Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.

Your mom has a spreadsheet for Thanksgiving. You have a bot.

Before the turkey timer starts and the group texts detonate, AI can help you pull it together, minus the judgment, PTO requests or dramatic sighing.

Meal plan, meet meal bot 🦃 

Skip the “what should I make?” spiral and cut straight to the menu.

Ask: “Plan a Thanksgiving menu for six, including one vegan guest, and make a grocery list.”

ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini will serve it up fast. Then paste the list into Instacart or Walmart’s AI cart builder to turn it into one click.

You can even prompt: “Plan the same menu on a $XX grocery budget and highlight cheaper swaps.”

Dinner: handled. Ego: intact.

Trip wrangler 🛫 

The government reopened this morning, but the fallout’s still in the air.

The FAA says post-shutdown staffing gaps could spill into Thanksgiving, so this year’s travel rush may get an extra side of delay.

AI can’t clear the skies, but it can help you dodge the turbulence.

Use Google Flights with Gemini, Hopper’s AI alerts or Kayak’s price predictor for flexible routes and real-time delay updates.

If your plans unravel midair, prompt ChatGPT to “find the fastest reroute from Orlando to Chicago with open seats in the next 24 hours.”

It’ll rebook faster than TSA can say “liquids bag out.”

Guest list therapist 🛋️ 

Use Notion AI or a smart-sheet bot to track who’s bringing what — and who’s bringing drama.

Let AI send reminders, assign dishes and draft the “let’s keep politics off the table” text you’re avoiding.

Gift whisperer 🎁 

For the athletes of holiday shopping, consider a bot your new teammate. Upload your list to Perplexity or Copilot for ideas by age, interest and budget. Then add: “Remind me who I already bought for.”

💡🤖 Final bot thought

ChatGPT remembers your holiday chaos so you don’t have to. OpenAI’s new memory feature can recall your recurring details: your mom likes red wine, you travel every Thanksgiving, your in-laws always want gluten-free rolls.

It’s the closest ChatGPT has come to being a real personal assistant — the kind that doesn’t flinch when you ask it to track gift receipts or cancel that regrettable flight.

Bot Hurt isn’t sponsored by any of the tools mentioned. They come from good old-fashioned word-of-mouth, trial and error, and way too much internet research.

🤖 💬 Bot Talk: When bots get bot hurt

Forget robot takeovers — the next wave of AI isn’t replacing jobs, it’s quietly automating the boring parts.

Shout-out to Ben, our first Bot N’ Forth guest, for sharing a Forbes article on why AI agents work best automating tasks, not entire jobs. The headline could’ve doubled as a spiritual sequel to our first issue.

Klarna, the Swedish fintech behind buy-now-pay-later, learned that lesson the hard way. After replacing staff with AI, it soon rehired them when service quality tanked.

Across industries, Forbes notes, companies that automate whole roles often stumble, while those that give bots smaller, focused jobs thrive.

One winner: Gilion, a Swedish startup running 82 AI agents to handle everything from data crunching to memo drafting.

Co-founder Henrik Landgren told Forbes the system “exponentially improved our product expertise and product value to customers.”

The trick? Breaking work into manageable, MECE-style tasks instead of one giant “AI analyst.”

The moral still stands: bots don’t steal jobs — they sort the spreadsheets.

🚀 Coming up next week …

Think AI for boundary-setting, stress-diffusing and stopping yourself before you say it.

Not therapy — but close enough. (And if you missed our AI + therapy issue, consider this your reminder to check it out.)

Don’t get bot hurt. Get bot even.