AI in the Workplace

This article is on "AI in the Workplace".

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Artificial Intelligence or AI is rapidly integrating into our daily lives, enhancing tasks from personalized recommendation and virtual assistants to advanced data analysis and smart home automation. In the workplace, AI is transforming the ways we work and communicate with our colleagues, customers, and business partners.

How AI Will Change How You Work

Imagine clocking in to work one day and finding out you have just been assigned a personal assistant. There must be a mistake, you tell your boss, I am not a leading executive. I am just a regular employee. However, your boss insists there was no mistake and your assistant is here to stay.

To your surprise, the assistant is very bright. They are skilled at writing emails, summarizing documents, and can answer tough questions accurately across numerous domains. On nearly any task you assign them, your new assistant manages to contribute substantially to the task at hand.

However, these abilities come with some big drawbacks. The assistant is not much of a self starter. They will need you to guide and supervise them at each step of their work. Additionally, your new assistant does not have a human body. Instead, they are a powerful computer program known as a machine learning model that you speak to using a user interface on your computer or phone.

This AI employee can enhance your job satisfaction and open up more opportunities to advance your career. They have a wide range of powerful skills but nonetheless need careful supervision and management to excel. Managing the performance of your AI assistant is a skill with significant payoff for your productivity. By taking care of the more tedious aspects of your job, your assistant frees up your time for more creative, complex, and fulfilling work.

While the rise of AI in the workplace has caused significant concerns from many people, we will hopefully convince you that the mental model we have just outlined is a better way to think about AI. Far from a robotic replacement, AI is more like your own personal junior employee. This employee has a wide range of powerful skills, but needs careful supervision and management to excel.

Let us introduce what kinds of workplace tasks AI can help you with versus what tasks you will still need to do on your own. AI tasks could be writing drafts of content, brainstorming, ideation, or the possible consequences of a decision, simplifying technical or jargon-filled text, summarizing a large document, or maybe translating a paragraph from one language to another.

Human tasks could be revising final drafts of content, making final decisions, handling sensitive situations, knowing what to communicate in an important email, fact-checking the accuracy and relevancy of AI-produced content, or maybe checking a message to someone from a different part of the world for cultural sensitivity.

Just as a two person team at a job can accomplish more than a single person can alone, much of your own work can likely be accomplished faster and of higher quality through the skillful combination of AI and human oversight. We will explore how to use AI effectively in the workplace, focusing on creative, intelligent use of large language models, literacy in the wider world of AI, and ways to mitigate AI's potentially harmful effects.

AI Cases at your Office

To begin our exploration of how to effectively use AI in the workplace, let us showcase some practical examples of how to use these tools in real life contexts. As you consider each example, think of how you might apply it to your own business tasks.

For our first example, let us explore how we can simplify a complex legal paragraph using AI. We have all encountered work-related writing that hard to parse. GenAI is great at quickly making such writing much more digestible. In this example, we have a piece of legal jargon which Chat GPT will simplify into something less complicated.  So first, let us start by entering our prompt in the ChatGPT's prompt box.

At the prompt, we input, please simplify the following language so an average 19-year-old can understand it. The lessee hereby agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the lessor from any and all claims, liabilities, damages, or expenses arising out of or in connection with the lessee's use of the premises. And then strike enter to process it. ChatGPT simplifies the language into, the renter promises to protect the owner from any problems, costs, or damages that happen because of the renter's use of the property.

As you can see, ChatGPT clarified the language of the first passage, removing unnecessary and cumbersome words. Also, note that we had to give the language model some context. In this case, we instructed ChatGPT to rewrite the confusing sentence so that an average 19 year old could understand it.

Now imagine a messy document of half completed meeting notes. Keep cleaner records of communication by sharing these notes with the AI, instructing it to identify action items, summarize, and format them nicely, and share a higher quality set of documentation for your organization's work. In this demonstration, we are going to explore the messy meeting notes of Clara, a dinosaur researcher who has attended a recent budget meeting.

