Technology is constantly evolving, and yet in many ways, it’s difficult to remember a time without certain tools. It’s hard to believe there was once a time when we needed to manually comb through our inbox and delete junk emails - much less remember when the internet wasn’t around at all! Research involved long days at a local library and perhaps a few encyclopedias, and instant messaging meant walking over and talking to someone.
These days, AI has become an integral part of many of our daily lives. People use it every day - perhaps throughout the day - to simplify tasks, save time, improve efficiency, and create compelling content. These apps have become so widespread that eventually it will be hard to imagine a time when we didn’t rely on AI.
In fact, according to Forbes, the AI market is projected to reach a staggering $407 billion by 2027. Over 60% of business owners say AI will increase productivity and 64% of business owners believe AI will improve customer relationships. On an individual level, users rely on AI most often to improve communications (such as email), answer financial questions, plan a travel itinerary, and prepare for job interviews.
If you’re impressed by those numbers and wondering how you can cash in on the latest AI innovations, we implore you to keep reading. As exciting as AI is, the whole landscape is complex and ever-evolving, and that means it can feel overwhelming. Rather than spending hours researching and wondering which programs can help you get ahead, browse these vetted suggestions. We’re sharing the best productivity-helpers so that you can narrow down your AI efforts to tech that will make the most impact for you.
What are AI Productivity Tools?
Productivity tools built on artificial intelligence are software applications that enhance efficiency, speed, and convenience in various tasks. These tools are best at automating repetitive tasks, assisting in decision-making, and providing insights based on data analysis. Here are some common areas that can be improved with AI:
- Task management- Tools that help organize, prioritize, and assign tasks, often integrating with calendars and email to streamline workflows.
- Virtual assistance - AI-driven assistants (like Siri or Google Assistant) that can schedule meetings, set reminders, and manage personal tasks.
- Content development - Tools that use AI to generate written content, design graphics, or create presentations, saving time in content production.
- Data analysis - Software that analyzes large datasets to extract insights, visualize trends, and aid in business intelligence.
- Email management- AI tools that can sort, prioritize, and respond to emails, helping users manage their inboxes more efficiently.
- Customer support - Chatbots and virtual agents that use natural language processing to assist customers, reducing the workload on human support teams.
- Collaboration and communication- Platforms that facilitate team collaboration, often incorporating AI features for better communication and project tracking.
- Time management and scheduling - Tools that analyze how time is spent on tasks, offering suggestions for productivity improvements.
These tools aim to streamline processes, reduce manual effort, and enhance overall productivity in personal and professional settings.
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Task Management
Everyone’s day is composed of a series of tasks, whether personal or professional. On any given day, these tasks can become overwhelming. Task managers can help with that. This type of productivity tool leverages artificial intelligence to automate and optimize your task management process. These tools analyze your work patterns, deadlines, and priorities, and then help you to automatically schedule tasks, adapt to changes in your workflow, and offer personalized recommendations to help you work smarter, not harder. Here are some of our favorites.
Motion - Motion is a productivity app that includes an AI-assisted scheduler for tasks and events for your calendar. It automatically locates an open time slot based on schedules you create for your calendar. You can connect your personal or work calendar to the app, which moves over any events you have added.
The standout features of Motion are AI-powered task prioritization, which automatically adjusts your tasks based on urgency and available time, and seamless calendar integration, which syncs with Google and Apple calendars. This provides a consolidated view of all tasks and events. Users rely on the team collaboration functionality, which allows project managers to assign tasks to various team members’ calendars, reducing the need for hands-on micromanagement. Further, dynamic scheduling automatically reschedules tasks that you miss, ensuring nothing will fall through the cracks.
Notion – Another great productivity tool is Notion AI. It can perform time-consuming tasks such as summarizing notes, distilling research, and translating documents in seconds. People use it as a central hub for information storage and take advantage of customizable templates and workflows. Notion AI integrates with many other common workplace tools and has strong collaboration features. This well-loved tool is versatile and allows for a wide range of uses, from basic note-taking to more complex database management.
AI Assistants and Chatbots
ChatGPT - One of the original AI tools that power several other platforms that people are familiar with. It's a conversational agent that can assist with a wide range of tasks, from brainstorming ideas to writing resumes and everything in between.
