The AI Questions Everyone is Asking. ANSWERED

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0:35Before we get started, if you're enjoying reworking, make sure you're following or subscribing wherever you're listening. It helps us reach more people and means you'll never miss an episode. So this is Arts Tim Anything. Every week I hear from people facing all sorts of challenges about work, business, money, confidence, relationships, and those moments where you're not quite sure what your next step should be. now this week's episode is all about something i use in my day-to-day and that i firmly believe should be used and implemented into our work it's changing the way we work already faster than almost anything we've seen before ai i know you've heard that a few times already right now depending on who you ask ai is either going to transform your career or it's going to steal your job the truth is probably somewhere in the middle like every new technology it's not about replacing people.

1:23It's about learning how to work alongside it. The people who stay curious, keep learning and aren't afraid to experiment are usually the ones who come out ahead. So today I'll be answering your questions on AI and I'll go into further detail into how I use it and where I think it can genuinely save your time. Now I should say I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm not a therapist, financial advisor or career coach but if I can help you think about something differently and leave you feeling a little more confident about your next step then hopefully we're doing something useful all right let's get into today's questions

2:03we've got a question in from mike in glasgow who got in touch on instagram at reworking podcast he says this you talk a lot about ai how do you actually use ai in your day-to-day life and how would you recommend someone get started? How do you go about setting it up? Listen, Mike, great question. I do use AI an awful lot. It is, I think now it's part of everything I do. I can't think of one thing that I don't do in a work environment and also in a personal life that I don't use AI for. And I explain why that's the case. For me, I love the fact that I can get multiple pieces of information very quickly and importantly, a different perspective on a decision I might be making, a thought I might be having, or a plan of action that we might be taking forward.

2:51And having that check and balance against my things is very important, particularly as I sometimes go in the wrong direction. So the more hands on deck, the better. But I think what you need to think about, Mike, for you personally, is don't try to think about learning AI. AI is massive, it's big, it's huge. There's loads of things that could take you down many different avenues. What I think you should do is think about one thing that you are either struggling with, you need some help with, or you are finding is taking a lot of your time. That's a repetitive process. If you can identify one of those three things, then you might be able to leverage AI to help you deal with the problem quicker, identify some options and solutions, or it gives you a different perspective on what you're doing and automates something so you've got less time wasted on a repetitive action and more time focused on doing something.

3:48I'll give you an example. I have lots of meetings with lots of different people. And I also have a memory that sometimes acts a bit like a sieve. Not a great combination. But if I record all of my meetings with the people's permission, using an AI platform like Fireflies, for example, that allows me to capture everything that happened in the meeting, all of the actions that were recorded and deadlines, and then automate the collation of all of those things immediately after the meeting. Not only does it give it to me, it also gives it to the person I had the meeting with. So both people are on exactly the same page.

4:26After then, I can analyse the feedback I've got from the transcript to see what actions were necessary. and in a week later when I've had several other meetings, I can refer back to it as a true reflection of what happened. And for me, who is dealing with multiple things on the go, that's incredibly helpful. So you might want to think about the one or two things that constantly always happen and take a lot of your time and then see if there's an artificial intelligence platform or process that can be applied to that to help it do one of three things. Can it make it happen quicker? so you can get through a process quicker?

5:04Can it reduce the friction or the heavy workload that might be associated with it? Or can it be used to leverage to earn you some more money or earn back some more time? And that's the way I use to decide whether I'm going to use AI or not in whatever I'm doing. So hopefully that gets you the answer to your first part of your question. The next one was, how do I go about setting up? Well, the great thing with lots of these platforms, they need you to use them. So they have really comprehensive guides about what you need to do, how you set it up and how you get started. The other thing I found myself doing an awful lot is getting reviews from people who have used platforms beforehand.

5:44And I would go on platforms like YouTube or even, lo and behold, I'm pretending I'm going to be cool for one second, TikTok. And then I can get the feedback on what people have used these platforms for and see if I can apply that to my own situation. Because that's the most important thing, Mike. I could tell you everything I do but you'd probably get bored halfway through because it's not relevant to you what you need to do is think about what's important for you what takes up a lot of time write all of those things down and then go and search could AI help me to make this more efficient that's hopefully useful for you and I look forward to meeting your agents you might build using some of the AI to automate some of those processes we've got a question in from Rachel from Liverpool love Liverpool you'll never work alone and you can tell I'm a red rather than a blue, but I love all colours equally.

