AI Tools to Boost Productivity

A very basic introduction. With some Enterprise and SMB twists. See polls at the end.

🎧 Audio Intro: 2:58

Hello Everyone,

In my own voyage into AI coverage and curation of the last three years, I have been reluctant to cover “AI Tools” in spite of its popularity among AI Newsletter Creators. I’m a pragmatist, and frankly a lot of the AI tools in 2023 were simply not that good or refined. Many that I tried didn’t do what they claimed to be able to do and weren’t that useful.

But slowly as times goes on, in 2024 or looking ahead to 2025, we will begin to see sustainable use cases with improved category leaders for enterprise applications and enhancements in real-world use cases for works settings, task automation, time saving and performance enhancement (even if in limited ways). This means I’ll be starting to cover more AI Tools in this Newsletter. Before Agentic AI begins to impress, the first wave of Generative AI tools are improving.

If you’d like to get the best of what I offer in this domain:

Support and Dive Deeper

Support my work for as little as $2 a week. 🎓📚💡

Full disclosure: I have zero affiliate links in this article.

While I am skeptical that AI boosts productivity, or will anytime soon in an economically meaningful way for the collective as is claimed in the marketing of several major corporations, that doesn’t mean as workers, leaders and CEOs we cannot adopt some of these AI tools in our own lives, workflows and daily tasks.

Learning AI Tools with a Health Skepticism

For the record, I am not a big believer in Copilots, Chatbots or “GPT Stores”, but that doesn’t mean skipping learning, not adapting and not investing some time, effort and curiosity to try the best of them.

If we are optimists, we might believe that we are about to enter a period where “Agentic AI” might actually make some real headway with AI boosting productivity, time will tell. This might also turn out to be a fad, gimmick and a disappointing marketing narrative.

In critical areas like in coding and for software engineers, this (productivity improvements) is already the case in mid 2024. In this article I’ll cover some tools and industries and try to help you adapt your way of thinking about this, in case you feel behind the curve.

Hampton Survey

Sam Parr’s Hampton did an AI Survey of Businesses that’s somewhat interesting.

💡 AI Tool Takeaways:

Share this post:

Explore….

MEETINGS & TIME MANAGEMENT

• 💯🚀🎯 Meetings & Scheduling: Fathom, Fireflies, Rewatch, Otter.ai

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

• 💰 Sales & Marketing: Factors.ai, Jasper, Clay, PowerIn.

CODING AND DEVELOPMENT

• </> Code & Development: GitHub Copilot, Cursor.sh, Crew.ai, Tavily, Pypestream.

WRITING & CONTENT GENERATION

• ✏️ Writing & Editing: Grammarly, Hemingway, Lex, Superhuman, HoppyCoppy, Read.ai.

DESIGN AND VISUAL MARKETING

• 🎨 Design: Adobe Generative Fill, Beautiful.ai, Gamma, Canva.

MULTI-MEDIA CREATION

• 🎧 Audio & Video: Descript, Screen.studio, Riverside, Synthesia, Opus Clips, MeetSteno.

WORKFLOW AUTOMATION

• 🛠️ Workflow Automation: Zapier, Make.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS & SUPPORT

• 💁 Customer Support: SupportAgent.ai, Intercom, Siena CX.

EVENT 🌟

🎉 Lead with AI Course by FlexOS (cohort #2) 🗓️

This is not a paid sponsor or an affiliate, but FlexOS recently released their new April Top 100 list, they have a new cohort for their May 13th course. It’s called :A Revolutionary AI + Productivity Course for Founders, Executives, and Leaders
– with LIVE coaching and free AI tools.

Lead with AI - Course for C-Suite Leaders

Price: $450 US.

🚀 For founders and executives who finds the day ending with tasks still unchecked.

📌 Three live sessions and daily self-study for two weeks to finally understand AI and build your own team of AI tools and ChatGPT agents. So that’s about $30/day of self-study which seems reasonable if you are committed and allot some time. Otherwise that’s $150 per live session, which doesn’t sound so bad either.

💪🏼Your chance to transition from overworked to hyper-efficient, by copying (FlexOS’s) proven playbook. I’m not getting any commision for signups, but some of my audience I have noticed are leaders, CEOs and C-suite professionals. I don’t think such tools will improve your productivity necessarily in any significant manner (needless to say not by 50% as is claimed in some of their copy).

I do not personally endorse this course (since I’ve never tried it myself), it’s just for your information purposes only.

If you’d like to try the above course on May 13th, click below.

What can AI Do?

🧠 Share your favorite AI Tools with us:

Tell us your favorites in our Chat Thread here.

What can AI Do Again?

Zoom in: (View on Desktop)

Image: Kelvin Mu, LinkedIn.

While we should be skeptical of AI boosting us at work, imagining how it might improve our performance, even on an individual basis and in narrow ways is fascinating and worthy of careful consideration and outright speculation, experimentation and for some of us, determined trial and error. Chances are, you’ve already tested this for tasks you do a lot each week.

How can Generative AI Help Professionals be More Productive?

Some of these will sound broad and generic, but think about how your work-life workflows actually work and how much time can be saved with the right tools.

◾ More efficient communication and collaboration

◾ Quicker admin and internal comms

◾ Eliminating or helping to speed up/automate repetitive tasks

◾ Code suggestion, translation and improvement (software-editing)

◾ Code testing and bug detection

◾ Personalized development environments and enhanced documentation

◾ Automated and AI-assisted customer service and customer success

◾ Time management: smart scheduling and meeting note documentation

◾ Writing, editing and Email management assistance

◾ Research, product ideation, and brainstorming

◾ And so many other interesting uses cases that are starting to become valid for particular industries like software engineers, legal professionals, academics or healthcare clinicians and physicians.

How do Enterprises Adopt Generative AI?

---

Insights from Hampton Report, Continued:

Roles of Business that will be Least Impacted by AI?

• Strategy & Consulting

• Trades & In-person

• Sales

• Account Management

• Design, UI, Product, etc…

Roles of the Business that will be Most Impacted by AI?

• Customer Service

• Content Creation

• Design & Creative

• Marketing & Paid Media

• Software Engineering & Development

• Data Analytics & Transcription

• Sales

• Administrative tasks

◾ AI Coding Tools

---

These are some tools from 2023, but since then many more coding related tools have flooded the market!

◾ Top AI Productivity Tools

---

◾ Top AI Video Tools

---

• 🔥 If tools for productivity is a focus of yours, you don’t want to miss out. I put a lot of hours into this.

• 🔖 Full disclosure: if you don’t like lists of tools and infographics, this might not be the article for you. This isn’t a primer, it’s more like a resource page. So bookmarket it.

• 🛒 I’m giving out free complimentary subscriptions (“comps”) to those readers who consistently share my work on Notes. If you want to support but cannot pay premium, that’s the most helpful. To restack, click the circle-arrow icon wherever you see a post, note, or comment worth sharing.