Jana Wilhelmus wears a lot of hats. She’s a fractional CMO, a content creator with 43,000 followers on TikTok, co-founder of AI4ALL, and a mother of two — often all in the same afternoon. So when we sat down to talk about how she actually uses Claude, the first question was simple: with a week that full, where does AI earn its place, and where doesn’t it?
Written by Berna Syuleymanoglu
Jana’s answer, over the course of 40 minutes, kept circling back to the same line: Claude does a lot in her week — sorts her files, drafts her content calendars, chases down partners and funding — but it never once makes the actual call. What’s changed for Jana isn’t that she decides less. It’s that her judgment goes where it’s actually needed, instead of getting spent on the tasks that used to fill up her day.
The kind of stability people used to have — one job, one routine, staying in one place for years — is fading, and people are pushed to constantly re-educate themselves, switching context, wearing different hats. As Jana put it, “life today isn’t about doing one job anymore.”
She felt it directly as an expat: moving from Bulgaria to Amsterdam, then Utrecht, then Rotterdam, starting over each time, through having kids, leaving corporate life, opening an agency, and later closing it. Every stage meant reinventing herself again.
That’s the world AI entered as something that started making the ordinary parts of her day a little lighter. “I’m loving AI and the way it helps me juggle everything,” she said, “to create processes, to be faster, to organize my thoughts and my work, so I can keep up with the reality of running a household and being there for my kids.” It’s not just that AI does the work. It’s that it hands her back the time to be present for everything else.
The first time Jana used Claude as a real assistant, she gave it one task: to organise her desktop. “I’m quite a creative person, so sometimes I work in chaos, and then I organize everything — I’m a Virgo rising,” she laughed. Claude sorted everything, categorised, and even set aside a folder saying : “I think you want to delete these.”
Around the same time, a colleague spent an hour searching “compress PDF online,” frustrated that the free tools kept asking her to pay. Jana’s answer: just tell Claude to go to your downloads, take the file, and compress it. “There’s still such a gap between people who know how to use it and people who say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it could do that,'” she said.
Ask Jana where her work ends and Claude’s begins, and she starts with what stays hers. “Strategy is always with me,” she said. She knows the audience, the goals; does the research and checks the facts herself, from sources she trusts, before anything gets fed into the AI.
What Claude is good at is everything that comes after. “I’m at this stage of my career where I’m not so excited about the execution itself,” Jana said. “Claude helps me turn strategy into execution” — breaking one idea into a full content calendar: LinkedIn posts, newsletters, TikToks, campaign briefs, all aligned to the same goal. She compares it to onboarding a new employee: you feed it your documents and your reasoning before you let it start creating on its own.
At AI4ALL, that division of labor has real stakes. The organization helps young people and women in transition navigate work and society, which means constantly finding the right partners and funding. “Claude is really helping me search for the right partners,” Jana said, work that used to eat a full day, now done in a fraction of the time.
There’s a line Jana doesn’t let AI near at all: “Anything involving values.”
AI doesn’t decide what AI4ALL fights for, or who the organization partners with. It doesn’t write funding proposals — some run a hundred pages, and the team writes those themselves, sitting down together.
What it does is help her narrow down the first group of options, faster. “Technology can definitely optimize the work processes,” she said, “but it doesn’t make the decision. AI suggests. It doesn’t decide — it gives you opportunities, and it saves you time.” It’s the same principle AI4ALL teaches in its programs: don’t let AI think for you, or make decisions for you. Critical thinking, she said, should never be replaced by judgment handed off to a machine.
Asked for an example of Claude being part of her home routine, Jana didn’t hesitate: “It’s not.” More and more, she protects offline time on purpose — welcoming her kids from school without a screen in sight, going for walks, talking to each other.
That’s not to say AI never shows up at home. It does, just on her terms. On family trips, she’ll use it to track down authentic, local restaurants in some small villages along the way. And in the car, it became a game: on a road trip from the Netherlands to Greece, they shared strange facts while driving — like whether an hour near a black hole really means millions of years pass on Earth — and everyone guessed true or false before checking a few different AIs to see who was right.
Jana, on the other hand, explained her own children barely use AI day to day, and she’s fine with that — it’s part of why AI4ALL focuses its programs on ages 16 to 24 rather than younger kids, who, in Jana’s view, need to be outside, writing by hand, reading books.
A lot of solopreneurs feel like everyone else has already figured it all out. Jana feels it too. “I feel this way every day,” she said, smiling. “We all do.” Her advice isn’t to catch up on everything at once — pick one AI, start with one small skill, and build from there.
What really helps is not doing it alone. “There’s so much knowledge online, but joining a community and a room full of people, doing it together, is very energizing,” she said. That’s the whole idea behind AI4ALL, and it’s the same idea behind the AI Marketing workshop she’s co-hosting with Oliviana Bailey on September 2.
“You can ask on the spot — ‘I’m stuck here, how do I do this?'” she explained. People from AI4ALL walk the room, helping one-on-one, because everyone’s workflow is different. And it doesn’t end when the afternoon does — the community keeps talking, meeting, texting.
“It’s not going to be a long theory,” Jana added. “We’re going to roll up our sleeves and get to work.” Her closing message is for anyone still on the fence: “Don’t be scared that AI is going to replace your job. No matter how old you are, you can join a community of like-minded people and go further, without fear.”
Join Jana and Oliviana Bailey on September 2 for “AI Marketing That Does the Work For You” — a hands-on afternoon where you’ll leave with a working AI assistant built around your own content, not a slide deck of theory. Get your ticket here.
Want to be part of what’s next? Visit our website to learn more about AI4ALL’s upcoming Meetups, the Entrepreneur Program, Masterclasses, and the Mentor Program. Join our movement shaping AI’s future together.