Artificial intelligence is supposed to make your work easier. But figuring out how to use it effectively can be a challenge.
Over the past several years, AI models have continued to evolve, with plenty of tools for specific tasks such as note-taking, coding and writing. Many workers spent last year experimenting with AI, applying various tools to see what actually worked. And as employers increasingly emphasize AI in their business, they’re also expecting workers to know how to use it.
“I think 2025 was just a taste of what’s to come. Folks were figuring out how to deploy AI for productivity,” said Wade Foster, CEO of workflow automation platform Zapier.
The number of people using AI for work is growing, according to a recent poll by Gallup. The percentage of U.S. employees who used AI for their jobs at least a few times a year hit 45 percent in the third quarter of last year, up five percentage points from the previous quarter. The top use cases for AI, according to the poll, was to consolidate information, generate ideas and learn new things.
The Washington Post spoke to workers to learn how they’re getting the best use out of AI. Here are five of their best tips. A caveat: AI may not be suitable for all workers, so be sure to follow your company’s policy.
Automate your inbox
Managing your email is a pain. And while email providers offer tools to help, AI can do even more, Foster said.
Create an AI agent or use an AI app that can sort, organize and prioritize your inbox based on simple commands. Think of it as creating a complex set of rules that automate which folders emails go to, how they’re labeled and whether they’re marked as urgent. Instead of creating a rigid list of keywords or contacts, use natural language to identify topics or issues you need to track.
AI can also automatically draft responses to specific types of emails you regularly get. For example, AI can draft a response directing people to the career website anytime someone asks about job openings, Foster said.
“You can get pretty darn close to an automated inbox,” he said.
To automate, you’ll need tools by services like Zapier, which offers limited free versions and premium options, or SaneBox and Superhuman, both of which have tiered pay options.
Create a personal assistant
AI can be particularly useful in getting you up to speed, prioritizing tasks and tracking progress, several workers said.
Helen Lee Kupp, co-founder and CEO of virtual community and nonprofit Women Defining AI, said she built an “AI chief of staff” at the beginning of the year to prioritize tasks. She speaks to Claude voice mode in the mornings, which then structures her day. To build it, she asked the bot to create an AI assistant and provided a list of parameters and attached work documents. She then edited the instructions and pasted it into a Claude Project, generating a customized bot she can reuse.
“It’s really nice in the morning to be able to dump whatever’s on my brain and have a first draft of here’s how we think of priorities,” she said.
Another option: Build a daily briefing agent that sends an email with a to-do list and important updates from your email and calendar, Foster said. To do this, make a custom GPT (you’ll need ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month) by clicking “explore GPTs” on the sidebar and then “create.” To automate your briefing, connect ChatGPT to your email and calendar, but beware of security and privacy risks. Prompt it to email you every morning with specific details around the information you want, Foster said. You can also create a daily to-do app. You may need additional tools or a hosting service to do this, but ChatGPT can provide instructions.
To avoid giving ChatGPT access to your accounts, manually upload your calendar, task list or select communications and prompt it to prioritize from there.
Build what you need
To solve specific problems, several workers said they built custom apps and tools using chatbots and simple commands to generate code, a concept known as vibe coding. Michael Frank, co-founder and CEO of agentic AI risk platform Radiant Intel, said he’s used Claude Code and app builders like Google Antigravity to build an app that aggregates local news for him. But people can build apps to help them learn a new skill or provide feedback on their work to improve, he said. Think about your mistakes or time-intensive tasks and build something for that, he said.
“These are not going to radically transform anyone’s life, but can it make you 5, 10 or 15 percent more productive? Absolutely,” he said.
Lee Kupp said she’s used AI platform Gumloop, which has a limited free option and doesn’t require coding knowledge to build an AI agent that monitors a Slack channel for website feedback and logs problems into a tracker. For Alexander K. Moore, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Replit and Claude Code helped him quickly build customized webpages to more efficiently conduct surveys.
You can also build a customized dashboard on Claude to track sales, customer satisfaction, the performance of a product or feature, or other key metrics, said Jhalak Rawat, chief operating officer at manufacturing AI start-up Soff. Tell it to provide action items to improve them. Use the dashboard to help get your next promotion, she added.
“It’s a good way to show the work you do,” she said. And “it takes one prompt, which takes 10 minutes to write.”
Warm your cold intro
Before pitching a new client or connecting with a new colleague or other professional contacts, use AI to find commonalities to break the ice, Rawat said.
She uses Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser, to find commonalities between her and another person based on their LinkedIn profiles and information available on Google. She once was able to connect to the CEO of a company she wanted to target because Comet told her that he was a pizza lover who once led a pizza company — a detail buried in a podcast. That tasty tidbit provided a way to warm her cold intro. This can also help when people are trying to meet new contacts for a career switch.
Enhance your meeting notes
Meeting notes and transcriptions from video meeting providers usually fall by the wayside, several workers said. But they’re more likely to refer to their notes if they actually take them.
So they use Granola, an AI-powered notepad that enriches meeting notes without an AI bot showing up as a participant (there’s an option to notify others it’s in use). It transcribes the meeting and follows the structure of your notes, adding detail and action items. You can even write notes before the meeting or ask questions about a meeting or explore trends within your meetings. Foster said he’s used it to identify topics for social media posts within his conversations. Granola can also coach people, he said.
“People take it as face value,” he said. “With AI, it has a neutrality to it.”
One bonus tip: Make your AI chatbots less sycophantic, which Moore says results in straightforward feedback. In ChatGPT, go to personalization options by clicking your name in the lower left corner of the screen. In the “custom instructions” and “more about you” sections, emphasize accuracy, clear reasoning and explanation over flattery, praise and agreeing with you. Tell it to push back and be blunt. Moore has a sample prompt you can use.
The toughest part about learning how to effectively use AI at work is starting, workers said. But once you get going, it gets easier.
“Don’t overthink it,” Lee Kupp said. “Pick one [large language model] and get started.”
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