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One creative way Kristin Moore, a technical product manager at PERQ, a digital marketing platform for property management companies, uses AI is to help ensure she understands her colleagues\u2019 technically advanced conversations. If she\u2019s in a meeting and engineers talk through a topic in a way that she doesn\u2019t grasp, she can upload the recorded conversation through Claude, AI assistant built by Anthropic, and ask it to summarize what she needs to do to follow up.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt picks up on all of that terminology that I don\u2019t understand, and it can simplify it into something that I can consume,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n
She also asks the AI tool to read through emails, support tickets, recorded meetings and conversations to determine what her clients would like her company to build.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely freed up hours and hours of my week,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n
Kyle Weimar, an elementary school teacher for Charter Schools USA, serves as coordinator of a Florida school\u2019s multi-tiered support system, a position that involves creating plans to help children performing at the bottom 20% of the student population.<\/p>\n
In that role, he uploads test scores, report cards and health information into his school district\u2019s AI tool. Then he asks it before meetings to help brainstorm what the district can do to help each child.<\/p>\n
Weimar has also used AI to grade papers. He says he can upload 100 to an AI agent, give it a scoring guide, and let it grade and give students instant feedback. \u201cI can do that in 30 minutes, whereas it would have taken me a week before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Teachers are really overwhelmed with work, \u201cso any tools that we can use to make that a little bit more viable, we\u2019re really excited about using,\u201d Weimar said.<\/p>\n
Ashley Smith, head of marketing at HireQuest, a staffing and recruiting company with about 400 franchises, used Claude to build a dashboard that analyzes website traffic data and social media trends. It reports what the HireQuest\u2019s followers are reacting to or ignoring, and Smith uses the information to inform franchisees about how to win more business, she said.<\/p>\n
When members of her sales team attended a huge manufacturing trade show recently, she asked them to take screenshots of the companies they wanted to pursue. She uploaded the images to an AI platform and prompted it to build a list including company names and, based on press releases and stock reports, insights on what their staffing needs might be over the next 18 to 24 months.<\/p>\n
The hours Smith said she saved by handing off that research task to AI let her spend more one-on-one time with her franchisees.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI has not replaced anything. It\u2019s only expanded what we\u2019re able to offer to our franchisees,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIt allows us to do things that, candidly, we just weren\u2019t able to deliver even as short as two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A design leader at Georgia Pacific, the pulp and paper company that makes Dixie cups, Quilted Northern toilet paper and other consumer products, says he uses AI to create quick visuals. When brainstorming how to modernize the Brawny paper towel brand, for example, Andrew Markle said his team asked AI to depict what the man shown on their packaging would look like with a longer or shorter beard.<\/p>\n
Using AI helped people on the team review ideas more quickly, and the tool also offered predictions for how target consumers might respond, Markle said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not replacing the creative eye of what\u2019s good and what\u2019s appropriate for our business,\u201d Markle said. \u201cUltimately, we knew we were going to partner with our ad agency. We have an illustrator that\u2019s going to do the final vision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kenneth Lynch, a special education coach in Tulsa, Oklahoma, teaches developmentally disabled students life skills to help them live independently. He uses AI to develop quizzes as learning materials. For example, when he was working with a student who wanted to pursue automotive work, Lynch uploaded a book of mechanical instructions to an AI tool that generated quizzes for each chapter.<\/p>\n
He is more reluctant to trust AI when it comes to soliciting guidance on psychological conditions. \u201cWhen I look up different types of diagnosis and try to connect comorbid diagnoses together, it really struggles with understanding how those fit together,\u201d Lynch said.<\/p>\n
Ravi Pendse, the University of Michigan\u2019s chief information officer, has used AI to prepare for meetings by asking the tool to predict what questions he might get asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has made me a lot more efficient,\u201d Pendse said. \u201cIt gives me more time to focus on my own mental health and wellness.\u201d<\/p>\n
The University of Michigan also created an AI tutor that professors can tailor to help students with coursework material around-the-clock, he said. But Pendse is mindful to use AI responsibly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all should be thinking about how we ensure that AI does not erode our critical thinking skills, especially those of our children,\u201d Pendse said. \u201cAs we grew up, we learned from our mistakes. We wrote bad papers, and we got better.\u201d<\/p>\n
One way that Bob Jones, the university\u2019s assistant vice president of emerging technology and support services, uses AI is making sure his emails are succinct enough for the intended audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I\u2019m communicating about a particularly sticky topic, I want to make sure that I\u2019m neutral and thoughtful,\u201d Jones said. \u201cSo the idea of really assessing how I\u2019m presenting myself, AI is really good at that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n