Editorial
Much digital ink has been spilled on how to apply ChatGPT, Jasper, Claude, Bard and other generative AI tools to use cases in different verticals to increase productivity and improve efficiencies. These tools have wide applications in my specialty, marketing. Who hasn’t heard about how marketing teams can easily create content outlines and even entire blog posts as well as variants of social media posts, ad headlines for testing and so on?
Tips and guides can be very helpful to companies looking to take a first step into improving departmental processes with AI. It’s great to hear about how much more efficient we can be using AI to augment our work. But what are some practical ways to do this, and what tools should we consider? In this article, I want to share some of the specific ways I have been leveraging generative AI to ratchet up my own personal productivity to 11. And hopefully, I can inspire other executives with some ways they can apply AI to their daily workflows to address the myriad tasks that crop up in the everyday course of getting things done.
Context Switching
As chief marketing officer, I am constantly switching contexts. In any given day, I pinball between one-on-ones with my team, to client touch bases, to executive team huddles, to actual heads-down, get-things-done time. Plus, let’s not forget about any “fires” that might crop up! And each of these meetings and tasks require my full attention and problem-solving capabilities.
What’s more, most of the things requiring my attention are short in duration, lasting about 15-45 minutes each. As research has shown, returning to focus on a task takes an average of 23 minutes. So in effect, by the time I get into my focus zone in a 30-minute meeting, it’s already time to move on to the next task.
And that’s where generative AI has come in to help me. Say I have a 30-minute block of time before my next meeting, and I urgently need to create a contract addendum. Instead of starting from scratch, I can tell ChatGPT, “I need to create an addendum to X contract that illustrates Y. Here's some parameters, here's the things we need to protect ourselves from, here's some things we want to avoid. Please generate the appropriate language.” Within seconds, it generates text I can use as a helpful starting point. It's much easier to correct something you can iterate from than to generate something from nothing. With a few minutes of editing, I have something ready to get over to legal for final approval in 30 minutes or less.
Quick Note Taking and Presentation Creation
You can also use AI to transcribe meeting notes. Tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Otter.ai and others powered by speech recognition software will not just record your meeting, but can also provide a transcription of the discussion. Then, once you have that transcription, you can feed it back into a tool, such as ChatGPT, to generate meeting notes. And you can in turn use those notes to create an outline for a presentation, or ask it to develop some slide content. Again, getting that first draft out is often the hardest part — so let the machine help you get a draft together quickly.
Pattern Recognition for Team Reviews
This next tip is for managers with multiple direct reports. How do you keep track of your team’s performance through the year? As for me, I take notes from one-on-one meetings with each of my team members. Over time, I have a good set of notes on each direct report’s contributions. But how do I coalesce that down into feedback and examples for when it’s time to do reviews?
At our company, we do employee performance reviews twice a year. Each team member’s performance is based upon our company’s four core values: flexibility, creativity, taking initiative and collaboration. This is where the pattern-recognition strengths of an AI come in handy.
When it’s time to write my team’s reviews, I can ask the AI to organize the anonymous notes (remember, don’t put any personal info into an AI!) into buckets corresponding to those values. This allows me to better organize my thoughts, illustrate concrete examples for each core value and provide the framework for preparing my reviews much more easily than combing through months of notes and looking for through-lines that relate.
How to Get Started Using AI
Tips and guides can be very helpful to companies looking to take a first step into improving departmental processes with AI. It’s great to hear about how much more efficient we can be using AI to augment our work. But what are some practical ways to do this, and what tools should we consider? In this article, I want to share some of the specific ways I have been leveraging generative AI to ratchet up my own personal productivity to 11. And hopefully, I can inspire other executives with some ways they can apply AI to their daily workflows to address the myriad tasks that crop up in the everyday course of getting things done.
Context Switching
As chief marketing officer, I am constantly switching contexts. In any given day, I pinball between one-on-ones with my team, to client touch bases, to executive team huddles, to actual heads-down, get-things-done time. Plus, let’s not forget about any “fires” that might crop up! And each of these meetings and tasks require my full attention and problem-solving capabilities. What’s more, most of the things requiring my attention are short in duration, lasting about 15-45 minutes each. As research has shown, returning to focus on a task takes an average of 23 minutes. So in effect, by the time I get into my focus zone in a 30-minute meeting, it’s already time to move on to the next task.
And that’s where generative AI has come in to help me. Say I have a 30-minute block of time before my next meeting, and I urgently need to create a contract addendum. Instead of starting from scratch, I can tell ChatGPT, “I need to create an addendum to X contract that illustrates Y. Here's some parameters, here's the things we need to protect ourselves from, here's some things we want to avoid. Please generate the appropriate language.” Within seconds, it generates text I can use as a helpful starting point. It's much easier to correct something you can iterate from than to generate something from nothing. With a few minutes of editing, I have something ready to get over to legal for final approval in 30 minutes or less.
Quick Note Taking and Presentation Creation
You can also use AI to transcribe meeting notes. Tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Otter.ai and others powered by speech recognition software will not just record your meeting, but can also provide a transcription of the discussion. Then, once you have that transcription, you can feed it back into a tool, such as ChatGPT, to generate meeting notes. And you can in turn use those notes to create an outline for a presentation, or ask it to develop some slide content. Again, getting that first draft out is often the hardest part — so let the machine help you get a draft together quickly.Pattern Recognition for Team Reviews
This next tip is for managers with multiple direct reports. How do you keep track of your team’s performance through the year? As for me, I take notes from one-on-one meetings with each of my team members. Over time, I have a good set of notes on each direct report’s contributions. But how do I coalesce that down into feedback and examples for when it’s time to do reviews? At our company, we do employee performance reviews twice a year. Each team member’s performance is based upon our company’s four core values: flexibility, creativity, taking initiative and collaboration. This is where the pattern-recognition strengths of an AI come in handy.
When it’s time to write my team’s reviews, I can ask the AI to organize the anonymous notes (remember, don’t put any personal info into an AI!) into buckets corresponding to those values. This allows me to better organize my thoughts, illustrate concrete examples for each core value and provide the framework for preparing my reviews much more easily than combing through months of notes and looking for through-lines that relate.
How to Get Started Using AI
Here’s my advice for getting started with AI and taking advantage of its super-powering potential in your daily work life.
- Get familiar with how ChatGPT and other AIs work. The amazing thing about generative AI tools is that you can basically ask questions in plain English. You don’t have to know how to code. You don’t have to think about how to structure a special Google search. For now, what you do need to know is how to write good prompts, when you tell the AI what you need and the format you need it in, then it uses that information to provide your answer. Think of an AI, such as ChatGPT or Claude.ai, as a very inexperienced intern. Be explicit with your ask and don’t make too many assumptions of what it might know, and tell it exactly what you need. And remember, just like work an intern does, never use an AI’s output as the final product. Review it carefully and apply your human judgment to make the content your own and always fact-check. AIs are known to hallucinate and sometimes invent things.
- Look for places where you or your team are taking time on tasks. Anywhere in an organization where there are processes that take crucial time, brainpower, work cycles and thinking about stuff, you may be able to apply AI to improve those processes or even offload them from a human.
- Just start experimenting! Nobody knows your business like you do, so take a good look at where you may be able to get a little assistance from an AI, then begin testing it out. I expect that once you start down the path of testing a generative AI tool to improve a time-consuming or manual process or providing a first pass at some deliverable, you’ll find it hard to believe your time savings.
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