Marco Petrosillo

I'm in my 40s and I can't sleep more than 6 hours anymore. Doesn't matter what time I go to bed, my body just wakes up. For years I thought it was a problem to fix. Tried everything, no screens, magnesium, all the usual advice. Lately I stopped fighting it. I get up, make coffee, and I have the quietest hour of the day before anyone else is awake. Some of my best work happens there. Still not sure if it's a superpower or my body slowly giving up. Anyone else in their 40s dealing with this?

What's the one task at work you'd hand to AI tomorrow if nobody was watching?

When I was running a 30-person company, I thought my job was to have all the answers. It took me way too long to notice I had become the bottleneck for every decision, including the ones I knew nothing about. Now I sit with owners of small companies who are exactly where I was. Most of them open by asking which AI tool they should buy. I usually ask what they're still doing themselves that someone else could do. AI can help with that part. Letting go they have to do on their own.

Nice city.

Has AI actually given you back any time at work? Or did the time just quietly fill up with more work?

Fifteen years at a system integrator teach you something about software projects. They rarely fail on the day they go live. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where everyone nods and nobody says what they actually think. I've sat through a lot of those meetings. In some of them I was the one nodding. AI is going to change plenty of things inside companies. I'm not sure it will change that meeting.

The best Claude prompt I know is four words long. "Ask me questions first." Most people type one line, get a bland answer and decide AI is overrated. Claude knows nothing about you. So it guesses. And guesses always sound generic. Try it on something real. Say you have to give a toast at a friend's 50th. Don't type: "Write a toast for my friend's 50th." Type: "I need a 2-minute toast for my friend's 50th birthday. Before you write anything, ask me the 5 questions you need to make it personal." It'll ask how you met, the story everyone retells, the tone you want. You answer like you're talking at the bar. Typos included. Then it writes. And it sounds like you, because it's built on your stuff. Three more lines worth saving: "Give me 3 versions: short, medium, blunt." For when you don't know what you want until you see it. "What would you change if you were me?" After any draft. It finds the weak spot before someone else does. "Explain it like I'm smart but new to this." For anything technical. No jargon, no talking down. Turns out AI works better when you let it listen first. Same as people.

At this point, I don't blame people but the system that allows this to happen.

My body now sends notifications. Sleep badly once and my back files a full report by 9am.

I'll be in Trieste today. First time visiting. Any advice on where to eat local food away from tourists?

I've spent my whole career in consulting, one of the industries AI is hitting hardest. Paradoxically, I'm in a better spot than before. A lot of business owners still haven't built the skills to manage it. I have.

What's the weirdest thing someone asked you to automate at work?

I've been stuck at 1.2K followers for a while. Can we help this little account crush some numbers? Let's #connect!

Your gym is counting on one thing: that you never read page 4. Here's how to read it in ten minutes with Claude, even if you've never used AI. Download the contract PDF, or take a photo of every page, and upload it to Claude. First message: "I want to cancel this membership. Find every clause about cancellation, notice periods, automatic renewal and penalties. Quote the exact sentence and tell me the page." Asking for the quote and the page is the important part. You don't have to trust the AI. You read the sentence yourself and check it in ten seconds. Second message: "Explain it like I'm not a lawyer. What's the cheapest way out, and what's my deadline?" If it comes back with something like "60 days notice before renewal, in writing", you now know more than the person at the front desk. Third message: "Write a short cancellation letter that cites those clauses. Polite, firm, no drama." Same steps for your phone plan, your car lease, the insurance policy nobody ever opens. Lawyers just got a whole gallery of tools like this from Anthropic. You only need this one. Now you can finally stop paying for the gym you don't go to.

Every company has one spreadsheet that, if it disappeared tomorrow, would stop the whole place. What's in yours?

Honest question. Do you answer work messages after 6pm, or do you pretend you didn't see them until morning?

Somewhere after 40 you stop asking what you want to become and start asking what you want to stop doing. The second list is longer.

Lunch question. What's the dish your mother made that no restaurant has ever got right?

Unless your business is based in Italy where once you hire someone, it's forever and ever.

Today at a client, the owner of a small-medium utilities company asked me if AI could read his supplier invoices. I showed him. It took about forty seconds. He was quiet for a while, then said: "My friend has been doing that for months." We spent the next hour talking about his friend. AI barely came up.