4 ways to make your job more brain-friendly | ‘Benefitsmaxxing’ | Are you a ‘job hugger’ or a ‘job hopper’?

4 ways to make your job more brain-friendly | 'Benefitsmaxxing' | Are you a 'job hugger' or a 'job hopper'?

Why it's time to get comfortable with AI

A letter from editorial director Lisa Smosarski.

"Do not consider AI your competition; consider it your colleague."

These words jumped out at me at Campaign's Year Ahead conference last week, an event dedicated to predicting consumer behaviours, marketing trends and new ways of working.

Over the course of a fact-packed morning, there was one thing the panels of CEOs, marketing gurus, creatives and strategists clearly agreed on: the rhetoric around AI has changed.

No longer is it acceptable to be an AI luddite or to loudly claim that you don't use AI because you like to do everything 'authentically'; if you are going to hold your own in the world of work in 2026 and beyond, you have to understand how AI can help, enhance and enable new creativity or productivity in your field of work. No one is expecting you to be an expert right now (in fact, most are in agreement that if someone claims to be an expert, they're probably bluffing), but day-to-day use and an understanding of how AI might benefit your specialism is becoming as basic as knowing how to share your screen in Teams. As one speaker soberingly put it: "If your clients know more about AI than you, you're in deep trouble."

Which is a problem when you consider the AI gender adoption gap has still not closed: women are still less likely to use it, trust it or see its need. That becomes more pronounced with age, with women over 45 really getting left behind… like we need any more gaps in the workplace.

So, 2026 absolutely must become the year every woman gets comfortable with AI, whether that's using it to help generate your business strategy, plan a holiday itinerary or make silly videos to send to your friends on WhatsApp.

Whilst I would always encourage all women to upskill with training where possible (take the courses at work, sign up for the platforms on offer), I can tell you from experience that the best way to get comfortable with AI (generative or otherwise) is to start using it. Download the ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude apps and, quite simply, play. The beautiful thing about AI is you can't break it. It won't get annoyed if you don't get it straight away, and it won't tell anyone if you're useless. It's just you and a piece of technology pretending to be an incredibly patient human, working it out together.

Happy experimenting!

4 ways to make your job better for your brain, according to a neuroscientist

Work smarter: recognise that the work will never be 'done'

Digital editor Ellen Scott shares insightful hacks to make work that little bit easier.

As someone who writes about careers, I spend a lot of time talking to people about the way they work. And what keeps coming up in my chats, in among grumbles about open-plan offices and worries about AI taking jobs, is people working outside of their contracted hours in an attempt to 'catch up' or 'get ahead'.

I want to say to you what I say to them, along with a virtual shake of your shoulders. Catching up and getting ahead are myths. So too is the notion – and it's one that so many of us are clinging onto – that the work will ever be 'done'.

There is no endpoint to the majority of work: the to-do list rumbles on. One completed project is simply followed by another. In most jobs, there is never a moment at which you can clap your hands together, put your feet up and declare that there's nothing further to get up to.

What this means is that you have to create your own endpoints. When there's no concrete end to work, it's vital to enforce your own iron-clad boundaries. That means leaving work on time, refusing to let emails bleed into your weekend and letting go of the idea that if you pour more hours in, you'll ever be 'done'.