Although there are many things artificial intelligence still can’t handle it well, one of its best uses is as a productivity tool to help you streamline your day. AI tools can help you complete some of the more mundane everyday work tasks faster, freeing you up to do more creative and thoughtful tasks.

Here are some of the best ways to incorporate AI into your work life without compromising the quality of your work.

Remember to always verify the information any AI tool spits out to you. Even when all you’ve asked it to do is summarize a document, AI is known to hallucinate and make up details that are not accurate.

Create notes about almost anything with Microsoft Copilot

Confronted with an enticingly long (and boring) working document or a 300-slide presentation that you just don’t have time to read all the way through? Microsoft AI tool in the browser, copilotcan help

Copilot is free, accessible as an app and in the Microsoft Bing browser. Once you’ve loaded the web page you want to summarize, click the Copilot icon in the top right corner of your browser and enter what you want Copilot to focus on when creating notes.

You can also ask Copilot to extract specific information you’re looking for from a presentation or long document. Don’t forget to double-check the accuracy of your Copilot summaries.

See Us step-by-step guide on using Copilot to take notes.

Get an AI summary of your call. Zoom

If you’ve just been in another one of those Zoom meetings that could have been an email and you’ve gotten a little carried away, Zoom itself now has AI tools to help you remember what just happened.

Zoom’s AI companion is included with all of the company’s paid video calling plans — prices start at $13.32 per month — and can be turned on so it takes real-time notes during meetings and shares action items with you.

During live meetings, hosts can turn on the Meeting Summary, which can be shared via team chat. AI Companion can answer your dating questions, such as catching up with a chat if you join late, and record your ending which has been divided into “chapters” based on each topic discussed.

Behold what you need to know about using Zoom AI Companion.

Improve your email text with AI

Stuck on making a request or reply? Why not try the neurodivergent focused AI platform goblin.tools — which is currently free and paywall-free and has translation into 13 languages.

The “Formalizer” tab allows you to “Turn spicy thoughts into elegant ones or vice versa.” So, if you’ve hurriedly written a somewhat irritated reply to a co-worker or client, you can use the AI ​​tool’s drop-down menu and choose between useful settings such as more professional, more polite, and less burdensome, with an indicator of “ spicy level’ to choose from three chili settings for how strong you want your message to be delivered.

The AI ​​tool will reword your message in no time and you may be in a better mood afterwards.

Read more about CNET’s experiment with mitigating professional emails using AI.

An AI project manager

If you need a project manager to keep your big projects streamlined and moving forward, but struggle to switch between big picture and day-to-day planning mode, keeping other people’s workflows focused and on track, AI could be the answer.

Otter.ai can help you stay focused and organized. Its The GenAI meeting the tool is an assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet that records, transcribes, and “remembers” what was said in each meeting (just double-check that you got all the details right).

It also integrates with your other work apps, allowing you to connect your Otter.ai account to any Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and HubSpot accounts you use. It can then assign tasks to those platforms; send reminders and information; and post on Slack.

You can get Free, Pro ($10 per month) and Business ($20 per month) versions of Otter.ai.

Behold everything we learned while testing Otter.ai as a project manager.

Editing with AI-powered Grammarly

Not sure of your wording. and don’t have an in-house editor to help? Grammarly, available in Free, Premium ($12/month), and Business ($15/month) versions, can be activated for multiple desktop applications, including Google Docs, email, and Instagram.

If you use Instagram for business, for example, you can use Grammarly’s caption generator to find something in seconds or edit what you’ve written in a Google Doc or email. You can also customize the tone and formality of the suggestions it provides for your writing.

Behold what to know about using Grammarly AI to edit your paper.

Summarize a Google Doc with AI

If you do your best work in Google Docs and need a very quick summary of a long one, Google Twins will have you covered – although you’ll need a paid subscription to use the feature.

All you have to do is open a document, highlight the text you want to summarize, click help me write and then click summarize. (You can also select options like Tone, Bulletize, Elaborate, Concise, or Reword.)

Be sure to double-check that Gemini understood the document and what was important — and use the help document improvement feature to provide feedback on how accurate (or not) Google’s AI tool was.

Here is ours step-by-step guide to summarizing Google Docs with AIand you can also read the full CNET hands-on Gemini review hereas well as competitors’ AI tools Perplexity, copilot and Claude.

Write a job presentation with AI

If you are able to present during a meeting, the AI ​​tool goblin.tools can help you improve a rough presentation.

First, you can use the Estimator tool to get an approximate amount of time to create a presentation, then enter the rough draft into its Formalizer tool. Scroll through the drop-down menu to choose from 14 different tones, such as “more passionate” or “easier to read.”

If you’re missing some details that you might be asked about during your presentation, you can also use the Teacher tool to give you a crash course on a topic you’re unclear about — goblin.tools has access to OpenAI’s GPT models and his training data and gives you simple explanations on any subject you choose.

Finally, you can paste the resulting presentation into the Judge tool, which provides feedback on how your presentation looks. Just make sure you read and refine what the AI ​​suggests to make sure it makes sense to humans.

Here is ours complete guide on using AI to make a business presentation.

Create a PowerPoint slide deck with AI

Once you’ve used AI to say what you want to say in your presentation, another AI tool can help you make your slideshow in minutes instead of hours.

I tried the midrange plan AI predicts ($29 per month with a 14-day free trial) and entered a prompt with your image preferences, though you can also upload a PDF of all the featured words you want. It will create a mock design for you. and will separate your content into slides. Sometimes it chooses some strange images, so you will have to read everything and change the images and text.

It took about 30 minutes to make the necessary changes – much less time than creating a slide deck from scratch. Here they are all CNET tips on creating a PowerPoint slide deck with AI.

Automatic adjustments to your calendar

Movementan AI calendar assistant, can plan your day, schedule appointments, and create and refine to-do lists for you. One of the main reasons we tested it (free for a seven-day trial, then $12-$19 per month) was to try out the automatic calendar adjustments. Using knowledge of your previous behavior, Motion AI rearranges tasks when things change unexpectedly.

During the free trial, Motion slightly rearranged meetings and time blocks to fit what it assumed were our needs. However, one week was far too short for the AI ​​assistant to learn our behavior – it either needs a longer free trial to really see if the benefit is worth the cost, or you’ll need to sign up for a paid account for to offer it’s a shower It also may not automatically schedule the tasks in the order you’d like them to, meaning you’ll have to manually rearrange them anyway, although using the tool for a longer period of time can also fix this obstacle.

Check everything I found about Motion while testing it.

What didn’t work: Creating a company logo with AI

We tried to create a business logo using the text-to-image tool The middle of the journey. But if you’ve ever used an AI image generator, you’ll know that what I came up with was a bit too surreal to align with the business logo concept.

You can access Midjourney via Discord, with subscriptions to the AI ​​tool starting at $10. To use it, just write a description of how you want your logo or image to look. and then generate. If it happens to come back with an image you like, you can right-click to save.

Midjourney probably has a better chance of replacing stock photos – we don’t think designers have anything to worry about being replaced in the logo business anytime soon.

Here is ours experience using Midjourney to create a logo.