Technology might be advancing, but one thorn remains in any productivity-focused team’s side — unnecessary time-wasters.
The question is, which are the biggest time-wasters now that cloud storage has made the file cabinet obsolete, and Slack messages have replaced endless email chains? More importantly, how can modern solutions backed by artificial intelligence eliminate them? Here are the four worst offenders and AI’s approaches to dealing with them.
Admin Work
Paperwork is a tedious yet necessary part of smooth daily operations. While it remains unavoidable, paperwork isn’t necessarily the most inefficient task. Admin is a sprawling subset of each department’s work responsibilities that continuously gets held up by small inconveniences.
Maybe the person who needs to sign off on a project isn’t in today, or there’s a scheduling conflict with members of your distributed team. A few such inconveniences wouldn’t pose a setback. Frustratingly, there can be hundreds of them during a given week, imperceptibly but measurably chipping away at people’s focus and productive time.
AI’s role in admin optimization is twofold. On the one hand, it automates most rote paperwork. Tasks like data entry and coordination with multiple data sources, internal reports, or autofill in form fields already save considerable time. On the other, AI can subtly align and nudge things in the right direction. For example, it can coordinate everyone’s calendars to find a suitable meeting time or automatically remind colleagues of their obligations should they fail to meet milestones in time.
Searching for Information
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office environment has found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time in search of a file or line in a spreadsheet. The problem gets worse as more tools are adopted, since this introduces potentially incompatible formats and even more places to trawl through, including the cloud.
Ironically, AI drastically speeds up information retrieval by humanizing it. People no longer need to remember an exact filename or phrase – the AI assistant will take their natural language inputs and search emails, drives, or Slack communications for exact and close fits. It’s also great for locating the latest versions of different documents and extracting pertinent data from documents once they are located.
Manual Reporting
Reports are vital for keeping different stakeholders in the loop and justifying actions from individual employees up to the organization as a whole. Creating reports manually takes ages since they’re so involved.
You must first spend time researching and collecting data from various sources. Teams then need to normalize that data and present it in a way that stakeholders find appealing and understandable. Rinse and repeat every quarter, or even every month, as needed.
AI intervention is perhaps at its most beneficial here, as the right combination of tools can automate every aspect of the reporting process. Unified dashboards with access to pertinent data sources are particularly useful, as they enable you to create templates and rebuild reports in a fraction of the time whenever needed.
Context Switching
Humans are at their most productive when they can dedicate time and mental energy to completing single large tasks or multiple smaller yet similar ones in one go. Unfortunately, the modern workplace is a challenging environment in which to accomplish this. Sometimes, it can even be actively hostile.
All too often, a regular workday will involve answering emails, coordinating with or updating team members, and using several tools. Then there are constant distractions, either from colleagues or the barrage of notifications you receive. Not only is finding time for focused work a challenge, but you also lose minutes each time you’re forced to switch tasks or cognitive load types and attain a flow state.
AI tools act as helpful gatekeepers and organizers. They collect and prioritize notifications, informing you only when a matter requires urgent attention or is impactful. They can also help you create time slots in which to uninterruptedly tackle similar batched tasks. By serving as a single gateway to multiple AI models, an AI gateway simplifies workflows and reduces the overhead of juggling different tools, helping teams stay focused and minimize context switching. Copilots are particularly useful since they interact with and can pull data from various tools. This lets you get answers or start processes from a single source without having to open or use multiple tools manually.
Are There Risks?
Artificial intelligence has already shown itself as adept at identifying and whittling down the most egregious time-wasters. However, overzealous adoption of AI in pursuit of greater productivity can have significant negative consequences.
Every AI tool your team integrates into its workflows has to be secure. This means it needs to feature safeguards that prevent unauthorized access, encrypt data it stores and transmits, and integrate securely with other systems.
Users get the most out of AI tools when they feed them more data. In a business setting, much of it is sensitive, including customer data, IP addresses, and business secrets. Feeding such data into unsecure AI tools risks its unintentional exposure in leaks. Employee training and guardrails help minimize risks, but they’re only semi-effective if the AI tools your team interacts with lack proper security standards.
Also Read: Unleashing Creative Potential: How AI Tools Empower Small Teams and Creators
