AI Is Deodorant. Nobody Talks About It.
So. Confession.
It is 11:47pm on a Tuesday. I am at my kitchen table in pajamas, drinking the kind of coffee I make no apology for. I have an email open to a CEO. The reply needs to go out before tomorrow morning, because I do not let CEO emails sit longer than 24 hours. They are always the first ones I get back to. The cursor is blinking at me like it knows something.
I open ChatGPT in a different tab.
I type: help me draft this in a warmer tone, two paragraphs, not too eager.
Three minutes later I have a draft I would have spent forty five minutes wrestling out of myself. I tweak two sentences. I hit send.
And then I do the thing I want to talk about today.
I closed the ChatGPT tab. I will clear the history. I do not tell a single person I used AI to help me draft it. Not my best friend. Definitely not the colleague I had brunch with the next morning who asked how I got the email out so fast.
Why?
Because I, Sapna Malhotra, CMC CPA ICD.D, twenty five years + of international management consulting experience, founder of DigiruptorTM, developer of R.O.A.R FrameworkrTM, a woman who teaches AI and transformation literally for a living, was worried she would think I cheated.
ROARers. We have a problem.
Here is what I have been turning over all week.
AI is the new deodorant.
Stay with me. We all use it. We all hide it. Nobody talks about it. We have collectively decided that admitting we used AI to draft something is the same as admitting we did not really do the work. So we use it in private, we present the output in public, and nobody says the quiet part out loud.
It is the most elegant group conspiracy in modern professional life.
We sit in our home offices at 11pm asking ChatGPT, or Claude, or Copilot, or whatever tool we use, to clean up an email, and then we hit send like we wrote it ourselves. Which, fine, we kind of did. But we will tell you our weight before we tell you we used AI for the first draft. We will tell you our actual age before we admit Claude helped us prep for the board meeting. We would rather pretend we have a personal sentence factory in our heads.
And we cannot tell anyone, because what if they think we are not really competent.
(Reader, they are doing the exact same thing. They will also tell you their weight before they tell you.)
This is the high achiever trap dressed up in a 2026 outfit.
We already know the trap. We downplay our wins. We assume praise is just being nice. We overprepare for everything. And now there is a fresh new flavor of the same thing, served warm: I cannot tell anyone I used AI to write that, because then they will think I am not really competent.
Listen. The women I respect most are using AI every day. Drafting. Summarizing. Planning. Role playing hard conversations. Prepping for boards. Writing the connection request they have been avoiding for six weeks. They are not less capable. They are more capable. They have figured out the part most of us are still hiding from.
AI handles the ordinary. We handle the extraordinary.
You heard that one from me last week, and I am going to keep saying it until it stops sounding revolutionary. The ordinary work, the drafting, the formatting, the first pass of anything, that is the deodorant layer. Necessary. Invisible. Not the thing that makes us us. The extraordinary work, the judgment call, the relationship, the question only we would think to ask, that is what our readers, our clients, our boards are actually paying for.
Stop hiding the deodorant. Start owning the extraordinary.
Three questions worth sitting with this week.
Where are we using AI in private and apologizing for it in public, and why?
Imagine, for a moment, what is the ordinary work in our week that AI could absorb, so we can spend that energy on the work only we can do?
If the women we most respect were watching us draft our next email, would we feel embarrassed, or excited, to show them how we have been using AI and exchange tips?
The AI Prompt of the Week.
Last week I told you about the framework. This week I am giving you the first prompt that builds it.
Copy. Paste. Replace the yellow. Run it.
I am a [TITLE/ROLE] with [X] years of experience in [INDUSTRY]. My primary networking goal over the next 12 months is [OBJECTIVE]. My biggest obstacle to networking consistently is [OBSTACLE]. Write me a clear, one paragraph networking objective I can use as my strategy anchor.
This is Prompt 01 from the AI Prompt Lab. It will not give you advice. It will give you an anchor. One paragraph you can use every time someone asks what you are working toward.
Use it once. See what comes back. Reply to this email and tell me what shifted.
(And no, I will not tell anyone you used AI to write it.)
Now go make me ROAR. 🦁
One quick note.
These prompts work on any tool, free or paid. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, free tier or premium. They will all give you something useful. I want you using them this week.
But, when I run them, I am running them on the paid versions. ChatGPT Plus. Claude Pro. Not the free tier. There is a reason. There is a hidden cost on the free version that most people do not see until it costs them something.
