As a leader of a large team, you may find yourself juggling various diverse and complex tasks, from managing personnel turnover to overseeing projects and making strategic decisions, not to mention team cohesion and culture.
The pressure to perform can be overwhelming, leading to burnout and decreased efficiency. But what if you had a co-pilot to help you navigate through the daily grind and free up time for higher-level tasks? That's where AI comes in.
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash
AI, or artificial intelligence, can be a powerful tool for anyone leading a large and diverse team to improve team efficiency and reduce burnout.
Here are a few ways how:
Data Entry and Aggregation: "Fill in the Blanks"
AI can help with data entry and aggregation, filling in the blanks if you give it the rows and columns. This can be particularly useful for analyzing large datasets or generating reports. By automating the tedious data entry process, you can free up time to focus on more strategic tasks.
Brainstorming: “Generating 30-50 Decent Ideas in seconds”
When you're looking for one or two ideas for pithy speech like brand and product naming, copywriting, keyword research for SEO, and other tasks that used to take several people an hour or more to generate, AI can help. With AI, you can generate 30-50 ideas in a matter of seconds. This can help you save time and resources while also providing you with a diverse range of ideas to choose from.
Boilerplate to Prose
If you've ever struggled to turn boilerplate bullets into prose, you'll appreciate how AI can help. With the right prompts, AI can help you transform your bullet points into well-written, grammatically-correct prose in a matter of seconds. This can save you time and also improve the quality of your writing.
For instance, in writing this article, I gave ChatGPT the skeleton bullets of the content that I wanted to cover, and had it generate several drafts — guiding it a bit on length, audience and tone. I then acted as the editor and stitched those results together in the space of fifteen minutes. As someone who is used to spending hours and has written over a hundred blog articles, this time-saving is invaluable to me.
While there are many benefits to using AI, there are also limitations that decision-makers should be aware of:
AI can "Hallucinate"
If there isn't enough data, AI will do its best to fill in the blanks. However, this can sometimes result in incorrect or irrelevant information being generated. To mitigate this problem, it's important to check AI's work and verify its findings.
For example, if you're going to ask an AI tool to provide a table of potential sales prospects and their contact info, ask it to provide URLs for those businesses and then ask it to check which of those links resolves to a real website.
AI Reflects Your Own Biases
AI will reflect your own biases and linguistic tendencies. It's important to ask follow-up questions to reduce your own biases.
For example, if you ask AI for the "best" or "most" <blank> without giving it context on who the audience is, the output AI generates may not be suitable for your needs.
It's important to prime AI and ask it for several ways to approach a problem and to outline a framework or thought process for getting to the right answer, not just the answer closest to you.
Precise Language Works Better
AI tends to be literal and works best with precise language that you see in Excel functions or the menus of your favorite apps.
More complex verbs like "append, edit, enumerate, prioritize, categorize" will get you better, more complex results than simpler verbs like "add, change, make, do."
Brush up on your ten-dollar words as they encapsulate far more information.
Ultimately, AI Saves You and Your Team Time and Energy
AI can save you time and energy to focus on higher-order questions and problems. It's actually quite gratifying to task AI with time-consuming tasks that you and your team don't like doing anyway without sacrificing quality.
Ask your direct reports and individual contributors what they like doing least and work with them to see if it’s something you can offload to AI.
This can free up your time and the time of your team members for higher-level tasks, ultimately leading to improved productivity and reduced burnout.
In conclusion, incorporating AI into your work as a responsible decision-maker can provide numerous benefits, including improving team efficiency and reducing burnout.
By keeping these tips in mind, you can successfully use AI as your co-pilot to tackle time-consuming tasks and free up more time to focus on higher-level tasks. As AI technology continues to advance, it's an exciting time to embrace its potential and use it to drive success in your organization.
If you'd like to learn more about how to responsibly apply AI Tools within your business, book a 30-minute consultation call with Numbers & Letters via this link.
Eric Boromisa is the Managing Director of Numbers & Letters, a human-steered product strategy and market development consultancy.
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