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The life of the desk worker has changed drastically in the past few years. Days and the to-do lists have lengthened. The way we consume information has changed. Generative AI has disrupted the whole scene.
Additionally, generative AI has the unique potential to ease the cognitive load in our day-to-day to help solve problems. But according to recent research by the Workforce Lab from Slack, more than two-thirds of desk workers have never used AI at work.
To me, that sounds like many workers still need a little inspiration for how they can get started with (and trust) generative AI at work.
Based on my conversations with desk workers, keeping boots on the ground, and thinking hard about how AI can help us achieve our productivity goals, I’ve outlined some practical applications of generative AI that I believe even the most doubtful of desk workers can get behind. Here are four ways that generative AI can help you in your day to day, now.
1. Gets you up to speed faster when every moment counts
Work moves fast, and sometimes you need access to information immediately so you can act quickly. With generative AI, you can distill knowledge and highlight important themes quickly, which can save you anywhere from minutes to hours of time.
For example, let’s say you’re part of a smaller engineering team and you’re hit with a major service outage. The on-call incident manager gets paged in the middle of the night and needs to catch up on the situation quickly. Rather than spending valuable time sifting through endless messages to catch up on everything that’s happened, they can use generative AI to request an instant summary, allowing them to jump into the conversation right away and contribute to the solution immediately.
2. Helps you access the right information
At any point, there’s so much information coming through to you during the work day. In fact, nearly half of desk workers struggle to find the information they need to complete their work, and 32% of employees have made the wrong decision due to a lack of awareness, according to Gartner.
AI-powered search is a great solution that can help you make sense of data and find what you’re looking for more quickly. For example, if someone leaves your company, the things they worked on, the project details, and the insights they shared are still accessible to the current team. With enhanced search capabilities that deliver intelligent responses, you can pick up and continue an initiative without missing a beat.
New hires joining a company can even use this information to learn about their team’s foundations and how they’ve previously operated, so they can form better insights and build connections with the team.
3. Keeps you in the loop, especially when every task isn’t created equal
Every message, every project, and every task is not created equal. By categorizing and prioritizing tasks based on how complex or urgent they are, you can structure your day in a way that runs more smoothly.
For example, some items at work are high priority and will always require your immediate attention. As you attend to those items, there may be other projects you need to stay updated on, even if you’re not directly involved in them from the outset. You don’t need to read or respond to every single message, but staying in the loop is still part of your job.
With a little bit of guidance, generative AI can act as your companion, helping you prioritize your most important work and surfacing the right information at the right time – whether that’s immediately, with your cup of coffee in the morning, or at the end of a long, busy day.
4. Gives you a head start to focus on what really matters: the human side of work
Desk workers report spending a third of their day on average on tasks they consider low-value, according to recent research. Generative AI can relieve desk workers of that mundane busy work, freeing up time for them to focus on more high-value activities that are best accomplished with human creativity at the helm. That includes brainstorming innovative solutions, channeling spontaneous or artistic creativity, or making high-stakes ethical decisions.
Slack’s AI-powered work operating system provides the most natural path to start engaging with generative AI – because it’s where work is already happening. With Slack AI, which uses a company’s conversational data to help users work faster and smarter, companies of every shape and size can get value out of generative AI in a simple and intuitive way via capabilities like AI-powered search, conversation summaries, and recaps.
Implementing generative AI into your day to day should be a delightful, accessible, trustworthy, and easy experience that allows you to focus on what makes work really special: human-centric creative work that bends rules and pushes boundaries. With these practical applications, generative AI is sure to be an augment to your work so you can free up time and make your day to day profoundly more rewarding and enjoyable.
Work smarter and save time with powerfully simple AI, right where you need it. Get Slack AI today.
This article is a collaboration between Slack and G/O Media Studios.