Artificial intelligence is permeating workplaces, changing the nature of jobs of every stripe.
Teachers are using it to create lesson plans and grade papers. Marketing professionals are harnessing it to work a room and learn about the needs of potential clients. Product managers are asking AI to serve as an interpreter when technical conversations went over their heads in meetings.
Some people who employ AI tools are concerned that widespread use of the technology could erode critical thinking skills, especially among children. They also caution that AI-assisted work needs to be checked carefully because the tools have been known to hallucinate and make mistakes.
Here are some ways that people with a range of jobs use artificial intelligence to save time and generate ideas.
Unpacking jargon
One creative way Kristin Moore, a technical product manager at PERQ, a digital marketing platform for property management companies, uses AI is to help ensure she understands her colleagues’ technically advanced conversations. If she’s in a meeting and engineers talk through a topic in a way that she doesn’t grasp, she can upload the recorded conversation through Claude, AI assistant built by Anthropic, and ask it to summarize what she needs to do to follow up.
“It picks up on all of that terminology that I don’t understand, and it can simplify it into something that I can consume,” Moore said.
She also asks the AI tool to read through emails, support tickets, recorded meetings and conversations to determine what her clients would like her company to build.
“It’s definitely freed up hours and hours of my week,” Moore said.
Grading papers
Kyle Weimar, an elementary school teacher for Charter Schools USA, serves as coordinator of a Florida school’s multi-tiered support system, a position that involves creating plans to help children performing at the bottom 20% of the student population.
In that role, he uploads test scores, report cards and health information into his school district’s AI tool. Then he asks it before meetings to help brainstorm what the district can do to help each child.
Weimar has also used AI to grade papers. He says he can upload 100 to an AI agent, give it a scoring guide, and let it grade and give students instant feedback. “I can do that in 30 minutes, whereas it would have taken me a week before,” he said.
Teachers are really overwhelmed with work, “so any tools that we can use to make that a little bit more viable, we’re really excited about using,” Weimar said.
Working a room
Ashley Smith, head of marketing at HireQuest, a staffing and recruiting company with about 400 franchises, used Claude to build a dashboard that analyzes website traffic data and social media trends. It reports what the HireQuest’s followers are reacting to or ignoring, and Smith uses the information to inform franchisees about how to win more business, she said.
When members of her sales team attended a huge manufacturing trade show recently, she asked them to take screenshots of the companies they wanted to pursue. She uploaded the images to an AI platform and prompted it to build a list including company names and, based on press releases and stock reports, insights on what their staffing needs might be over the next 18 to 24 months.
The hours Smith said she saved by handing off that research task to AI let her spend more one-on-one time with her franchisees.
“AI has not replaced anything. It’s only expanded what we’re able to offer to our franchisees,” Smith said. “It allows us to do things that, candidly, we just weren’t able to deliver even as short as two years ago.”
Rebranding the Brawny paper towel man
A design leader at Georgia Pacific, the pulp and paper company that makes Dixie cups, Quilted Northern toilet paper and other consumer products, says he uses AI to create quick visuals. When brainstorming how to modernize the Brawny paper towel brand, for example, Andrew Markle said his team asked AI to depict what the man shown on their packaging would look like with a longer or shorter beard.
Using AI helped people on the team review ideas more quickly, and the tool also offered predictions for how target consumers might respond, Markle said.
“It’s not replacing the creative eye of what’s good and what’s appropriate for our business,” Markle said. “Ultimately, we knew we were going to partner with our ad agency. We have an illustrator that’s going to do the final vision.”
Creating quizzes to help learn material
Kenneth Lynch, a special education coach in Tulsa, Oklahoma, teaches developmentally disabled students life skills to help them live independently. He uses AI to develop quizzes as learning materials. For example, when he was working with a student who wanted to pursue automotive work, Lynch uploaded a book of mechanical instructions to an AI tool that generated quizzes for each chapter.
He is more reluctant to trust AI when it comes to soliciting guidance on psychological conditions. “When I look up different types of diagnosis and try to connect comorbid diagnoses together, it really struggles with understanding how those fit together,” Lynch said.
Preparing for meetings and drafting emails
Ravi Pendse, the University of Michigan’s chief information officer, has used AI to prepare for meetings by asking the tool to predict what questions he might get asked.
“It has made me a lot more efficient,” Pendse said. “It gives me more time to focus on my own mental health and wellness.”
The University of Michigan also created an AI tutor that professors can tailor to help students with coursework material around-the-clock, he said. But Pendse is mindful to use AI responsibly.
“We all should be thinking about how we ensure that AI does not erode our critical thinking skills, especially those of our children,” Pendse said. “As we grew up, we learned from our mistakes. We wrote bad papers, and we got better.”
One way that Bob Jones, the university’s assistant vice president of emerging technology and support services, uses AI is making sure his emails are succinct enough for the intended audience.
“If I’m communicating about a particularly sticky topic, I want to make sure that I’m neutral and thoughtful,” Jones said. “So the idea of really assessing how I’m presenting myself, AI is really good at that.”
Understanding customer needs
The marketing director at SumnerOne, a company that delivers printers, copiers, and IT services, asks her AI tool to help create email campaigns, social media posts and slide decks. Natalie Blythe said she also uses it to help understand her ideal customers.
For example, when aiming to sell printing services to universities, she asked chatGPT, an AI tool created by OpenAI, to create a probable demographic profile of an admissions director at a university. Then she asked it to predict what the director’s top five problems might be and to identify ways her company’s products could help solve them.
“When it first started up, I was in the camp of, ‘Oh my God, this is the end for us,’” Blythe said about the early days of AI. But rather than just fear it, she dug in and started learning.
“The efficiencies gained out of it have been tremendous,” she said.
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Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well
—Cathy Bussewitz, Associated Press