Whatever your stance on the current state of artificial intelligence, it’s snowballed into a force that’s reshaping how we approach work. It’s healthy to be skeptical; after all, there’s no shortage of evidence suggesting that at least some of the hype surrounding it is unwarranted.
That said, the push toward AI adoption is undeniable. Whether or not AI really does end up “taking our jobs,” those of us who learn how to leverage it will be in a better position to hold on longer than the rest.
So, how do you reconcile a mistrust of the technology with the necessity of mastering it? By focusing on tangible applications that actually help you get ahead by using your wits to their fullest. Here are five legitimate ways of augmenting your workflows with AI without feeling like you’re relinquishing your humanity.
Automate Low-Value Work
How much time do you spend each day on necessary time-wasters like keeping up with meeting schedules or generic email replies? Ordinarily, you have two options. You can either let them pile up and spend a chunk of each day in mind-numbing tedium, or you can handle each as it lands and say goodbye to deep concentration.
AI can draft your email reply or make sense out of jumbled notes, letting you concentrate on work that actually advances your goals. That said, it’s important to remember that you’re in control. While you can relegate most dull and repetitive tasks to it, you may also choose to only do so with work that feels like noise.
Speed up Work You’d Do Anyway
For all its current shortcomings, AI is really good at summarizing and laying the groundwork for most written outputs. Why spend hours piecing together a coherent narrative from a boss’s email chain or buried in reports when an AI assistant can transform these into digestible cliff notes in a minute or two?
The expertise and perspective you bring remain invaluable, especially when interacting with the growing number of people with AI fatigue. If anything, having an AI bring you up to speed or create a serviceable first draft creates more time for polish.
Get a Complete Picture
Humans are terrible when it comes to manually making sense out of data, especially when faced with the torrents of it that interactions and digital systems constantly generate. Even if you’re a hyper-specialized analyst, chances are you’re missing patterns simply because covering everything is either highly impractical or downright humanly impossible.
Let’s take the finance sector, famous for its convoluted contracts and jargon. JP Morgan Chase has developed an AI-augmented platform called COIN to review loan agreements. COIN can spot unusual clauses and draw attention to inconsistencies between contracts. It also highlights risks that become clear only when analyzing many dense, repetitive contracts.
Rather than replace professionals, innovations like this act as a second pair of eyes that draws attention to discrepancies that would remain hidden otherwise. The final decision remains yours, and now it becomes better informed.
Reduce Dependency Bottlenecks
Waiting on others’ inputs remains one of the biggest work-related time-wasters. An AI might not be able to greenlight the next project milestone, but it can help you be as prepared as you can be to tackle it.
For example, let’s say that a project brief contains legalese or technical jargon you don’t understand completely yet. An LLM can translate these into plain English, so there are no misunderstandings. Better yet, you can ask follow-up questions or have it use analogy and simplification to hammer such concepts home.
This is empowering because it creates a safe sandbox where you can ask anything – even something you’d feel colleagues would judge you for – and approach the topic as many times and from as many angles as it takes to make it click. You get to do your job with greater understanding and without bothering others, so it’s a win-win.
Shift the Perspective
The more experience we have in a role, the more we tend to take the perspective we’ve gained as the default. Let’s say you’re a product manager who has to come up with a new feature for an established product. You’ll likely leverage your expertise to weigh all pros and cons and come up with a proposal.
Because you’re overfamiliar with the ins and outs, you may assume that everyone else will see the same value. Moreover, you deal with the risks every day, so they don’t raise concerns. When it’s time to present your ideas, what you thought was a killer proposal actually ends up bombing. Why? Because half the departments in your company wouldn’t know how to implement or adapt to the changes. Easily-confused customers would fare even worse.
AI can help in situations like this by acting as a soundboard. Your core idea remains, but asking an AI to interpret it from different angles ends up making the value proposition stronger. Maybe you need it to raise objections that the marketing department might. Or, it can help you clarify vague concepts that customers could be confused by.
Photo by Roman Budnikov: Unsplash
Johannah Lopez is a versatile professional who seamlessly navigates two worlds. By day, she excels as a SaaS freelance writer, crafting informative and persuasive content for tech companies. By night, she showcases her vibrant personality and customer service skills as a part-time bartender. Johannah's ability to blend her writing expertise with her social finesse makes her a well-rounded and engaging storyteller in any setting.
