7 AI Workplace Productivity Tricks You Should Try and 1 You Shouldn’t Try

There are many things that AI doesn’t do well. But one of its best uses is as a productivity tool, and it can help you get through some of the more mundane tasks of every day more quickly.

Here are some of the best ways to integrate AI into your professional life without sacrificing the quality of your work.

Remember: Always check the information an AI tool spits out to you. Even if you’ve only asked it to summarize a document, AI has been known to hallucinate and make up details that don’t add up.

Take notes on almost anything with Microsoft Copilot

Faced with a blindingly long (and boring) work document or 300-slide presentation that you simply don’t have time to read through? Microsoft’s in-browser AI tool, Copilot, can help.

Copilot is free, accessible as an app and in Microsoft’s Bing browser. Once you’ve loaded the web page you want to summarize, click the Copilot icon in the upper-right corner of the browser and type in what you want Copilot to focus on when taking notes.

You can also ask Copilot to extract specific information you are looking for from a long presentation or document. Remember to check the accuracy of Copilot’s summaries.

Check out our step-by-step guide to taking notes with Copilot.

Get an AI summary of your Zoom call

If you just joined another Zoom meeting that might as well have been an email and you’re feeling a little disengaged, Zoom now has AI tools that can remind you what just happened.

Zoom’s AI Companion is included in all of the video calling company’s paid plans (prices start at $13.32 per month) and can be turned on so that real-time notes are taken and action items are shared with you during your meetings.

During live meetings, hosts can enable Meeting Summary, which can be shared via team chat. AI Companion can answer your questions about the meeting, such as catching you up on a discussion if you’re running late, and giving you a recording of the ending that’s divided into “chapters” according to each topic discussed.

Here’s what you need to know about using Zoom AI Companion.

Soften your email texts with AI

Stuck with wording a request or response? Try a neurodivergent AI platform goblin tools — which is currently free and without a paywall and has been translated into 13 languages.

The ‘Formalizer’ tab lets you ‘turn spicy thoughts into stylish thoughts, or vice versa’. So if you’ve quickly written a slightly exasperated response to a colleague or client, you can use the AI ​​tool’s drop-down menu to choose from useful settings like more professional, more polite and less sarcastic, with a ‘spiciness level’ meter to choose from three chili pepper settings for how strong you want your message to come across.

The AI ​​tool will rewrite your message in no time and you might even be in a better mood afterwards.

Read more about CNET’s experiment with softening professional emails using AI.

An AI project manager

If you need a project manager to keep your big projects running smoothly and moving forward, but you struggle to juggle big ideas with day-to-day planning, and keep other people’s workflows focused and on track, AI could be the solution.

Otter.ai can help you stay focused and organized. Meeting with GenAI Tool is an assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet that captures, transcribes and ‘remembers’ what was said in each meeting (just double-check that all the details are correct).

It also integrates with your other work apps, so you can connect your Otter.ai account to all the Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot accounts you use. It can then assign tasks to all those platforms, send reminders and insights, and post to Slack.

You can get Free, Pro ($10/month), and Business ($20/month) versions of Otter.ai.

This is everything we learned while testing Otter.ai as a project manager.

Edit with AI-powered Grammarly

Not sure what to type and don’t have an in-house editor to help? Grammarly, available in Free, Premium ($12/month), and Business ($15/month) versions, can be enabled for multiple apps on your PC, including Google Docs, email, and Instagram.

For example, if you use Instagram for business, you can use Grammarly’s caption generator to come up with something in seconds or edit what you’ve written in a Google Doc or an email. You can also adjust the tone and formality of the suggestions it offers for your writing.

Here’s what you need to know about using Grammarly AI to edit your work.

Summarize a Google Doc with AI

If you do your best work in Google Docs and need a super-quick summary of a long paper, use Google Docs. Twin has everything you need, but you will need a paid subscription to use the feature.

All you need to do is open a document, highlight the text you want to summarize, click Help me write and then click To summarize(You can also select options such as Show, Bullets, Elaborate, Shorten, or Rephrase.)

Double check that Gemini understood your document and what was important. Use the Improve Help Docs feature to provide feedback on how accurate (or not) Google’s AI tool was.

Here’s our step-by-step guide to summarizing Google Docs with AI. You can also read CNET’s full hands-on review of Gemini here, as well as competing AI tools like Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude.

Create a work presentation with AI

If you have to give a presentation during a meeting, you can polish your presentation with the AI ​​tool goblin.tools.

First, you can use the Estimator tool to get an estimate of how long it will take you to create a presentation, and then drop your draft text into the Formalizer tool. Scroll through the dropdown menu to choose from 14 different tones, such as “more passionate” or “easier to read.”

If you find yourself missing details that could be covered during your presentation, you can also use the Professor tool to get a crash course on a topic you’re not quite sure about. goblin.tools has access to OpenAI’s GPT models and training data, and will give you simple explanations on any topic you choose.

Finally, you can paste your resulting presentation into the Judge tool, which will provide feedback on how your presentation is coming across. Just be sure to review and refine the AI ​​suggestions to make sure it makes sense to humans.

Here’s our complete guide on how to use AI to create a work presentation.

What Didn’t Work: Creating a Business Logo with AI

We tried to create a company logo using the Midjourney text-to-image tool. But if you’ve ever used an AI image generator, you know that what we found was a little too surreal to fit the concept of a company logo.

You can access Midjourney via Discord, with subscriptions to the AI ​​tool starting at $10. To use it, all you need to do is write a description of what you want your logo or image to look like and then generate it. If an image you like happens to appear, you can right-click to save it.

Midjourney probably has a better chance of replacing stock photos. We don’t think designers need to worry about them being replaced in the logo industry anytime soon.

Here you can see our experiment where we used Midjourney to create a logo.