AI (artificial intelligence) used to mostly be in science fiction horror movies, but it's become a reality that has quietly integrated into hundreds of everyday actions in our lives. And, since AI is here to stay and isn't so stupid anymore, it makes sense to use it to help us.
Most people have seen how AI can help people write an impressive CV or recommend a good website to find information, but that isn't even 1% of what AI can do for us at work. AI tools can help you improve your decision-making skills, do repetitive tasks for you, improve your productivity, and help with customer service, creative design, and personal development. It's like having a personal assistant who can't make you any coffee!
So, let's take a look at some of the things you can use AI to help you with.
Automated Administrative Tools
Simple repetitive tasks like data entry, email management, and scheduling, can be useful as 'buffer' tasks, which some remote workers use to rest their brains a little. But, for many people these simple tasks are demotivating, frustrating, and far too time-consuming. If you want your time back to do more interesting and useful things, you can use AI-powered automation tools to do these tasks for you.
Email Management
AI-powered email management tools like SaneBox and Boomerang can automatically prioritize and categorize your emails for you. So, when you come to read them, the most important ones are at the top and everything has been categorized according to the topics you chose.
Meeting and Calendar Management
Sidekick and Reclaim can coordinate meetings and manage your calendar for you, taking the busy work of finding everyone's availability off your hands.
Note Taking Tools
Tools Like Fireflies and Krisp can automate note-taking during meetings. Krisp is even able to automatically generate and share action items with meeting participants, as well as transcribe the meeting for your records.
Productivity Tools
Traditionally project Managers have had to slowly and carefully create project flow diagrams, check for progress to update their tracking, and keep deadlines and completion date projections in mind. AI is now able to take over project management, leading to a reduction in human error, bringing project management to remote workers, and freeing managers up for more hands-on work.
Project Tracking
Asana and Notion, can automatically assign tasks to yourself and your team, set deadlines, and track progress. That means you can focus on getting things done instead of chasing information.
Personal Assistants
Personal assistants, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, can help you with your daily tasks in all kinds of unexpected ways. You can ask it which brand of cereal is the market leader in Sweden and expect an accurate answer.
These personal assistants can also integrate with your calendar and task management apps, and let you add appointments, reminders, or notes using only your voice.
Predictive Analytics
Tools like Graphite Note and Altair AI Studio can analyze gigantic data sets to predict future trends and the outcomes of ongoing processes for you.
Instead of complex time-consuming statistical analyses, you can simply delegate these tasks to your predictive analytics AI and have all the results presented to you in easy-to-interpret dashboards. You can monitor your performance and make decisions based on statistical evidence without hiring an entire department or getting a master's in statistics.
Creativity Boosting AI
If you use it properly, AI can be an excellent tool for boosting creativity and innovation. You can think of creative AI more as a way of rearranging your human ideas to see if new methods, compositions, or angles bring something extra to your art.
Writing Enhancement
Writing assistants like Grammarly and Hemingway can help you by giving you live grammar, spelling, and style tips as you type. This way you can focus on what you want to say, while they take care of making it clear, concise, and engaging. It's like having a silent expert proofreader and editor giving you suggestions, and you decide if you want to use them.
Design Enhancement
Using AI to boost creativity in art and design is a controversial topic, with many seeing no place for computers in an artistic world. But, what if the AI is only there as a friend offering you ideas if you ask?
Canva and Autodesk Generative Design can generate multiple design options based on specific parameters and constraints that you give them. It's basically like having a 'what if' machine available for you to run your work through. So, if you know you want to keep the foreground but are interested in changing the background, or would like to try alternative light sources, fonts, color palettes... really anything, you can ask your AI to produce some ideas of what that could look like. The final design, the parameters and the instructions the AI receives are all from you, keeping the artistic control firmly in your hands.
Customer Service Assistants
It's well-recognized that many people would prefer to have a human respond to their questions, requests, and complaints. But, if humans handle all of your customer service inquiries a lot of human talent and time can be wasted on repeating the same two-sentence script 100 times a day.
AI can also help remote workers improve customer service by providing personalized and efficient support. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine customer inquiries,
Chatbots
Chatbots like Guru and Zoho Desk can provide 24-hour customer support, answering frequently asked questions and guiding customers through common and less complex tasks. That means you are free to focus on more complex and higher-value customer service.
Chatbots can also learn from their customer interactions, which improves their responses over time, making them faster, more accurate, and more supportive of your customers.
Sentiment Analysis
Do you have a tower of customer feedback, reviews, or forms to evaluate? That's something sentiment analysis tools like Qualtrics and Sprout Social can easily do for you. They can search through your feedback and identify areas your customers are dissatisfied with, so you can start making the improvements now.
Personal Development AI
Now that we have an army of AI tools conducting our business for us, we have time for some personal development. Why not take advantage of AI tools to make recommendations for where to start and how to improve your skills?
Personalized Development Recommendations
Learning platforms like Coursera and Udemy can make personalized course recommendations for you based on your goals. The AI adapts to your learning speed and offers you additional resources if it calculates that it would help you.
Wrap Up
AI is now everywhere, and thankfully a lot more useful than 10 years ago. Nothing is stopping you from being a 'one-person productivity machine', but if you would like a small army of robots doing all the boring, unskilled, or even over-skilled parts of your job, it makes sense to get used to what AI can do for you.
Just in this article, you have seen how AI tools can:
Answer factual questions for you.
Gather data and analyze it.
Predict future trends and market movements.
Collate questionnaire responses and provide you with the most important changes your customers want from you.
Give you hundreds of new suggestions to add to your creative pieces.
Schedule your appointments, keep your diary, and respond to requests.
Manage your customer service.
Track your progress.
Prioritize and categorize your emails.
Create personal development learning plans and provide you with materials.
AI is an additive tool, it can only add to your creativity, intelligence, skill, and experience, but it is nothing without you. Learning to use AI tools can free up many hours of your time each week for you to fill with more enjoyable, meaningful, and satisfying tasks. There's probably an AI out there that can make you a coffee too.
Helpful Links
The Best AI Productivity Tools in 2024 - Zapier's in-depth analysis of the best 38 AI apps to improve your productivity in 2024.
8 of the Best AI Productivity Tools to Help You Optimize How You Work - Buffer's most highly recommended AI productivity tools.