I thought it might be helpful to look at the main areas AI (especially the generative version) are getting involved in the workplace.

The first area is general admin, there you’re looking at them:

• Creating emails – especially ones that are fairly standard templated sorts of comms, remember to review the final copy and add your, human touch. People don’t really like AI copy.
• Editing emails (and other docs) – having just said don’t use it for the final version, it can still be a useful grammar checker, just remember to mention what you do want, if you don’t want US English.
• Creating documents and reports – expanding bullet point lists into full paragraphs, fetching supporting information if necessary (double check! This is a classic place for hallucinations), adding speaker notes for presentation slides.
• Summarising documents – giving a fast overview on that 85 page report, generating an executive summary for a report you’ve just written/compiled (just make sure what you think is important is included), coming up with a podcast or video overview of one or many sources (see NotebookLM).
• Summarising meetings – creating transcriptions of meeting conversations and condensing them into bullet point summaries, including action points.

There are other areas, such as spreadsheet analysis and actually going through your full/unread inbox to let you know what’s in the pile, but you get the idea.

The aim is to cut time and effort on everyday tasks, leaving you (and your brain) free(er) to jump into higher-value activities.

Tools most frequently used:

• Microsoft Copilot, since many organisations already have MS Office, it’s right there, like a mid 2020s edition of Clippy.
• Google Gemini, for companies using the Google suite rather than Microsoft.
• Claude, seems to be getting a reputation for being the go-to LLM for corporates.

Use Cases and Prompt Ideas

Email & Communication

• Turn these meeting notes into a polite follow-up email with clear action items – paste or upload notes.
• Rewrite this email to sound more decisive but still friendly – paste email text (or you can do this directly in the email if you’re fully hooked into Google or Microsoft).
• Review this email for tone and suggest where I can make it more (friendly/formal/polite/brief) – paste email text.

Documents

• Convert these bullet points into a 3-paragraph executive brief – paste text.
• I’m presenting this report to (the board, my marketing director, our finance guy, the hiring manager). Please review it and identify 10 questions they are likely to ask. – attach report. You can use the answer to edit the report content and/or be prepared for the questions.
• Create an agenda for a 45-minute kick-off meeting about (the Christmas campaign, upgrading the ERP system, the office supplies contract), including time allocations.
• Review this contract and flag any key areas of concern or interest, with particular focus on contract timeline, costs, human resources, and penalties – this doesn’t in any way replace the need for a lawyer if it’s a key contract, but you’ll be able to give them a slightly more focused brief after this prompt.

Data & Analysis

• Here are our quarterly sales figures (ONLY if you’re using a tool you’re allowed to put confidential info into). Identify the top 3 trends and suggest what to investigate further.
• What’s the Excel formula I need to be able to (compare information in two spreadsheets and put data into one of them, combine the contents of two different cells, whatever function you can never remember how to do).
• What are the industry benchmarks for (email open rate, cost-per-click, percentage of overhead being payroll) for the (construction, ad agency, education) industry in (the UK, London, the EU, China) – this is a good one for Perplexity.

Meeting Support

• Summarise these meeting notes into: decisions made, action items with owners, and open questions – paste text or if you’re using Teams, Zoom, etc, use their built-in transcription and summary capability.
• If you have a folder of notes from multiple meetings your tool has access to – Find any meeting notes file where (Myra’s birthday, the launch event retrospective, the new renewal email campaign) is mentioned and bring it up.

Next: AI for Marketing activities