6:32She got in touch with us via Instagram at reworkingpodcast. And she asked the question, what's one productivity habit that's genuinely changed the way you work? That's really interesting. I think there's a number of things that I've done that have changed the way I've worked. I think the most important thing for me is at the end of any day, write down a list of things that I want to achieve the next day. Because what that does, it helps me to stay focused. if you're anything like me Rachel you've got a myriad of things that you could be doing and multiple tabs open in your head demands from family friends children partner loads of other people colleagues who are asking you stuff and I can sometimes find that quite overwhelming where there's so much happening what I'd want you to do and what because what I find is most useful at the end of every single day I write down what I want to do the next day and I prioritize that in the first thing I do in the next day for the morning.

7:28What you can also do, and a great hack, is use one of the large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude. And if you put a project together, which is all of Rachel's to-do list, at the end of every day, rather than writing on a piece of paper or a post-it note or the back of envelope, which might get lost or have a cup of tea spilled on it and you don't know what you've written, jot it all down in one of these platforms. And the reason I like that is that you don't have to only type it down. You can actually speak into a processor on your phone, on a microphone or whatever. Make it as automatic as possible and easy as possible to write down your list.

8:10And at the end of every day in your project, which is Rachel's to-do list, say, I want to do this tomorrow, X, Y and Z. And then in the morning, you could ask that particular project in that large language model you got, what's my priority thing for this morning and interestingly it can give you a perspective of what you should prioritize and offer any help with those particular tasks so one thing I found most useful list stuff down use large language models to help you organize those things you've got to do and then make sure you do it first thing in the morning before you get any distractions around anything else and make sure you repeat the process at the end of the day write down what you've got to do.

8:52One thing I'd advise though, don't feel guilty if you don't get through all the to-do list. It's okay. Every day is a new start where you can say, okay, now I'm going to do this. But if you're finding things always constantly slipping, maybe you're going to need some assistance to help you get through the things that you want to do. But that worked for me. It's really clear. Another thing, Rachel, you might find useful, because I know I did, I scared my PA one day when I first got a new PA and I showed her how many emails I had in my inbox. It was 23 ,000 plus. She nearly fell on the floor. What I used as a productivity hack is I used Claude to be able to create an agent.

9:29Now, it sounds very scary, but I'll come back to it, which was able to analyse all of my emails, sort out the priority order for ones that were coming in in terms of urgent or come from specific people and advise me what I should focus on and help me to organise what I needed to do. It also went through every single email and found if there was a word unsubscribe or click here or other things like that, it put them into a spam folder. So it took them all away from me. So sometimes I use artificial intelligence platforms to help me organise and siphon out some of the noise. Because the thing that most hampers my productivity is the overwhelm from multiple requests on my time.

10:10And if I can get some form of artificial intelligence support to reduce the noise, it allows me to be more productive because I'm not worried about missing an email or something in my spam folder when it should be in my normal inbox. I'm just worried about the things I need to focus on. That list I've done at the end of every day, I focus on the next day. I did mention a thing about agent. I don't want you to get scared and think it's iRobot coming to take over and get rid of everybody in the world. An agent is an automatic system or process which happens using artificial intelligence. So, for example, this agent was a series of tasks where I'd say, open up my inbox, first task, go through all of my inbox, second task, and then start to organise the information that you receive by the email priority list that I would have given it.

11:03the agent is just a autonomous amount of actions that has taken place by the computer so don't think that there's some magic robot in the background saying what do you want me to do that was a really rubbish robot voice but it's more so getting the computer to automatically do some things and boxing that under an umbrella which i would call an agent

11:31okay so we've got a question in from louis from brighton who got in touch on email at reworking at bowermedia.co.uk he said there's so much ai out there how do you know what actually is worth using and what's just hype there are so many platforms out there to use are there any ai platforms you pay for any you would steer clear of so i'll split this in half louis because that's a big question but an important one the first part was how would you find out with all the noise which ai platforms are actually worth using and what is just hype i think the easiest thing to focus on when you're deciding what's useful and what's not is what do you need the first question you've got to ask is not what AI platform I should use, is what do I need?

12:19Because being clear about what you need support with will probably help you find the right tool to assist you in the actual execution of whatever you're set out to do. Because that's the important thing with AI. AI is a tool. It doesn't replace people, doesn't replace human beings or human creativity or thought. It assists and augments those things that are already there. And that's the way I'd want you to see it, Lewis. So once you've written down what you want to tackle, then you can start looking at what best tool will support that goal. Because if you want to edit a video, for example, it may be useful to use a platform like Claude, but it may be better to use one like Nano Banana or something.

