Ambient occlusion in combination with real-time lights

Hi! First of all, I must note that I feel like I have a very limited understanding of the lighting system in Unity, I'm more experienced in Blender. I've read a lot of documentation but it just seems like I'm missing something essential and that Unity is constantly working against me in anything I try. So any help or explanation is really welcome!

So I would like to have ambient occlusion in my game scene, but not the real-time image effect one since that doesn't look very good to me and slows down my game. In the Scene Lighting Settings, there's an option for ambient occlusion under "Baked GI" which I'd like to use. But I would also like to be able to change the intensity of my main light object in-game, so that I can create day and night. But for that, the light needs to be in real-time, which makes the ambient occlusion not possible.

Does this really mean I have to choose between ambient occlusion or a real-time light in my game? Or am I missing something? If you need more information about my set-up to answer this, please let me know. Thanks in advance!