Five Ways AI Can Boost Your Productivity at Work
April 16, 2025
From drafting emails to summarizing meeting notes to writing snippets of code, artificial intelligence (AI) tools are great for enhancing productivity in the workplace. They are rapidly transforming how we work, helping employees focus on strategic tasks rather than tedious ones. What would you do with that extra time?
A global survey by Freshworks of over 7,000 full-time employees found that 24 business days a year were freed up with AI and, in a typical work week, three hours and 47 minutes of employees’ workloads were saved with AI summarizing reports, suggesting next steps, and handling repetitive tasks. The same study also found that nearly three in four workers trust AI to bring value to their work processes, and over 80 percent trust AI because they believe its quality of work is good or makes their team more productive.
While there are clear advantages to using AI tools in the workplace, there is no replacement for human judgement when it comes to ensuring accuracy. Being able to use AI effectively and ethically is a skill set that is becoming increasingly in demand from employers across all industries.
To gain an insight into how AI is improving productivity in the workplace and how it’s shaping the future of work, we spoke with Bailey Parnell, a Curv Creator who helped design the Curv Microcertificate, AI for Productivity, and Founder of Center for Digital Wellbeing.
We also spoke with:
- Samin Khan, who was an Assessor for the Curv Microcertificate, AI for Productivity, and is a Generative AI Applied Data Scientist at Kiddom. Samin has also been leading applied AI research and development across accessibility, mental health, and education for eight years.
- Aleksandar Kojic, who completed the Curv Microcertificate, AI for Productivity, and is a Research Data and Agreements Officer at TMU and previously held Project Management and Administrative/Operations positions.
- Eve Staszczyszyn, a Curv Creator who helped design the Curv Microcertificate as well as Assessor for the microcertificate, AI for Productivity, and is Head of Operations at Arthur AI. She has also worked across three early-stage mental health tech companies.
General AI Use
How do you use AI tools to improve your productivity?
Bailey: I use AI to draft and refine communications, develop session content, generate ideas for workshops, and adapt learning materials for different audiences or formats. For example, when creating a leadership workshop for a healthcare client, I gave ChatGPT information about them and what we gained from discovery. I asked it to help generate scenario-based discussion prompts tailored to frontline managers and then refined those prompts to match the tone and complexity needed for that specific group.
Samin: I use AI for coding, document drafting, brainstorming, and research. At Kiddom, I fine-tune AI models for curriculum generation, and in my research at Stanford, I use AI for student engagement detection from classroom transcripts. For example, I build workflows with AI to develop lesson plans for Kindergarten to Grade 12 teachers.
Aleksandar: I use AI tools to quickly generate drafts of reports and presentations, saving significant time in initial content creation. For example, I use it to kick-start a draft to generate initial ideas as a starting point.
Eve: I use AI tools to improve productivity across both function-agnostic and function-specific tasks. At the company where I lead operations, we see a similar trend: some tools are used broadly across teams, while others are tailored to specific functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and people.
For example, I use an AI assistant to refine messaging for internal and external communication – this saves me plenty of editing time and supports me in refining messaging so it resonates with different audiences.
Other ways I use AI tools include soundboarding with AI assistants when drafting policies and frameworks at work to accelerate the creation of structure, which is imperative in operations
I also use AI tools for market research, specifically to quickly understand industry trends and conduct competitive analysis (this is especially important for operations when it comes to procuring new tools, but also generally for the company's position).
Have you noticed a significant improvement in efficiency since using AI?
Samin: Yes, AI has made writing, coding, and data analysis significantly faster. I would estimate that Claude’s Sonnet 3.5 on Cursor has made me at least twice as efficient at producing useful code. Perplexity’s DeepResearch saves me at least half the time it would normally take me to synthesize findings on a new topic on my own.
Aleksandar: Yes, over time, I have noticed I’m able to improve completing assignments more quickly. In particular, reports and presentations. However, I remain vigilant against potential biases in AI outputs, ensuring that visualizations and summaries are factually accurate and unbiased. For example, I may need to ensure that there’s a wide range of ages in the data so that the outcome doesn't overly represent just one age group.
Eve: Yes, leveraging AI has made me more efficient and productive at work. For research, it accelerates the process of finding and synthesizing relevant information. Instead of combing through articles, reports, or other content, AI surfaces sources and distills key insights.
For writing, it significantly speeds up both drafting and editing—tasks I used to spend a lot of time on. I find it especially saves time at both the start and end of writing-heavy tasks. For cognitive work, AI can suggest useful structures and frameworks. In operations, where understanding both granular details and the big picture is critical, AI acts as a thought partner when prompted with the right context.
AI for Task Management
How effective is AI in helping you prioritize your daily tasks?
Samin: I use Gemini meeting transcripts and summaries to jog my memory of meetings, but I still manually adjust priorities based on project urgency and team needs. For example, I have a weekly meeting with the AI and data science and curriculum teams to identify areas of improvement on our AI lesson plan generator. The transcripts and summaries allow me to focus on being present rather than taking notes. When I need to review details from the meeting, I can always go to the summary or transcript to quickly find the information I need.
Aleksandar: AI is effective in highlighting key tasks, helping me focus on the most impactful elements of my reports. For example, AI can organize my data into a graph or dashboard, so I can focus on the content of the presentation as I’m not a graphic designer.
Have you used AI assistants like ChatGPT for brainstorming or decision-making?
Aleksandar: I have used ChatGPT for brainstorming presentation outlines and generating potential data visualization approaches. They are a good starting point for a new project or assignment. I critically evaluate AI-generated ideas, ensuring that they are not based on harmful stereotypes or misleading information.
