand.

From about four hours a day to 1 hour

Connecting Claude to xTiles and customizing the morning brief changed the math directly: what used to take roughly four hours a day to process dropped to about 1 hour. The combination that made the difference was AI pulling from the tools she already used, formatted through the morning brief into something she could consume rapidly instead of assembling manually.

What actually changed: less manual assembly, not less information

The point isn't that less information came in each day — it's that the same information arrived already assembled instead of requiring her to collect it manually across separate tools first thing every morning. That manual assembly step, not the volume of information itself, was the actual bottleneck a busy day used to hit before anything else could start.

One person's setup, evaluated before it becomes a team's setup

This is the pattern behind her test-it-herself habit: results like a four-hour task shrinking to 1 hour are usually what gets a wider rollout evaluated in the first place — not because a policy decided to try something new, but because the person already relying on it daily is the one who can say, honestly, whether the time actually got saved.