AI at work
Practical ways to save an hour a day — drafting, meetings, spreadsheets, research, and unstuck moments.
Most office work is language work: emails, docs, slides, summaries, status updates. AI is a force multiplier on every one of them.
The four daily wins
1. Email triage
Forward yourself a long email thread. Ask: "Summarize the open questions, draft a one-paragraph reply that confirms the meeting and asks about budget." You just saved 10 minutes.
2. Meeting notes
Paste in the transcript (Zoom, Teams, Otter, even a rough Notepad scribble). Ask for action items grouped by owner. Send those to the team within minutes of the meeting ending.
3. The first draft
Status reports, project briefs, performance reviews, job descriptions. Tell the AI: "Here are 5 bullet points. Turn this into a half-page draft I can edit." Editing is much faster than starting from a blank page.
4. The "I'm stuck" moment
You've been staring at the same slide, paragraph, or formula for 20 minutes. Paste it in. Ask: "What's three different ways I could approach this?" Pick the best one and move on.
Spreadsheets without the pain
- "Write me an Excel formula that counts orders over $500 in column C, grouped by month from column A."
- Paste in error messages, ask why. (Half of Excel is googling errors. AI is faster.)
- "What kind of chart should I use for this data?" Paste the headers, get a recommendation.
A note on confidentiality
Don't paste anything into a public AI tool that you wouldn't want indexed somewhere. For genuinely sensitive material, use an enterprise version (ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini for Workspace, Claude for Work) that your employer has set up — those have data protections in writing. When in doubt, anonymize first: replace names, numbers, and identifiers with placeholders.
The 70/30 rule
Treat AI output as a 70% solution. The last 30% — fact-checking, voice, judgment, the local detail only you know — is still your job. That's where the value is.