Try these 9 ways to optimize your productivity with AI, but don’t try this one

Although there is a lot artificial intelligence can’t work well yet, one of the best uses as a productivity tool to organize your day. AI tools can help you get through more mundane work tasks faster every day, freeing you up to do more creative and thoughtful tasks.

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

Just remember to always double-check the information any AI tool gives you. Even if all you asked to do was summarize the document, AI is known to hallucinate and make up details that are not accurate.

Create notes about almost anything with Microsoft Copilot

Faced with an incredibly long (and boring) working paper or 300-slide presentation, you just don’t have time to read it all the way through? Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Tool in the web browser, Second pilotcan help

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

You can also ask Copilot to extract the specific information you’re looking for from a long presentation or document. Just remember to double-check the accuracy of Copilot’s totals.

Check out our a step-by-step guide to using Copilot to create notes.

Get an AI summary of your Zoom call

If you’ve just been in another Zoom meeting that might have been via email and you’ve drifted off for a bit, Zoom now has AI tools to help remind you of what just happened.

AI Companion by Zoom is included with all of the company’s paid video calling plans — prices start at $13.32 per month — and can be turned on to take real-time notes during your meetings and share tasks with you.

During live meetings, hosts can enable a “Meeting Summary” that can be shared in the team chat. AI Companion can answer your questions about the meeting, such as catch you up on the discussion if you join late, and provide you with a recording that is divided into “chapters” at the end according to each topic discussed.

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

Soften your email wording with AI

Stuck on formulating a question or answer? Why not try an AI platform focused on neurodivergents goblin.tools — which is currently free, without paid access and has translation into 13 languages.

The “Formalizer” tab allows you to “Turn spicy thoughts into stylish ones or vice versa.” So, if you’re in a hurry to write a slightly annoyed reply to a colleague or client, you can use the AI ​​tool’s drop-down menu and choose between useful settings like more professional, more polite, and less harsh using the “spiciness level” meter. to choose between three chili settings for how strong you want your message to be received.

An AI tool instantly rephrases your message, and you might feel better afterwards.

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

AI project manager

If you need a project manager to organize and advance your big projects, but struggle to switch between big ideas and day-to-day planning mode, focusing other people’s workflows and keeping them on track, AI could be the answer.

Otter.ai can help you stay focused and organized. Its GenAI meeting The tool is an assistant in Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, recording, transcribing and “remembering” what was said in each meeting (just make sure that all the details are correct).

It also integrates with your other work apps, allowing you to connect your Otter.ai account to any Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot accounts you use. It can then assign tasks between these platforms; send reminders and information; and post to Slack.

You can get the free version of Otter.ai Pro ($10 per month) and Business ($20 per month).

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

Grammarly AI-powered editing

Not sure about your wording and don’t have a staff editor to help? Grammarly, available in free Premium ($12/month) and Business ($15/month) versions, can be enabled for many applications on your computer, 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 something you’ve written in a Google Doc or email. You can also adjust the tone and formality of the suggestions it offers for your letter.

Here What you need to know about using Grammarly AI to edit your work.

Summarize a Google Doc with AI

If you work best in Google Docs and need a super-fast summary of a long document, Google twins has you covered — although you’ll need a paid subscription to use this feature.

All you have to do is open the document, highlight the text you want to summarize, click Help me write and then press Summarize. (You can also choose options such as Tone, Highlight, Clarify, Shorten, or Paraphrase.)

Be sure to double-check that Gemini understood your document and what was important — and use the help document improvement feature to provide feedback on how accurate (or not) the Google AI tool was.

Here is ours a step-by-step guide to summarizing Google Docs with AIand you can also read CNET in its entirety Gemini hands-on review hereas well as competitors’ artificial intelligence tools Perplexity, Second pilot and Claude.

Write a working presentation with the help of AI

If you are ready to give a presentation during a meeting, the AI ​​tool goblin.tools can help you polish a rough presentation.

First, you can use its estimation tool to get an approximate time to create a presentation, and then insert your draft into the formalizer tool. Scroll through the drop-down menu to choose from 14 different tones, such as “more passionate” or “easier to read.”

If you’re missing a few details that you might be asked about during your presentation, you can also use the Professor tool to give you a crash course on a topic you’re not interested in – goblin.tools has access to GPT OpenAI models and study data and provides simple explanations of any subject you choose.

Finally, you can insert your resulting presentation into the judge tool, which will provide feedback on how your presentation looks. Just make sure you re-read and refine what the AI ​​offers to make sure it makes sense to humans.

Here is ours a complete guide to using AI to create a working presentation.

Create a PowerPoint slide deck with AI

After you’ve used AI to help you articulate what you want to say in your presentation, another AI tool can help you create a slideshow in minutes instead of hours.

We tested the mid-range plan Prezi A.I ($29/month with 14-day free trial) and added a tooltip with image settings, although you can also download a PDF file with all the presentation text you need. It will create a design layout for you and divide your content into slides. Sometimes it picks some weird images, so you’ll need to read everything and change the images and text.

It took about 30 minutes to make the necessary adjustments—much less than creating the slides from scratch. That’s all CNET’s tips for creating PowerPoint slides with AI.

Automatic adjustment of your calendar

Movementan AI calendar assistant, can plan your day, schedule appointments, and create and refine to-do lists for you. One of the main reasons we tested it (free for a seven-day trial, then $12 to $19 a month) was to try out its automatic calendar adjustments. Using knowledge of your previous behavior, Motion AI re-prioritizes your tasks when things change unexpectedly.

During the free trial, Motion tweaked the order of meetings and time blocks a bit to suit our needs. However, the week was too short for the AI ​​assistant to learn our behavior — it either needs a longer free trial to really see if the benefit is worth the cost, or you’ll have to sign up for a paid account to give it a go. It also may not automatically schedule tasks in the order you’d like them to be placed, meaning you’ll still have to manually rearrange them, although this obstacle can also be overcome by using the tool for a longer period of time.

Departure everything we found about the movement during testing.

What didn’t work: Creating a company logo with AI

We tried to create a company logo using the text-to-image tool Middle road. But if you’ve ever used an AI image generator, you’ll know that what we found was too surreal for a business logo concept.

You can access Midjourney via Discord with an AI tool subscription starting at $10. To use it, you just need to write a description of how you want your logo or image to look and then create. If it does come back with an image you like, you can right-click to save.

Midjourney probably has better options for replacing stock photos — we don’t think designers have much to worry about in the logo business any time soon.

Here is ours experiment with using Midjourney to create a logo.