AI for Productivity

There is a lot of discussion within the HE sector around the use of AI in teaching, learning, and assessment; however, AI is a valuable tool beyond learning spaces and can boost and support productivity.

Below are some suggestions for using AI to help support and boost productivity in your day-to-day work. Using AI in this way helps to make repetitive but essential tasks more efficient so that you have more time to focus on the more complex or creative and engaging parts of your work. However, please be aware of the guidance relating to the strengths and limitations of using AI which can be found on this site.

Strengths and Limitations of Generative AI

Drafting emails

With the prominence of emails in working culture, a large proportion of time is spent composing emails. Using AI to support in the composing of emails can turn a 15-minute task into a 5-minute one with the right prompt. Using the compose setting on Bing Chat, select the Email output, along with your preferred tone and length, provide a prompt containing the relevant details, and the generative AI will fill in the rest.

Below is an example of this approach, which took less than two minutes to create. You can see how the AI has provided additional useful information that was not included in the prompt. It is important to review these details and adjust as needed (for example, the suggested meeting time).

The following exchange was carried out using Bing Chat Enterprise [10th November 2023].

Example email

Prompt:

Compose an email inviting colleagues to join a working group for the planning of the Digital Education (known as DigiEd) 2024 conference.

The group will meet twice, six weeks apart with the first meeting taking place on Wednesday 15th November. People need to confirm their interest by 5pm on Friday 10th November.

Output:

Subject: Invitation to join DigiEd 2024 planning working group

Dear colleagues,

I am writing to invite you to join a working group for the planning of the Digital Education (DigiEd) 2024 conference. This is a great opportunity to contribute to the development of the conference program and network with other professionals in the field of digital education.

The working group will meet twice, six weeks apart, with the first meeting taking place on Wednesday 15th November from 10am to 12pm. The second meeting will be scheduled closer to the date. The meetings will be held online via Zoom and the link will be sent to you once you confirm your interest.

If you are interested in joining the working group, please reply to this email by 5pm on Friday 10th November. Please also indicate your preferred topics or themes for the conference program.

I look forward to hearing from you and working with you on this exciting project.

Sincerely,

Your name

Data analysis

Generative AI is very good at spotting trends in data and can process large volumes of data quickly. Inputting your data into the model and asking it to identify the key trends can save you valuable time in analysing the data and enable you to focus on the more complex part of writing it into a report or preparing a presentation explaining the significance of this data.

Using Bing Chat Enterprise will ensure that any data you input into the model is protected and will be deleted after your sessions. However, please still be mindful of your use of sensitive data and only input essential information.

Project/Timeline Planning

Project management and timeline planning is a complex and time-consuming task. By providing an overview of your project and the date on which it’s due, AI can identify a breakdown of activities, divided into phases or categories, and establish a timeline for the project delivery. This approach assists with the complex process of project planning and Gantt charting, particularly for anyone who is new to project management and establishing timelines.

Producing Images

Bing Chat’s integration with Dal-E 3 means you can now as the tool to produce custom images based on your own requirements and design ideas. Producing an image in this way allows for greater levels of customisation and allows you to select an image without having to look into copyright restrictions. However, you should always acknowledge the use of AI and list the tool as the source of creation.

Research Assistant

If you need to learn about and understand a particular topic within a short space of time, AI makes for an excellent research assistant. You can, for example, ask AI to provide definitions or provide a list of resources or texts and even to provide synopses of these tasks. While this does not replace in-depth research, it can help you develop a fundamental understanding of a concept and some of its key points or principles in a short space of time.

Summarise meetings & content

Summarising content can save a lot of time when reviewing materials, researching or even just trying to summarise and collate actions from meetings. As an example you could take your transcript directly from your meeting, copy this into Bing chat AI, and ask it to summarise the key points and any actions, this could save you time with officering meetings and give you a good starting point to transfer into a document template. You could potentially look wider than meetings and focus on summarising content to help you understand agenda items or meeting minutes in more depth.