13:05If you want to write a perfect email or improve the email that you've already produced, because that's what I'd advise you to do, then it may be that you want to use a platform like Copilot because that will help you in your writing. It's very interesting if you've used any of the big email providers like Outlook or Google Mail. At the bottom of emails now, you'll automatically see an automatic option to reply to the email that's in there because it would have analysed all of your previous email responses and suggested ones that are going forward. So think about it like the automatic selection of the next word when you're writing a sentence.

13:45So there's a lot of AI out there, but you need to think about what do I need to help me to be better, to function faster or more efficiently. And that's going to give you the prompt to go and find the right piece of technology to support you rather than wading through everything. Your second part of your question, Lewis, is equally interesting. You said there's so many platforms out there. Are there any AI platforms you pay for and what would you steer clear of? So I pay for several platforms, Lewis, but that's mainly because I use them for work. So I don't think that's going to be totally relevant for you.

14:20What I'd say, if you are thinking of paying for any platform, do a quick test. If you pay for a platform, count the amount of pounds that you pay for that platform, right? And then work out if the output from using that platform saves you time or makes you money. is it going to make you more money than what you've spent? Or is it going to save you a time equivalent of money more than what you've spent using the system? And I'll break that down further. If you are going to use it like I do to analyse your emails and every morning it's going to look through your email account and highlight the priority emails you need to focus on and it does that within, say, 60 seconds.

15:08and it usually takes you over an hour every single day to process your email because you want to read every single one, see where it's coming from, work out what they've said beforehand and then put it into a folder to work on before you've even written a reply. I then work out what your hourly rate of pay is because if your hourly rate of pay is more than the£20 a month that you might pay for one of these platforms, then using the artificial intelligence platform to reduce your need to spend an hour sifting through emails is actually a cost benefit to you. I'd encourage it to be done. So make sure when you're thinking about should I spend money on a platform, be clear what you're getting in return for the spend.

15:51Don't just spend because it's the best thing and you're going to get faster processing time, etc. Because lots of these platforms offer a very, very useful free version that will answer most people's questions and be sufficient for most individuals. What you need to work out is, if I pay for this, am I going to get more back than I've actually paid for by using it? Because if the answer is no, just use the free service and you'll be fine. So you aren't specifically, are there any platforms that I pay for? Now, my team pay for several to help create business solutions for others and our business Eternal in Bristol uses a lot of very sophisticated tools.

16:33The ones I use personally though and pay for are both ChatGPT, I pay a premium on that, but I use and spend more money personally on Claude and the reason for that is that lots of my work requires quite strategic thinking and sometimes I have to do that confidentially and what the paid service allows me to do is do lots of research really quickly and importantly for me get feedback on suggestions that I'm thinking about doing next. So the payment allows me to have a safe space as safe as data centres in America or wherever they might be based can be to have a safe space to volunteer some information with a suggestion of what my actions will be and receive feedback based on what other people have done in similar scenarios.

17:22So I find that really useful around giving me a different perspective on an idea, but also sometimes sparking a bit of creativity and producing something that I hadn't thought of that I can then take and take advantage of. When I'm thinking about the ones I actually steer clear of, there are a lot of platforms that are claiming to be AI, which are just masks or covers over the main popular platforms like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. So what I'd want you to be able to do is if you're thinking about which ones to steer clear of, make sure you're not paying for something that's just a wrapper with one of the big platforms sitting underneath it, because you might as well go direct and just pay for the big platform rather than paying some middleman to take advantage of your money.

18:12It's been really interesting to get these questions about artificial intelligence. And I think and would encourage everybody listening to ask more questions. There is a lot of false conversations creating a lot of fear amongst people. Is AI going to take over? Are we all becoming redundant because AI is going to do all of our jobs? And I think the honest truth is nobody knows. We are in the middle though of one of the greatest revolutions which I would encourage you to be part of rather than be a bystander. so if there's anything that worries you about ai firstly send us some questions we'd be more than happy to answer them i love it but i want you really to go and do the research for yourself to see what's actually happening because i don't think that anybody's actually going to lose their job because of ai what you're going to lose your job is because you're going to come up against somebody else who's doing the same thing as you and they know ai so my advice to you don't be intimidated by AI.

19:09Be curious. You don't need to know everything about it and you certainly don't need to become an expert overnight. But just start experimenting, ask questions, try things, see what helps because the future of work isn't about competing with technology. It's about learning how you can make it work for you using technology. If something from today's episode resonated with you, share it with someone, a friend, a colleague, your partner, a family member. This is a new era we're heading into and the capabilities AI has to transform both work and everyday life is immense. Thanks for all your questions.

19:43Keep sending them in via social media or email at reworking at bowermedia.co.uk. And don't forget to follow the show. I'll see you next time on Reworking.