How To Use AI At Work

By now you’ve probably heard that AI can do all kinds of tasks for you in the workplace — maybe even replace workers entirely. However, if you’re not very savvy yourself yet, you may be wondering how exactly it can help. We’ve put together a list of ways in which you can use AI at work and hopefully become more productive.

Automating Tasks

The first and foremost way AI can help you is by automating tasks. If you have any kind of office job, there’s likely a number of things that you do every day which could be done a little quicker by a computer. You just either haven’t thought about it yet, or you’re not sure how to do it.

This is where artificial intelligence shines, easily performing any number of tasks that leave you scratching your head. A good example is email management, which before would involve either using an add-on in Outlook or Gmail, or even use of a custom script coded in Python. Tricky operations out of reach for a lot of people.

Until now, that is. With minimal work from you (and some customization), you can ask ChatGPT to not only sort emails for you, but even automatically reply with form responses to certain emails. For example, you can have it send something along the lines of “we’ve received your email and will get back to you in 24 hours,” to even just simply replying to certain annoying senders that their request is under advisement. It’s up to you, the AI won’t judge — though your boss might.

It’s not just emails, either: ChatGPT can also be used to automate certain aspects of your calendar, like managing recurring tasks, setting reminders, and cleaning up unneeded entries. If you spend as much time clearing up your calendar as we do, that’s a godsend.

Data Entry

As cool as automation is, even more interesting are the many ways in which AI can help you manage data, especially when it comes to input. One of the biggest banes of almost any office job is the fact that different formats of files don’t work with each other, meaning a lot of grunt work even for mid-level employees.

For example, it’s very hard to take the text from a PDF file and have it exported to a Word document. Let’s not get started on the many issues you will have when confronted with paper records.

AI is the answer to all these issues. Any AI worth its salt can read practically any document and then give you an output in whatever format you’d like. All you need to do is tell it what to do and you’re pretty much good to go. It’s really fantastic, and a massive timesaver.

What makes it even better is that with the help from AI you can then manipulate this data more easily than ever before, like entering it into tables, creating visualizations, the lot. What once was the domain of data scientists now can be done by almost anybody — though you may want to get an expert to vet your work as AI can be unreliable.

Writing

Naturally, a great way to use AI in any setting is as a way to improve your writing, or even have it write for you. For example, you can have it put together non-essential emails, like we recommended earlier, or have it knock together a simple report or two.

There are several ways in which ChatGPT or other AIs can help you write: you can ask it for an outline of an article based on existing work so you have a blueprint to work with, for example. This is very handy if you’re new to a subject or even just need some guidance on how to start an article.

Naturally, you can also ask for an outline for a presentation, a memo, or pretty much anything else related to the modern office environment. Examples abound, and you can save yourself a lot of time.

ChatGPT is also a great tool if you want to check something you’ve written. No matter if you’ve written an email, presentation or full-length article, you can feed it to ChatGPT and have it come back with suggestions for improvements.

You’ll find, though, that we recommend keeping things simple. The more complicated you make your prompts, or the more you put on ChatGPT’s plate at any one time, and the worse the outcome will be. We don’t recommend having it write up outlines for entire books in detail, for example.

Also, be extremely wary of having an AI write entire articles for you: even with extensive editing from you after the fact, it’s extremely easy to detect and will likely land you in trouble with your boss. Fact is, that even at its best AI is unreliable and you should always check its work, whether it’s written an article for you or even just an outline: double check it gave you what you asked for.

Research

Nowhere is this need to verify more present than with our last entry, namely having AI help you with doing research. Finding out how things work is an integral part of any modern job and, just like in school, AI can be an amazing assistant.

However, there’s an issue, namely so-called hallucinations, which is when an AI simply makes stuff up. It’s a little unclear why it does this, and newer iterations of most bots do it less — when comparing GPT-3.5 with GPT-4 there’s a marked decrease — but it’s a pretty serious issue that you need to be aware of and calculate into whatever you’re doing.

The result is that you can use AI to guide your research, but it can never do the research for you. For example, you likely shouldn’t ask the bot a direct question like “tell me about interest rates” since that may lead to some odd information. Instead, you can ask it for resources, like books.

Note that GPT alternatives like Google Bard or Auto-GPT may be a better option to get recommendations than ChatGPT for the simple reason that they’re plugged into the internet, while GPT is not.

Another great way to have AI help with research is to ask it to set out a course for you, which you can then use to study in your own time. Though this likely won’t help if you need to put something together for a presentation next week, if you’re invested in improving your skills over the long term, it’s ideal.

Again, you may want to double check everything that the chatbot says, but it’s a great way to get started with whatever you’d like to do.

Using AI at Work

AI is a wonderful tool to help you save time at work while also improving your own productivity. The tips above are just a few ideas to help you get started; there’s literally no end to all the things chatbots can help you do at work. Just remember to not rely on them too much and check what they’re doing, and you’ll likely have a much easier day at work.