First, let us briefly look at her notes, which seem disorganized, somewhat random, and frankly, messy.

Meeting Notes - Dinosaur Researchers

Funding Issues

Need more money for excavation

Team meeting next week

Samantha: we should apply for more grants

Budget Review

Etc…

Ok, while Clara has taken some interesting meeting notes, they are too disorganized to add to her official records. But that is ok because we are going to post her notes to Microsoft's Copilot and have the language model organize it for her. First, let us start by entering our prompt in the Copilot's prompt box. Let us tell the AI what we are doing and what we are looking for. Here is how that will look, hi, my name is Clara. Would you please take the following meeting notes from my dinosaur budget meeting, and organize them for me. Please provide a brief summary of the themes, as well as highlighting what might be some important follow up topics. And then simply paste Clara's meeting notes after that.

Copilot will organize and sort the notes for us. Note how Copilot cleaned the notes and organized them in clean and actionable ways. And Clara can continue to refine the Copilot output by asking to focus in on certain areas, like potential budget issues.

When starting a new project, or developing content, brainstorming is often the first step. AI can rapidly generate a variety of ideas and suggest themes, instructing it to ask you some interesting questions that will help you come up with even better ideas. Then, when you are ready, AI can also help you draft initial versions of content like social media posts or blog articles.

Another popular use of AI is to generate content, for example, AI can help you draft emails quickly and efficiently. Let us return to Clara, our researcher with a dinosaur project, to draft an email to our boss asking for additional funding. In this demonstration, we will explore how AI can assist in content development by brainstorming ideas and drafting initial content. Step 1: Let us start by entering our prompt in the ChatGPT's prompt box. For the prompt, Clara announces her intent to use ChatGPT to draft an email to her boss, I would like you to draft an email to my boss asking about additional funding.

Then, Clara provides the AI with some basic details about the email she needs to write.

Recipient: Clara's Boss Harold

Subject: Request for additional funding for dinosaur research project

Main Point: highlight the importance of the project

Explain the current funding shortfall

Specify the amount of additional funding needed

Mention potential benefits of securing additional funding

Step 2: AI generates the email

By providing basic details, Clara was able to generate a well structured email requesting additional funding for her project.

AI as a Research Assistant

Have a question about a new market trend or need a quick explanation of a complex subject? Maybe you are helping a child with a school project. AI, like Google's Gemini, can provide accurate answers and explanations, pulling from a vast range of resources. It is like having a research assistant at your fingertips. However, remember to verify any information the AI shares with you before making important decisions.

Now let us look at another application of AI. In this demo, we are going to use Google's Gemini to learn about dinosaur fossils in South Africa. First, let us start by entering our prompt in the Gemini prompt box. Let us enter a general question about dinosaur fossils, Please tell me about the different types of dinosaur fossils found in Southern Africa. Now, let us pick a specific dinosaur from the list. Now, let us prompt the AI in the Gemini prompt box, tell me about what these Coelophysis ate. And finally, let us learn more about Coelophysis. Enter in the Gemini prompt box the following, what happened to the Coelophysis?

Using this strategy that is going from general to more specific prompts, we can explore all kinds of details about dinosaurs. We could ask follow up questions like, what is the approximate weight of Coelophysis? And perhaps, did the Coelophysis have any predators?, to get more information about this ancient creature.

Integrating AI into Daily Tasks

These ideas are only the beginning when it comes to using GenAI on your work tasks, but hopefully, they get your ideas flowing if you are still wrapping your mind around the applications of AI at your work. As we discussed in each of these use cases, it is best to think of AI as a kind of personal assistant whose work you must carefully validate and proofread. Relying too much on AI is a serious mistake. However, after skillfully validating the output of AI, integrating these AI capabilities into your daily routine can free up valuable time, reduce repetitive tasks, and help focus on higher level strategic goals.