3 must-know tips when using AI to streamline your home life

Managing a household can sometimes feel like an impossible undertaking. Between scheduling, cleaning, meal planning, and delegating and completing tasks, the whole operation could come to a halt with a single mistake or misstep.

That's why some people are turning to artificial intelligence to make their home life run more efficiently and reliably. A growing number of household management apps and platforms offer basic tools for streamlining the hardest parts of running a household. Basic AI features from Google Gemini and ChatGPT can also help you brainstorm for tasks like meal and vacation planning.

What you can't get — at least for now — is an AI self-driving car that will deliver your tween to their basketball practice, or a robot that will fold heaps of laundry. But as long as you keep your expectations realistic, using AI for household management can save you time, and lessen your mental load.

Here are three ways you can use AI to do exactly that:

Use AI for scheduling

Parents, or anyone who runs a household, knows that an organized calendar is essential. Apps like Ohai.ai, Maple, and Jam all offer AI-powered scheduling tools that aim to streamline your schedule — and ensure that no important appointment slips through the cracks.

In some cases, you can forward emails with key dates and associated responsibilities that the app will ingest and automatically add to your calendar.

The caveat, however, is that such apps may not be able to connect to your work calendar if you maintain one through your employer, because of security restrictions. So if you're hoping that an AI scheduling tool will be your silver bullet, be sure to first consider whether it can sync with every calendar you use.

Let AI help plan your meals

Meal planning can be hit-or-miss with AI. Some AI-generated recipes are notoriously bad, filled with the wrong measurements or bizarre ingredients. In extreme cases, a recipe might be deadly.

While it's probably best for now not to trust AI entirely to generate high-quality recipes for you, there are tools that can help you manage shopping lists, scheduling, and menu selection.

With Apple's integration of ChatGPT, for example, Siri should be able to offer meal-planning support. The workspace web application Notion also has AI-powered meal-planning templates that can take the ingredients you have on hand into account, then offer suggestions for what to make.

AI can help you assign and track tasks

Managing a household means knowing what needs to get done—and by when. Whether that's scheduling annual health appointments, paying utility bills, signing up for the neighborhood potluck, or returning the library books, there's no shortage of tasks that need to be tracked.

Households may rely on some combination of communication and scheduling tools to take care of these chores (think Slack and Google Calendar), but family management apps like Jam, Ohai.ai, and Maple are specifically dedicated to dealing with this workload. You can set deadlines and reminders that are tied to shared calendars.

However families choose to incorporate AI into their lives, they should read the fine print of the services they use, search for products that safeguard their privacy, and remember that there's no universal solution for the problem they're trying to solve.