AI (Artificial Intelligence) in everyday life in Israel didn’t arrive for me as a shiny “future” thing. It arrived as a way to stop losing whole afternoons to forms, phone menus, and the particular kind of bureaucratic friction that makes you feel like you’re failing a test you didn’t know you were taking.

I moved to Israel at the end of 1999. I didn’t come with a special talent for paperwork or a love of process. I came with mother-tongue English, decent patience, and the stubborn belief that if you just keep showing up, eventually someone will authorize the thing and make it happen. For years, that worked. Sort of. I got by the same way a lot of people get by here. Asking one friend who knows someone, keeping a folder of mystery documents “just in case,” and learning which offices are allergic to email and which ones are allergic to phone calls. And trying to avoid the ones who only answer to fax.

Bank then, I’d leave the house with a list and come back with three new problems I didn’t have in the morning. I’d stand at a counter while someone flipped through my documents like they were shuffling cards, and I’d try to read their face to see whether I was about to be told “missing one thing” or “wrong form” or the worst one: “Who told you to come here today? We only process these forms tomorrow and you need a pre-booked appointment.”

The first years, I didn’t even have the vocabulary to be angry. I had embarrassment. I had that tight smile you do when you don’t want to show you’re lost. I learned quickly that in Israel, bureaucracy doesn’t always care that you’re polite. It cares that you’re correct. Correct office, correct day, correct hours, correct attachments, correct phrasing, correct everything. Even the language around it is a maze. Hebrew forms can be written in a tone that feels like it’s already disappointed in you. You read a sentence three times and still aren’t sure if they’re asking for a document, a declaration, or your firstborn.

So I did what you do. I adjusted. I built routines. I kept photocopies, many many photocopies. I got used to printing things because “online” never really meant online. I learned that “come tomorrow” can mean tomorrow, or it can mean please leave, or it can mean I’m not the person who wants to deal with this right now. I learned that the person who answers the phone is not necessarily the person who can solve the problem, and the person who can solve the problem is not necessarily reachable by phone.

And for a long time, my strategy was basically ‘survive the wave’. Handle the current crisis, put the rest in a mental drawer, and hope nothing overlaps. That’s the real killer, the overlap. A housing issue that triggers a municipal form that triggers a banking demand that triggers some other checkbox. It’s not one process. It’s a chain of processes, and each one has its own mood.

What’s changed in the last couple of years isn’t that Israel magically became less bureaucratic. It didn’t. The forms are still there. The offices are still offices. The rules still have the same slightly chaotic energy where something is clearly written, but also somehow negotiable. What changed is that I finally have something that sits next to me while I deal with it. AI. Artificial intelligence helps me deal with the processes that feel like they have no intelligence.

Not as a replacement for doing things. As a second brain that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t get offended, and doesn’t make me feel stupid for asking the same question twice or even ten times.

Here’s what that looks like in real life. It’s 9:40 at night, the apartment is quiet, and I’m staring at a PDF that could be a contract, or a warning, or a polite threat. Pre-AI, I’d either ignore it until panic forced me to act, or I’d send it to someone and feel guilty for bothering them, or I’d try to translate it myself and end up more confused because direct translation isn’t understanding. Now I paste the text in, and I ask ‘what does this actually mean?’, and ‘what are they asking me to do?’ Not “translate,” but interpret. A real explanation in plain language. What matters. What doesn’t. What the next step is likely to be.

Or I’m drafting an email to an office that will decide whether to take me seriously. Before, I’d write something too long, too emotional, or too apologetic. Or I’d try to sound “official” and end up sounding weird, because official Hebrew and natural Hebrew aren’t the same thing. Now I can take my messy paragraph and turn it into something that reads like an adult wrote it. Firm, clear, not rude. The difference between “I’m begging you” and “Here is what I’m requesting, and here is the timeline.” I was amazed the first time I actually saw that this worked.

That’s the thing people miss. Bureaucracy is partly about documents. It’s also about voice. About how you frame the request. About knowing what to ask for so you don’t get bounced between departments like a ping-pong ball. When you’ve lived here long enough, you develop instincts, but instincts don’t always survive fatigue. AI helps when I’m tired.

It also helps with the small humiliations. The kind where you know you’re competent in life, but you’re reduced to guessing which dropdown option is closest to your situation. You pick one, submit, and later someone tells you it was wrong, not because the situation was wrong, but because the wording was wrong. AI can look at the choices and say, ‘based on how these systems usually classify things, this one is probably what they mean’. It can suggest which supporting document to attach. It can remind you that if you say it like this, it might trigger the wrong track.

I’m not pretending it makes everything smooth. Sometimes you still need to stand in line. Sometimes you still need a stamp. Sometimes the answer is still “no,” and it’s still delivered like it’s your fault for asking. But the emotional balance has shifted. For 24 years, I managed by shrinking my expectations. By telling myself, this is just how it is. By taking a deep breath and accepting that I might lose a day to something that should take ten minutes.

Now I don’t shrink as much.

There’s a different posture when you sit down with a bureaucratic problem and you’re not alone with it. When you can quickly understand what’s being asked, draft a clean response, gather the right attachments, and go in prepared. It sounds small, but it changes how you carry yourself at the counter, on the phone, in the email thread and on the WhatsApp group.

I still respect the system in the way you respect weather. It exists. You plan around it. You don’t try to argue with it like it’s a person. But now, when the next form shows up, I don’t feel that familiar drop in my stomach. I open it, and I start. I meet it head on.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)