Thank you once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In. A quick programming note: We will be taking the next two Fridays off. Happy holidays to all, and I look forward to resurfacing in your inbox next year.

For any number of reasons, 2025 has hardly been my favorite year. But if I were to make a list of things that went well, my relationship with AI would be on it.

This was the year I went from being an AI dabbler to a daily user. And while some of that usage still amounts to messing around—hello, Sora!—even more involves tasks that make me more productive. More importantly, it brings me better results, a goal I hold dear. (Sadly, not every AI enthusiast agrees.)

Here, then, is a look at how I’m using AI as 2025 winds down. I covered some of this ground in a September Plugged In. But since I wrote that, the technology has become even more core to my workflow, and my AI A-team has shifted pretty dramatically to Google products for the first time. So a year-end update seemed worthwhile.

First, I’ve finally figured out how to use chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini as research tools. I remain wary of accepting anything they say as the truth, since AI still has a devious knack for hallucinating fantasies that sound like fact. But it’s dawned on me that I don’t need to take AI at its word.

Starting a research quest with a detailed AI prompt is often more effective than trying to boil it down into keywords of the sort I would have typed into a search engine in the past. And every self-respecting chatbot now provides citations for its work, at least when I ask for them. They lead to web pages written by actual humans, which are far easier to assess than wordage extruded by an LLM.

After spending most of 2025 weaving between ChatGPT and Claude as my chatbot of choice, I was (mostly) wowed by the new Gemini 3 Pro-powered version of Gemini that debuted in November. It’s become my default bot. But the frenzied pace of competition in the category argues against long-term loyalty: I need to spend more time with the new GPT-5.2 version of ChatGPT, which arrived last........

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