How and When to use AI in your daily work

Artificial Intelligence tools are quickly becoming a standard part of how we work, serving as on-demand assistants to help us tackle everyday tasks faster and more creatively. But knowing how and when to leverage AI is key to making it a genuinely useful partner in your workday.

Here’s a quick guide on how to think about AI, where it shines, and when to rely on good old-fashioned human judgment.

How to Think About AI

Think of AI as an energetic, super-fast intern. It can summarize massive documents in seconds, draft outlines, and brainstorm endless ideas. However, like an intern, it still needs clear instructions, good context, and a thorough review of its work before anything goes out the door.

When to Use AI (Where It Shines)

• Overcoming “Blank Page” Syndrome: Use AI to generate initial outlines, rough drafts, or creative brainstorming angles when starting a new project.
• Summarizing & Distilling Data: Feed long regulation sets, meeting minutes, or guidance documents into AI to quickly pull out action items and key takeaways.
• Drafting & Refining Communication: Use AI to rephrase complex regulatory language for a broader audience, adjust the tone of a draft, or fix grammar. You can tell it to re-write at a 12th grade reading level or lower!
• Speeding Up Repetitive Tasks: Let AI help you write spreadsheet formulas, clean up text formatting, or draft routine updates.

When NOT to Rely Solely on AI

• Final Fact-Checking: AI models can sometimes generate confident-sounding errors (“hallucinations”). Always verify critical figures, dates, and regulatory specifics.
• Handling Sensitive Data: Never input confidential company data, sensitive customer information, or proprietary code into public AI tools. If you’re unsure, please check with me.
• Replacing Human Empathy: Nuanced communication—like sensitive employee feedback, client negotiations, or strategic decision-making—requires personal human connection and judgment.

The Golden Rule: Prompt, Review, Refine

The secret to getting great results from AI lies in your prompt. Give the tool a clear role, plenty of context, and specific constraints. Then, review the output with a critical eye and refine it until it meets your standards.

What’s Next?

This post sets the stage for me to share the specific ways I’m using AI to streamline my workflow—from Sheets hacks to writing better emails. Stay tuned!

---

By the way, this post was drafted by AI. I’m getting the author credit because I created the prompt, reviewed the content, and refined it several times until I felt it had the right tone and information. It feels slightly plagiaristic, so here’s the ethics debate I had in my mind. It’s okay because:

• First and foremost, I acknowledged the use of AI. I didn’t pretend to have drafted this content. I went a step further to explain where AI was used (drafting) and not used (prompting, editing and publishing).
• The post was written for you as a fellow employee. I don’t get any benefit beyond a “thank you.” The intent is to help you explore the use of AI in your role. And it fulfills one of my responsibilities as COO – to help employees increase efficiency and productivity.
• Truly, this post wouldn’t exist without AI. The drafting process might have been a few hours for me, and that’s enough to make me procrastinate. It’s been over a year since I wrote a post for Infused! When the alternative is nothing, the use of AI to create something is more palatable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI usage. My teenage sons can’t help but see it as a way to get out of reading books, writing book reports, finishing math assignments, and more. It’s a common topic at the dinner table and I want to give them – and you – solid guidance. And, of course, the way to become knowledgeable about the use of AI tools is … wait for it … to use AI tools!