Eve: I use ChatGPT and/or Claude every single day for brainstorming and decision-making. A lot of my work involves cross-functional alignment, so I use both my own critical thinking and these tools to surface synergies and sharpen ideas.
They’re most useful when I clearly outline the situation, identify key considerations, and prompt the AI to challenge my assumptions or extrapolate what I might have missed. In that way, it becomes an extension of my thinking/a thought partner.
For decision-making in particular, I use AI to help bring structure to ambiguity. Startups often deal with messy and novel challenges where there’s no obvious answer. Whether I’m working through complex trade-offs or trying to bring structure to a decision-making process, I use AI assistants in two key ways: 1) conversationally, to clarify my thinking in real time, and 2) deliberately, by prompting for specific frameworks to organize both qualitative and quantitative factors. I don’t depend on or expect the AI to give me the “right” answer, but I leverage it to develop a thorough and grounded decision-making process.
AI for Automation
What repetitive tasks have you automated with AI?
Samin: I use AI for generating code snippets and extracting highlights from meeting transcripts.
Aleksandar: I've automated the generation of basic data summaries and chart creation from raw data sets. I maintain oversight of the automation process, ensuring that AI-generated summaries and charts accurately represent the underlying data and are free from misrepresentations. Also, I only use AI processing data that does not contain confidential information.
Eve: With an AI-enabled note-taking system that I implemented with my team, I’ve been able to increase focus during meetings, improve information accessibility and sharing, streamline onboarding and return-to-work processes, and enable data-driven meeting insights.
How do you balance AI automation with maintaining personal control over tasks?
Samin: I use AI to handle repetitive tasks and cautiously build trust in applications that I’ve seen it perform reliably over and over, such as writing for loops and conditional logic in coding. Mostly, I review outputs.
Aleksandar: I ensure personal control by reviewing and editing all AI-generated outputs, focusing on refining the narrative and ensuring accuracy. I recognize that AI automation should augment, not replace, human judgment, and I maintain ultimate responsibility for the quality and ethical implications of my work.
AI for Writing and Communication
Do you use AI for drafting emails, reports, or documents?
Bailey: I use AI for drafting emails and communications, but I always review and refine the content to ensure it aligns with my voice and intent.
Samin: Yes, I use AI for drafting technical documents, research summaries, and emails, especially in my work at Kiddom and Stanford.
Aleksandar: For my coursework, I have used an AI prompt to draft initial report sections For example, for a report on a company restructuring, I used a prompt asking for optimization of resource allocation, risk, and benefits associated with the proposed reorganizational changes. It can be a good tool to get a first draft started. I am careful to review the work to avoid using AI to generate content that violates intellectual property rights.
How do you ensure AI-generated content aligns with your voice and standards?
Samin: I refine AI-generated drafts to match my tone and clarity, often using prompts that align with my writing style.
Aleksandar: When using AI solely for numerical data processing, charts, and graphs, ensuring alignment with my voice and standards focuses on the interpretation and presentation of the generated visuals. I meticulously review each chart and graph to confirm that the AI accurately represents the data. I then add context and narrative through accompanying text, ensuring the visuals support my intended message and adhere to my communication style.
Finally, I verify that the visual presentation adheres to established standards for clarity, accessibility, and ethical data representation.
Eve: While I value my authentic voice in all my communication, I also adapt it based on the audience, medium, and message. When I want to stay very true to my voice, instead of prompting the AI with “refine: [insert text]”, which can lead the output in many directions away from the original input, I use narrower prompts like “fix grammar and make this more succinct” or “make this clearer”.
Other times, I may seek more significant input support from the AI. For example, I might say, “make this more direct and suitable for executive-level communication”, or I might provide additional context and direction, such as “I am delivering the following message at an All Hands meeting and want to ensure it feels balanced (shedding light on both the positives and negatives) while remaining encouraging”.
Fun fact: many AIs allow you to set the tone and standards of responses. For instance, with Claude, you can choose styles like Normal, Concise, Explanatory, or Formal. You can even define a custom style by supplying your own writing samples.
AI for Learning and Research
How do you use AI to speed up research and learning?
Samin: I use AI to extract key insights from papers, summarize findings, and generate research questions. AI tools like ChatGPT help summarize articles, but I also use retrieval-based tools like Perplexity’s DeepResearch.
Aleksandar: I use AI to quickly scan and summarize datasets, allowing me to identify key information relevant to my reports and presentations. I am aware of the potential for AI to prioritize certain information over others, and I strive to maintain a balanced and comprehensive understanding of the research landscape.
Eve: Perplexity Pro and Deep Research, Cohere’s Chat, and OpenAI’s Operator have been especially helpful in accelerating market research. Perplexity’s powerful search and reasoning surfaces summarizes insight, and it has my trust that I can investigate the sources and evaluate their validity. Cohere’s Chat, which leverages tools like Calculator, Web Search, and Python Interpreter, is also a powerful AI for research and learning that immediately identifies hyperlinks. OpenAI’s Operator is impressive as it works a browser the same way I would when conducting market research – it’s a big time saver.
As we’ve seen, AI tools can be great for improving workplace productivity, but it’s also important to be able to show that they are being used effectively and ethically within company rules and regulations. One thing is for sure – they are here to stay and are evolving rapidly.
Based on the conversations we had, here are some favourites:
- Analytics: Explo
- Coding: Cursor
- Generative AI: ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Superhuman
- Image Creation: Dall-E 2
- Learning Language Model: DeepSeek, Codehere
- Search Engine: Perplexity
AI isn't just for tech experts – it can streamline everyday tasks in ways you might not expect. Whether it’s automating emails, summarizing research, or enhancing your creativity, the key is to start small. Try using AI for one task this week and see how it transforms your workflow. You might be surprised how much time you save to focus on the tasks that really matter.
