AI can be a useful if uninspired tool for writing emails. But there’s a lot more it can do to help you hit your goals, impress your boss, and limit your stress. 

As an OpenAI GPT-4 education partner via Khan Academy, the author of the best-selling AI for job searching book on Amazon, and the official AI career trainer for institutions including Harvard Business School and the University of Texas, I’ve had a front-row seat to both the right and wrong ways to use generative AI since its inception.

Let’s focus on the right ways — the ones that will help you be better at your job and make your life easier. Here are five AI hacks smart professionals use to get the most out of AI:

1. Do your research

Let's say that you're in charge of putting on a big event for your company. You know that if you don't tailor it to your customers' needs, the event is  going to be a ghost town.

Rather than guessing, hoping, and praying, why not ask your customers directly what they're interested in?

"Ugh," you might think. "That's going to involve a market research project, or a research agency, and money and time we don't have!"

Not in the age of AI. Head over to Google Forms, click the AI button at the top of the page, and tell the tool what you're looking to accomplish. In this case:

Survey my customers to understand what kind of event they'd most like to attend this year?

Voila, you’ve got an instant survey, ready to edit and send.

You can adjust the prompt to create whatever kind of survey you need.

For example, if you're an engineer, you might want to use a prompt like the following to measure customer feedback:

I need a product feedback survey to understand our customers' thoughts on a new feature we've released. Can you generate about 8-10 questions that cover ease of use, value, any issues faced, and suggestions for improvement? The survey should contain both quantitative (rating scale) and qualitative (open-ended) questions.

Whereas if you work in HR and are sick of holding trainings that no one attends, you might want to start with a prompt such as:

Can you help me develop a training needs assessment survey for employees to identify gaps in skills and training opportunities? I need around 10 questions covering their current skills, desired areas of improvement, preferred training formats, and any challenges they face in their roles.

2. Mine your data

Quantitative data has always been relatively easy to summarize with charts and tables. Now you can use generative AI to give you a summary of relevant  feedback.

Imagine your hypothetical survey comes back with 500 responses, which seems great until you start looking through the thousands of words people shared in the comments.

"Now I really am stuck," you might think. "The comments have the most important insights but I don't have the capacity to read through all of them and distill the takeaways!"

Just open your Form responses in a Google Sheet, click the Gemini icon, and ask the tool to:

Summarize the Comments column with the most common themes.

You can use a similar approach beyond survey comments. For instance, if you've just run  interviews with employees and have some massive transcripts to review, you can try a prompt like the following:

I have the transcripts of interviews conducted with employees about workplace satisfaction. Can you analyze the text to summarize the main points of satisfaction and dissatisfaction? Also, please identify any suggestions made for improvement.

If you're in charge of social media and struggle to make sense of thousands of posts, you could plug in this request:

We've received a lot of comments on our recent social media post. Can you analyze these comments to find common reactions, such as praise, concerns, or questions? Please summarize each type of reaction and provide examples if possible.

3. Get organized

As one of my former colleagues with ADHD once showcased for me, generative AI can be an incredible organizer and project planner, even if you aren't.

Going back to the company event example, let's say the survey helped you realize that your customers have been hungry for an interactive networking event. Just feed a specific prompt like the following into ChatGPT: 

Please generate a table-based comprehensive project plan and timetable for an interactive networking event. The event is scheduled to take place on November 1 and today is September 1.

The key here is that AI can do more than just spit out text. It can display that text in multiple formats, including tables, which then allows you to leverage another ChatGPT function: exporting data in files.

You can easily get a file to upload into your favorite project planning tool like Trello or Asana by telling the AI to:

Convert the above table into a CSV.

4. Prepare a presentation

The big day is almost here. You realize it might help to build out a slide deck that guides the networking event, step-by-step.

Instead of begging your designer to whip something up at the last second, head over to Canva, create a new presentation, and enter this prompt under the Design section: 

Generate a presentation to host a speed networking event.

Within seconds, you'll have a designed deck that you can edit as you see fit.

Again, you can adapt the prompt to help you prepare for any kind of presentation.

5. Measure your impact

The event was a huge success — congrats! Several attendees stopped to give you positive feedback and tell you how grateful they were that you planned something they needed. 

To demonstrate the impact of your work to your boss and other key stakeholders, why not draw a direct line between your attendees' experiences and your organization's bottom line?

Let's say you have a spreadsheet that tracks which customers participated in the event and how much revenue you earned from them in the three months immediately following it. Instead of eyeballing any connections or trying to remember what you learned in that one college stats class you took, you can apply a little AI data science magic.

Upload the file to ChatGPT and plug in the following request: 

What is the correlation between customer participation in my event and the revenue from that customer over the next 3 months?

Within seconds, ChatGPT will handle all the Python code and produce a statistical relationship:

You can go one step further and test it for statistical validity by following up with the prompt: 

Is that correlation statistically significant?

The results of this kind of analysis — whether it's about our hypothetical networking event or any other project — mean your case to your boss can go beyond "trust me" to "here's the proof."

Jeremy Schifeling is the founder of The Job Insiders, which provides career technology training for hundreds of top universities and business schools. He is also the author of "Career Coach GPT: The Complete Guide to ChatGPT Resume, Cover Letter, Interview, and Job Search Success" and shares his latest career and AI hacks on LinkedIn.

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