How to use Artificial Intelligence to boost office productivity

The implementation of Artificial Intelligence can actually boost your productivity level!

Just this week during an email conversation, I asked a colleague when they were free to schedule a call. The next email I received was from an “Amy Ingram” asking if Wednesday at 3:00pm worked for me. I naturally replied with “that’s perfect.” She let me know I would get a calendar invitation as a reminder. All good! “Amy” took care of it and “Amy” isn’t even a real person. There was nothing weird about my conversation with Amy; it was hard to believe it was an AI bot.

This is just one of the very few ways I’ve personally started to interact more and more with AI bots and tools for work. I’m curious to see which AI tools actually lead to better productivity and which are just cool for a bit and then die out. Can robots really take over tasks for us?

To get a better understanding, I had the pleasure of getting to speak with Silicon Valley’s Constellation Research VP and Principal Analyst, Alan Lepofsky a few days ago. Alan’s been at the forefront of watching AI move into the business world over the last few years. Alan gave his thoughts about how AI will help employees in the workplace and some areas to look for new developments in.

As exciting as it is, there’s still the question of how AI is starting to fit into the workplace now to actually help employees be more productive. At Hibox, we’ve been implementing AI not only into our platform, but also trying out new tools in office as our team grows.

Here are some ways we’ve made new hot AI tools actually work for us and increase our productivity:

Delegate menial tasks to a bot

What we use: X.ai
How we use it: scheduling meetings in house and scheduling sales calls.

The back and forth and trying to follow an email thread when setting up meetings and calls took a ton of time out of our day. On average, employees spend about 6 hours a day dealing with email. X.ai’s “Amy Ingram” is a virtual meeting scheduling assistant you can use in any email thread to take care of the back and forth, and instead automatically schedule meetings into your calendar. We use Amy for scheduling meetings both in and out of house.

Get a 24/7 permanent marketing intern

What we use: Growbots
How we use it: lead generation for our sales team.

The amount of tedious work in any marketing position is so overlooked. Which is unfortunate, because it’s such a creativity-driven role. The concept of AI taking over the menial tasks for our marketing employees to free up their time for creative work sounded great. We were a little sceptical at first because any inaccuracies in marketing automation can lead to awkwardness. Luckily, Growbots nailed the job. Growbots is a lead generation AI tool that helps identify and deliver you a spreadsheet of relevant leads so you can focus on sales. It’s freed up hours of time for our sales team so they can focus on the people (and money) part.

Have a bot do the reading for you: this is how AI boosts our productivity

What we use: Apollo
How we use it: content research, industry and demographic research, staying on top of trends across the internet faster.

I’m the content manager for Hibox. A lot of my job – and plenty of others at our fast-paced company – is to read and catch up on what’s going on across multiple industries. But the amount of content out there I’d like to be able to absorb is astronomical. So, I started using Apollo. Apollo gives me summaries of articles so I can reference from far more sources, much faster than I could before. This makes my research for writing content a breeze.

These AI tools take over little tasks you didn’t think would take up so much of your time, but we’ve experienced huge increases in productivity and time saved just trying them out where we can. That’s the great thing about these little tools: they’re versatile to use in all different areas of your company, or just for yourself.