It offers the ability to upload and analyze files and whether you need quick answers, detailed research, or creative inspiration, ChatGPT is a powerful tool to have in your arsenal. People use ChatGPT - or other tools based on the technology - for writing tasks, coding, researching, and a lot more. The tool leverages advanced models like GPT-4o, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5. It’s almost like having a personal assistant at your beck and call! Ready to help with whatever you need, ChatGPT is ideal for new AI users. It’s a great place to begin exploring what AI can do for you. It’s known for being versatile and OpenAI is improving the functionality all the time. Now, the program can learn from users’ chat history so we can expect even more use cases in the future.
Claude - Created by Anthropic, this tool is one of ChatGPT’s strongest competitors. Recently the company released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which makes the program even more useful. It’s a significant step forward in AI technology. Users say that it offers fast performance and can offer outputs much quicker than its predecessor, Opus.
Furthermore, it offers a more recent knowledge cut-off; April 2024. That means, unlike some programs that are not able to access information after 2021 or 2022, it is more up-to-date with content, making it slightly more credible in some spaces.
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Smart Email and Communication Tools
There are over 4.258 billion active email users worldwide as of 2022. Here’s a little more perspective: The number of emails sent every second exceeds 3.13 million. Suffice it to say, email is an essential part of how we communicate and get things done.
Unfortunately, we also spend a lot of wasted time on email and we aren’t great at prioritizing. 40% of consumers say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox. If we aren’t careful, email can become a huge time-sink, and companies in particular need to set themselves apart in an inbox. AI tools claim to make email easier, helping brands to write, create, and send more compelling emails. These tools can also help with database management, inbox cleanup, and lots of other tasks that make email less of a nuisance and more of a powerful tool. Here are some of the platforms worth looking into.
Mailbutler - With the tagline of “Your inbox, smarter”, this tool has plenty of useful features for a variety of users. A well-rounded AI program, this platform offers a full suite of generative AI tools in the email compose window: Smart Compose, Respond, Summarize, and Improve. An extension for Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook, it extracts contact information from the people in your inbox, saving you from organizing them manually. If you tend to forget to note down your tasks, it analyzes all the emails you get and extracts any detected tasks into the sidebar. You can also take advantage of email tracking to see when, how often, where, and on which device your emails were opened and your links were clicked, which is very helpful for those in sales or marketing.
EmailTree - A solution designed specifically for customer support teams, helping you organize your inbox, follow up on messages, and automate replies. It does this by processing the emails you receive and suggesting the follow-up action that makes the most sense. It's then up to you to trigger it. Companies can use it to deploy compliant AI email assistants, streamline responses, and ensure data governance. The tool boasts up to 95% Faster email processing with AI email management, and online reviews say it’s a huge time-saver for overburdened customer service departments.
Optimail - An ideal tool for marketers who use email in a proactive sense. It uses AI technology to monitor individual subscriber behavior for hyper-personalization. Marketers can use the AI technology to automatically adjust a campaign’s personalized content and timing, driving your audience to take action, from social sharing to purchasing. The platform offers an AI-powered content optimizer that is meant to increase customer engagement, drive conversions, and ensure email deliverability.
Plus, Optimail’s email automation feature will send automated emails on your behalf and learn from subscriber responses. That means responses will get more targeted and more effective over time, without manual effort on your part. Another bonus is that it easily integrates with existing infrastructures and can accommodate any size database.
Personal Automation and Integrations
Automation is something that can help everyone to do more, with less. While some people fear the level of automation that AI can bring, many people are harnessing it to make things easier for themselves - from mailing holiday cards and grocery shopping to streamlining outreach for entrepreneurial efforts. Here are some of our favorite tools that can work nicely in your daily life for a variety of tasks.
Personal AI - This really cool platform is billed as “a personal AI for everyone in everyday life.” Based on an AI model that you build personally and shape into what you want it to be (in other words, not a common shared model). You own all the data and the model that is forged. You can use your own AI to help draft authentic responses for incoming messages in private direct messages or group messages (AI channels) using Copilot or Autopilot modes. You can also develop custom solutions with multiple AIs and integrate them within other applications using APIs. With a focus on data privacy and continuous learning, Personal AI is a good place to start if you’re looking for an AI tool that can help with all the parts of your daily life that you want to automate and enhance.
Zapier - Allows you to automate faster by using natural language to create workflows that connect with a huge range of other apps. Simply describe what you want to automate, and Zapier will develop a workflow that you can easily customize to your needs. Zapier connects to OpenAI, ChatGPT, and most of the other tools that you might need to leverage. At a basic level, this allows you to combine almost any technology with the power of AI in order to work better and faster. Users have even leveraged Zapier to build their own custom chatbots. It’s definitely worth exploring if you would like to make some of your daily tasks easier with custom workflows.
