Six weeks with ChatGPT: what it's actually useful for in IT ops
The hype has died down slightly and I've been using ChatGPT daily for six weeks. Here's an honest inventory of where it earns its keep.
Six weeks ago, ChatGPT landed and the internet briefly lost its mind. I wrote about the initial reaction. Now I've actually lived with it for a sustained period, and I want to give a more honest, less first-impressions account of where it's useful and where it's genuinely not.
This is aimed at people like me: IT professionals, not developers per se, who are trying to figure out whether this changes our work in any meaningful way.
Where it's genuinely useful
Scripting and automation
This is the biggest win for me. I write a reasonable amount of PowerShell: Intune management, Azure AD reporting, Teams administration, general IT ops automation. ChatGPT is now part of that workflow.
Typical usage: I describe what I want in plain English, it gives me a working starting point, I read it, adapt it, test it. It's not generating production-ready code; it's giving me a scaffold that's faster to complete than to write from scratch.
Last week: needed to pull a report of all Intune-managed devices with their last sync date and compliance status, filtered by a specific group, exported to CSV. Described it in two sentences. Got a working Graph API call with the right fields and proper pagination handling. Would have taken me 30-40 minutes to build myself. Took 10 minutes to verify and adjust what ChatGPT produced.
First-draft everything
Emails. Documentation. Meeting agendas. Proposals. Anything where the blank page is the enemy, ChatGPT breaks the block. I still write everything myself. I read what it produces critically and rewrite substantially, but having something to push against is faster than starting cold.
Explaining Microsoft documentation
Microsoft docs have improved, but they can still be dense, inconsistent, and written for an audience that already understands what they're asking. "Explain this to me like I'm going to have to present it to a customer who doesn't know Azure" is a prompt I use weekly.
Troubleshooting errors
Paste error message. Describe context. Get possible causes and steps to investigate. Hit rate is maybe 60-70%, but that's often enough to point me at the right place faster than a Google search.
Where it's not useful
Anything requiring current information
ChatGPT's training data has a cutoff. It doesn't know about things that happened recently. I've caught it giving me outdated Microsoft documentation references and, more dangerously, telling me features exist in products that have since changed. Always verify.
Compliance and legal questions
Never, ever rely on ChatGPT for anything with legal, compliance, or regulatory implications. It will give you a confident, plausible-sounding answer that may be completely wrong for your jurisdiction, your sector, or your specific situation.
Precise, factual claims
If you need to know the exact licensing requirements for a specific Microsoft feature, the exact syntax for an obscure cmdlet, or any specific factual claim: verify independently. ChatGPT hallucinates with confidence.
The workflow shift
The thing that's genuinely changed is the cognitive overhead of starting tasks. There's a certain resistance that comes with opening a blank document or a PowerShell window with a complex task ahead. ChatGPT reduces that resistance. Whether that's a meaningful productivity gain or just a psychological effect is something I'm still working out.
What I can say: I'm starting more tasks faster, and finishing them in less time. The quality of my output hasn't changed; if anything it's improved because I'm spending the time I save on review and refinement rather than initial construction.
That's a tool earning its keep.
