NY.- As we all constantly hear, AI is set to change everything forever, it will replace workers, create new medicines and perhaps destroy the world.
But for now, I’m most excited about the ways AI can already solve the annoying everyday problems that plague my work life.
I can get help if I get distracted during a meeting, need to write a diplomatic note to an upset colleague, or need technical help right away. These aren’t exactly the global problems that AI promises to solve, but they are the kind of things that constantly frustrate us.
These are seven of the biggest problems that AI tools have already solved for me.
1.I got lost in a meeting
Sometimes the ping of an incoming message or the tedium of back-to-back video calls make me lose track of what’s happening in a meeting. That’s when an AI meeting assistant comes in handy. These tools transcribe, summarize and organize what happened in a meeting so that you later have an organized summary. Some assistants (like the built-in transcription in Zoom and Teams, or the Otter.ai companion app) even transcribe in real time, so you can quickly go back in the conversation.
2.I am overwhelmed by email
The task of managing email has become much easier thanks to a new generation of email clients that use AI to classify the incoming flood and speed up response efforts. AI-enhanced email programs like Superhuman and Shortwave can analyze the content of messages and keep track of different senders, allowing them to organize your inbox by message type and priority. Programs can also compose responses to messages.
3.I have to deal with an annoying colleague
Sometimes I get so angry at a co-worker who is uncooperative, argumentative, or condescending that I can’t help but write a very scathing and hostile email. I used to give myself a 24-hour cooling-off period before sending out those drafts and then give them to my husband to review and edit. Now I give the same job to AI.
If I say to the AI something like, “Please reword this response so that it is constructive and cordial, rather than hostile,” I get a new perspective on how to frame my incisive responses. That’s how I learned to say, “It’s been a challenge these past few weeks to line up directly,” instead of, “It’s super frustrating that you couldn’t make time for me.” I still have the emotional satisfaction of being as direct as I want, but the AI turns the draft into a message that can actually get the result I want.
4. I need technical support
Rarely a day goes by without you needing some kind of technical support, such as learning how to use a new app or troubleshooting problems with a video conferencing platform. But I hate watching instructional videos and don’t always have time to read an online manual or call a manufacturer. Now I ask Perplexity or ChatGPT how to solve my problem. That way, I get step-by-step instructions that are tailored to my particular level of experience and I can ask clarifying questions if I get confused or if my initial steps didn’t work.
5. I don’t understand the topic
If I need to read about an academic or technical topic that’s totally new to me, I often ask a general-purpose AI (like Claude, Perplexity, or ChatGPT) to give me a broad summary of the field, or I use an academic research tool enabled with AI like scite to give me a summary of the main insights in the field. But that’s just a starting point, because AIs often base their summaries on a peculiar subset of academic literature, or outright make things up. Once oriented, I choose a few credible articles (with many references or that have been recommended by experts) and have an AI summarize them and clarify any points I don’t understand.
6. I hate doing tedious work
I have yet to find a job that doesn’t involve some amount of tedious work, whether it’s invoicing, copyediting, data cleaning, or file organization. Now I hand almost all my boring and annoying tasks to an AI. For example, I have a supplier that gives me invoices in a format that my accounting system does not accept; Instead of redoing those invoices by hand (or asking my non-tech-savvy supplier to fix them), I use AI to do the work for me.
It took me five minutes to find the message that does the task: “You are a billing agent for a supplier. Your main role is to take raw billing notes and organize them into a structured table. The table must have columns for date, time period and hours worked, with one row per day. Your goal is to provide clear and accurate billing information, ensuring that all details are neatly organized and easily understandable.”
Once I have that message, I can use it again and again. Now all I do is paste the most recent invoice from my supplier after that message and I get a table that I can put into Excel and send to my accounting app.
7. I need more examples
When working on an article, presentation or report, I often struggle to find the perfect example to complete it, which can mean searching for hours on the internet or asking friends and colleagues to share their own examples and experiences. But now I’m asking a couple of different AIs to help me come up with more examples, like giving Claude and ChatGPT a draft of the first six problems in this article and asking them to suggest more problems the AI could solve.
When I did that, AI provided me with a list that reminded me of many other ways AI has eliminated big pain points from my work life. “Find relevant information in a sea of data”: Yes, I often upload spreadsheets to AIs and ask them for help reorganizing or detecting patterns. “Improve creative brainstorming”: It’s true that AI has eliminated the bottleneck of needing someone to bounce my new ideas off of, because now I can always turn to an AI to bounce them off virtually. “Improve social media management”: As ChatGPT suggested, I’ve used AI to analyze the performance of online posts and discover the best phrases and titles for future updates.
The list went on, in a beautiful illustration of what makes AI solutions so powerful: AI c
an not only address our work pain points, but it also retains a memory of everything it has fixed, long after my human memory forgets what it was like to work any other way.
#work #problems #helps #solve