Transcription
Transcription is the practice of converting recorded verbal communications into text. Transcription has become more important in our modern world where content spans several channels and audiences are more diverse. AI-powered speech transcription utilizes artificial intelligence to accomplish this, thereby removing the painstaking process of taking notes manually. If transcription is part of your job, give these tools a try to speed things up and improve accuracy.
Otter.ai - A type of meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings. Whether you gather in person or conduct them via Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, you can use this tool to highlight key points in the transcription, making it easy to review important information later. One of the best features is the ability to search the text to find specific points. You can also play back the audio at adjustable speeds and tap on the words to jump to specific spots in the recording. This tool provides a huge leg up when it comes to automated meeting notes, task assignments, and recordings. If you are often tasked as the meeting secretary, this AI platform will become your new best friend.
Descript - Transcribes your videos into a script. Descript’s audio-to-text capabilities transcribe audio with up to 95% accuracy to create transcripts, captions, subtitles, and text files. Users love it because they can edit audio by editing the text—just like a document—to remove filler words and make cuts with only a few keystrokes. This offers a huge time-savings to people who create video content regularly (for example, YouTube content creators or product marketers). Simply upload your file, edit it as needed, and then export it in your desired format. What once was an incredibly cumbersome process is much easier with this handy program.
Content Creation
Content is king, and one of the most exciting developments in AI is the superpower it’s given to content creators. Any brand will tell you that you can’t get far in today’s saturated market without content that gets noticed. An early 2024 survey revealed that almost half of responding decision-makers worldwide planned to raise content marketing budgets this year. AI tools allow content creators to stretch their budget - to essentially create more - and better - content without investing more resources. These tools are proving incredibly valuable in the content space.
Grammarly - Many people don’t feel comfortable with their writing skills, but writing is part of life whether we like it or not. From regular email correspondence to loan applications to customer service complaints and so much more, rarely does a day go by where we don’t need to draft some form of communication. This app is powerful because it integrates with the programs you already use - like email - and points out grammar mistakes and how to fix them. It also provides suggestions for clarity, deliverability, and engagement. You can customize settings for each item, so that copy is tailored to your particular use (For example, are you writing an essay to educate people? Or a letter to persuade someone to do something?). This is an incredibly helpful tool that can automate all sorts of writing across almost any use-case you encounter in your day.
Runway - Somewhat of a video magic wand. As video becomes increasingly important to marketing strategies across industries, this tool can help creators to generate video with AI. Users can train their own AI models and paint parts of frames using text prompts. There are lots of interesting features that make creating polished videos easier and also more fun. The learning curve is not too steep, and the app is growing at a great pace.
Midjourney - Known as a handy content-helper. Used for image generation, the app can come up with impressive results, even if occasionally it takes a few tries to get it perfect. The fact that you have to use Discord to access it feels a bit inconvenient at first, but once you get the hang of it, you can spend hours bringing your vision to life. Use it to create photos for email, print, social media, and more.
AIVA - Helps content creators to make great strides in the musical arena. Rather than using a text prompt like many tools, you can pick a style from epic orchestral to cinematic cyberpunk and then narrow down by specifics like chord progression. You can also upload an audio reference for inspiration. From there you can edit the result quickly and easily, and add or remove tracks until you’re happy with your final version.
AdCreativeAI - Known to offer well-designed ads and social posts in seconds. It will quickly become a content marketer’s favorite assistant, allowing them to generate a variety of assets, track competitors, and create reports — all using AI. From creative photos to headlines to complete video ads, you can use the tool to create advertising that is not only informed by what your competitors are doing, but designed to beat them. One of the best features is the ability to create entire product photoshoots, where your products are highlighted in professional-grade photography just by uploading simple images.
If you haven’t experimented much with AI - or perhaps you’ve been a bit intimidated by it - now is the time to dive in. Chances are, there are multiple aspects of your daily tasks and to-dos that can be streamlined, automated, and made easier with these new tools. Give a few of them a try and see how they can completely transform your personal workflows - for the better.
Take things a step further by using Shift to integrate these and other tools into one cohesive workspace for maximum efficiency. Shift is an innovative app-integrated browser that allows you to create custom Workspaces that align with your goals. Create a Workspace for personal or professional use and then populate it with the tabs, bookmarks, and accounts you rely on for those uses. For example, a “work” Workspace might contain Outlook, Slack, and Trello. Don’t forget to add valuable AI tools like Grammarly or Notion to make the most of your time and to enhance the use of all of your platforms.
Once you start incorporating AI into your daily life, you’ll wonder how you did without it for so long!
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