The perception of AI in the workplace is evolving. Once viewed primarily as a potential threat to jobs, it's increasingly being recognized as a tool that can enhance your work life. As AI becomes more widely used in the workplace, people are finding novel ways to use it to their advantage.
Workers' use of AI goes beyond simply automating routine tasks. Now, it's about exploring how the technology can complement your skills and enhance certain aspects of your professional life. From improving communication to sparking creativity and tackling unique workplace challenges, here are four ways AI can make your work more manageable.
Reworking your emails and messages so they land well
We've all been there — needing to write a work email or send a message when annoyed or stressed. When it comes to tricky communication, AI can help smooth things out.
Let's say your coworker badly messed up some numbers in a report, and as a result, it's added an extra week of work to your plate and made you look bad. Instead of quickly sending a message that you might later regret, take a few minutes to run what you want to say through an AI tool such as ChatGPT. Giving the chatbot the context of the situation, drafting out what you'd ideally like to say to them, and asking the AI to reword your message to make it more appropriate could save you some big headaches.
Here's an example of a prompt you can use in this situation:
And here's ChatGPT's response:
ChatGPT's approach maintains a professional tone, addresses the issue at hand, and opens the door for constructive dialogue while subtly indicating where the problem originated. This could help keep the peace and ensure you're getting your point across without drama.
A new brainstorming buddy
One of the best things about brainstorming as a team is having different perspectives to draw from. AI can help generate ideas and fill in gaps you may not have been aware of.
Think of AI as an extra team member with a broad skillset. It's not just about having another voice in the room; AI tools can tap into information and experiences from all over the world across various industries and backgrounds. This means they can offer insights and ideas that are out of left field — but in a good way.
Let's say you work at a tech company and are brainstorming your next app as a team. During the meeting, you could feed the ideas into an AI tool such as Microsoft Copilot to see what it generates and how those ideas spark new ones. Or, you could use an AI tool such as Otter to transcribe the meeting in real time and then feed the transcription into ChatGPT afterward so it has the entire conversation context on which to base its ideas.
Brainstorming at work can sometimes feel like hitting a wall, but AI can be a bridge to different worlds and experiences, leading to richer, more innovative brainstorming sessions.
Streamlining image editing
The need for quick and efficient image editing arises more often at work than you might expect — like when putting together a presentation on a tight deadline. AI can help with the smaller tasks that designers consider busy work so everyone can focus on what's important.
Say you need to remove the background of an image so the slide you're working on looks more visually appealing — you can use an AI tool such as Adobe Express to quickly remove the background and continue with the next slide instead of taking valuable resources and time from other teams.
Using AI for image editing is about more than just cutting things out. Instead, you could use it to adjust the lighting in people's headshots before uploading them to the company website. With tools such as Canva's photo editor, you can auto-adjust the lighting or adjust the focus for free — or upgrade to the Pro version to remove stray hairs with the magic eraser.
These AI tools are designed to be user-friendly, allowing you to handle small but essential tasks yourself.
Streamlining meeting notes and documentation
If you like to think out loud or visualize things better when reading the transcript of a meeting, AI can help you get everything down so you can focus on the next steps.
Imagine sitting through a long, detailed meeting. Instead of furiously scribbling notes, you could have an AI tool like Fireflies or Otter do the heavy lifting. These tools can listen in, transcribe what's said in real-time, and highlight key points. This means no more worrying about missing important details or spending hours after the meeting trying to make sense of your notes — and, as a bonus, the transcript is searchable, so you can easily find things later.
Say you're a researcher and have some insights based on interviews you've just conducted, but you also need to create a to-do list. Using an AI notetaker such as RambleFix, you can speak out loud as everything comes to you and have the AI summarize the most important points so you can look over them while also keeping the context intact.
Using AI for note-taking and documentation is about ease of use and accuracy. It's there to ensure that the after-meeting workload is lighter and that everyone can instantly access the information they need.
These four examples are just the start. As AI continues to evolve, its role in enhancing various work tasks will likely expand, offering even more innovative ways to support your capabilities and simplify your work life.
