AI at Work

Practical ways to integrate AI into your professional life without losing the human touch.

Overview

AI is transforming knowledge work, but not in the ways most headlines suggest. The real gains come not from replacing human work, but from eliminating friction—those small, repetitive tasks that fragment your attention and eat into deep work time.

This section covers practical applications across different professional contexts. Whether you're writing reports, preparing for meetings, conducting research, or managing your workflow, you'll find actionable guides and tested approaches.

The 80/20 of AI at Work
Most of the value comes from a few key use cases: drafting first versions, summarizing information, answering questions about documents, and automating repetitive formatting. Start here before exploring more advanced applications.

Key Use Cases

Getting Started

If you're new to using AI at work, start with something low-stakes where you can easily verify quality:

  1. Meeting summaries — Paste transcript, get structured notes
  2. Email drafts — Describe intent, edit the output
  3. Document Q&A — Upload a PDF, ask questions about it

Once you're comfortable with the basics, explore more integrated workflows like automated research pipelines or AI-assisted project planning.

Common Pitfalls

Watch Out For
  • Over-automation — Some tasks benefit from human friction and reflection
  • Quality blindness — AI output often looks polished but may be subtly wrong
  • Context collapse — The AI doesn't know what it doesn't know about your situation
  • Confidentiality — Be careful what data you share with AI services

Last updated on Dec 18, 2025