Honestly, I was in the same boat as you last year. I thought AI was mostly...

Honestly, I was in the same boat as you last year. I thought AI was mostly for writing emails or making chatbots. But 2026 has been the year I actually started using it for the messy, hands-on part of my job. I run a small woodworking and furniture restoration shop, and AI has been a game changer in a way I never expected.

I use Midjourney daily for design mockups. A client will describe a "mid-century modern coffee table with a walnut finish and brass hairpin legs that has a live edge on one side." I used to sketch that out or search Pinterest for hours. Now I generate three variations in minutes and adjust based on their reaction. It saves me a ton of rework because we agree on the look before I even touch a saw. I also use a simple voice-to-text AI for my shop notes and inventory. I used to lose scraps of paper, but now I just dictate "cut list for Jenkins sideboard: 4 panels of quarter-sawn oak at 18 inches" into an app like Otter.ai, and it syncs to my tablet. It keeps my hands free and my workflow clean.

The most unexpected tool is something called Glide Apps. I built a simple AI-powered dashboard that tracks my material costs and automatically flags when lumber prices spike. It sounds boring, but it saved me from buying a load of cherry when the price was inflated last month. The AI just flagged it, and I waited two weeks and saved twenty percent.

My advice is to look for AI in the boring, repetitive parts of your work, not just the creative stuff. That is where the real time sinks are.

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Roberts Kiaan @kiaanroberts3019

this is wild, i never thought about ai for lumber pricing. i do stained glass and it's the same headache with copper foil and glass sheets - prices jump around so much. gonna look into glide apps now, thanks for the tip. also the voice notes thing is genius, my shop is covered in sticky notes i keep losing lol
5 days ago

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