How do you use AI at work?

[Finmory]

I feel massively behind the curve on this. I keep hearing how people have massively reduced their workload with AI, if you’ve managed to do so could you tell me how? What software do you use and how do you use it at work?

I’ve tried using ChatGPT to draft emails but have not found it helpful tbh. I end up spending so much time outlining what I need and refining the clunky text that it’s quicker to write them myself.

I feel like the only person left not using AI!

Helps me draft job advert copy. It doesn’t write it for me but it helps me shape it in certain ways like hard to fill roles or looking to target ex demographic. Also helps me put campaigns together again doesn’t do it for me it helps me refine it. Im one person department so I bounce ideas off it like I would if I had a team.

I take written notes and put them into copilot to type out. Also use it for emails. I want to get better at getting it to build excel sheets.

I’m a nurse. We don’t use it at all.

Image creation mostly that then tends to get edited, speeds everything up.

Sometimes I just can't quite formulate a sentence in the way it needs to be done. Copilot to the rescue! Also if I'm wound up it helps me untangle why, which reduces stress and enables me to move on.

Exactly this. It was so useful when setting my teams objectives this year!

Thanks all for the great examples of how you use it. I’m going to try and integrate it more in an effort to make my days a little lighter.

Reassuring to hear that for most people it hasn’t completely taken over their ways of working, but has helped streamline things. I’d started to worry I’d fallen hopelessly behind in adopting new tech.

I’m usually working with quite techie people and often find it tricky to understand each other. It’s been really helpful to see how AI answers my questions, I adjust the question until the answer is the kind I need.

Then ask them that.

in home life, it’s been really helpful to load up all the test results and medical reports we get for DH’s multiple complex medical issues. It’s been really helpful to understand essentially what the likely causes are and what is actually results.

I think of myself as a bit of a whiz on spreadsheets, mostly from pushing through to get them to do what I want. Explaining what I want AI helps me to understand the flaw in my reasoning when it doesn’t work.

We are really pushing it at work.

use it to record / transcribe meetings. Can then issue meetings and notes much quicker - need checking but it gives you the basics.

rewording emails to sound better than I can write.

helping give me an outline or template to start from.

I’m a creative, I’m paid to write engaging content so don’t use it in the way most would. We do however have CoPilot, it’s a game changer for summarising documents and is great at people wrangling. I can ask it to check team calendars for an available time. It’ll come back with a couple of options and can send the invites and book a meeting room too

Omg I can’t believe I’ve never thought to use it for calendar management, that could be life changing in itself!

I use it Copilot to help produce meeting minutes and tidy up notes and transcripts. I also use it to scan handwritten letters and convert them to PDFs. I also find it helpful if I don’t know how to do something in Excel, for example. Copilot will quickly tell me what to do and save having to look at multiple webpages filled with adverts and popups. It’s also useful for little things like when is 180 days from now when booking meeting rooms.

I'll say this - I work in my second language, and at one point I was using it too much, and could really feel my written language getting worse. It really didn't take long! So now I restrict myself.

My job involves writing complicated technical sales documents, I'm also doing as AI apprenticeship (based on copilot). It's useful for helping me find source material, it's great for cutting, which I often need to do as we have to work to strict word/page limits. I use it for planning, finding what client specifications I have to meet, and short sections of writing but not long form. Definitely saves me some time, but I do still feel I have to read stuff I could get summarised because I feel otherwise I just haven't understood the material properly.

We use it like having a consultant around.

and to record and summarise meetings
analyse reports and look for themes
polish writing and turn it into plain English
give critiques and look for gaps

but it’s only as good as what you put in and you still have to do the work to get good outputs

ChatGPT plus is now far superior to copilot which I would not longer use

I’m a librarian working in a specialist field where you need a lot of knowledge about fiddly policies and regulations.

Recently, I’ve used it to give me a framework for a webinar I was leading, and write a shortish blog post based on a huge amount of complicated information. I find that its biggest value is in synthesising information and structuring it well - from there I’ll take the output and put it into my voice/fact check it.

There’s a lot of my job that it can’t do, but it definitely helps free up time for me to get other stuff done.

I've only recently started using it but ive found when I do it saves me a lot of time.
I use it to analyse data and produce a trend summary - I work in health & social care dealing with lots of health data. Using AI saves me loads of time putting together an analysis of someone's weight data for example.
I also do a lot of health promotion, asking AI for posters & easy ways to present info saves me time and is way better than anything I could produce myself.
What is really like is I can ask it to do this in the background so I can be working on a few things at once.

They both use ChatGPT 5.2 I believe? I’ve been doing some work across Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT (plus) and Copilot recently and found that the latter two came out with very similar answers. For the specific thing I was doing, Gemini was actually the only one that did it correct first time with no prompts required. I do tend to prefer ChatGPT generally though.

Great thread.

My biggest learning so far is to ask AI, at the beginning of any task, whether there are any aspects of the task which it will struggle with and which makes it less suitable for that task than another method.

I learned to do this having spent hours trying to refine the prompt for a task which involved getting some IG handles. It was my fault for persisting really - sunk cost fallacy etc. Eventually it told me that it can't actually read Instagram...

I use it to simplify then read out loud long complex documents, ones that I don't have to understand all of, but get a general idea. Then I carry my laptop around the house and do laundry, cookng etc while I'm learning (btw I'm paid for what I produce not my hours, so I'm not ripping anyone off by multitasking).

I write summaries then ask it "is there anything important I've left out?"

I ask it to make a list of all type of corrections to my final pieces - from typos to factural errors (which I then check myself, I don't rely on it to be accurate)

I recently developed a workshop and asked for its honest feedback - it was quite blunt and said that's way too much for the time allocated, and some parts aren't suitable.

But I've found it even more useful in my personal life and running the house. A small example is it helped me set up a tropical fishtank which I had been daunted by.

Much as I enjoy IT and AI, I see both pros and cons. A lot depends on how AI is implemented and used. That said, there are certainly successful implementations of AI that provide great benefits to humanity.

In two perspectives on the subject, the following are worth reading.

Website.

"The Register" is an online enterprise technology news publication

"Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI Copilot. Microsoft Copilot now heading into ‘Official Sensitive’ work after winning back just 26 minutes a day in a trial."

www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/hmrc_hands_28000_staff_ai/

Book.

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
by Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna.

I use Claude Code to generate code, documentation, test cases etc. I work in AI so I’m actually using an AI agent to create AI agents.

Its massively useful - it’s like having a team of junior developers who never need time off, actually document their code, actually apply new skills that you teach them, stick to the agreed coding conventions, and make fewer mistakes.

Which of itself is incredibly worrying for the future of the tech industry - why hire and train up new grads when AI agents do the work that they typically do, better, and cheaper?

Really interesting thread!
I use paid ChatGPT as a starting point to provide structure and refine ideas using my own material and references

My OH works in IT. Says he’ll probably never again get his head down and spend any significant time writing code. That key element of the job has disappeared completely very, very quickly.