Core question
How do I keep up with AI without it becoming a second job?
Short answer
Do not try. Build a filter instead. Ask whether a development changes one of five things: how your customers behave, how work gets done, what competitors can now do, how decisions get made, or what risk you carry. If it changes none of those, it is interesting rather than important.
I will say the uncomfortable part first. Even working in this full time, I have struggled to keep up. Success stories and cautionary tales pile up faster than anyone can read them. What I had to do was get ruthless about what actually matters to my clients and to our own work, and deliberately narrow what I pay attention to. If someone tells you they are on top of all of it, they are describing an ambition rather than a practice.
The five-part filter does most of the work. A new model with a better benchmark score usually changes none of those five things for a mid-sized manufacturer. A pricing change that makes a previously uneconomical process suddenly viable changes all of them. One deserves a meeting. The other deserves a bookmark.
The second half is people rather than feeds. A small number of trusted sources who can interpret technology through a business lens will save you more time than any newsletter. What you want from them is not news. It is the judgment call about which piece of news required a decision from someone in your position.
The goal is not knowing everything. It is knowing what matters soon enough to respond intelligently, which is a much lower bar and a much more achievable one.