Employees' feedback on their favorite AI tools for work tasks

Everyone loves lists - for AI’s tools, we went to our own employees plus, to a source: ‘People Managing People’ to compare - for what their favorite AI tools are for specific tasks. And, AI it’s not just for generating code, an email, or a conversation - these apps break into even smaller, simpler tasks.  

Let’s start with WriteSonic: An AI software available both free and for $79/mo, this app’s noted to have the best AI content generation – whether that’s generating an outline, or an automatic article, they’re really packing it all in to be generating any sort of prompt that focuses on optimization, relevancy, and the ability to translate into multiple languages. But, a big con of this is depending too much on generating specific prompts, especially if they don’t turn out well the first time around. Plus, you may need to learn how to customize things.

Next on the list - Crisp: this addresses customer service chats! Previously, we discussed how sites leverage chatbots to answer humans’ questions - the biggest drawback? It can only answer a limited amount of questions before repeating their FAQs and advice. The pros: it doesn’t differ much from what human customer support agents provide, but if they’re too busy to provide in depth customer support to fix your problems, they’ll just hand it over to the computer.

Then there’s Microsoft CoPilot: Gone are the days where we’d use peer review groups and spellcheck to correct our errors and improve our work — CoPilot can swoop right on in and take care of any editing simply just by asking in the search bar, “Please edit my document.” Remember when the squiggly red and blue lines underlining your words either meant they were misspelled or grammatically incorrect? Now you can hand over your entire document to be edited, from grammatical structure to analyzing key points to creating an outline.

ChatGPT: And, for conversational AI – years ago, we were encouraged not to engage in chatrooms and provide our private information. Now, every other sentence you hear is ‘Ask Chat’ or ‘I went to ChatGPT.’ Because, according to our sources, ChatGPT is where you want to head for the best conversational AI.’ While they boast a free version and the ability to answer any question you need in seconds, the biggest con they don’t list is becoming too dependent on an app for everyday interaction.

Otter.ai: this one transcribes meetings, auto-generates summaries, similar to what we see on every search engine or social media app. Even our encrypted messages aren’t safe from this. It shares many similarities to Fireflies.ai: this is another app that transcribes meetings and lectures and summarizes the important parts. Wow, so AI not only rips off human-made content but also rips off each other, too. Is this the AI cannibalization we’ve heard about?

Midjourney: with all this talk about documents, there needs to be room for creativity! That’s what Midjourney is for — it’s an app that coincides with your regular graphic design software like Figma, Photoshop, Sketch, etc. Despite the endless tools and tutorials these platforms supply, there’s still the option of just typing your idea out into a generator followed by repeatedly tweaking your idea with AI until it looks just right. But don’t worry, this is a nightmare qualified graphic designers have to deal with all of the time. The pros appear as ‘customizable’ and ‘high-quality art.’ But, is the image itself high quality when it’s just pulling from art on the internet? And the cons? It ‘may require a learning curve’ and there are ‘challenges with generating precise details.’ So, let it be a reminder that AI can still make dozens of mistakes - remember, there’s a certain quality this AI generated art holds. Some might not notice, but audiences who thoroughly appreciate the craft in a well-made graphic will know the difference and may lose trust in your brand.

Claude & Gumloop: Claude is getting all of the good press lately since they are focused on simplifying the workload. Claude is best for generating code while Gumloop serves better for ‘workflow automation.’ We hear that all the time, that AI is now used for ‘workflow automation’ in businesses, but what exactly does it amount to? Well, say you’re gauging insights for this upcoming quarter, Gumloop will take your company’s data and compile a summary, often including a list or table of tasks that range in priority. They utilize over 110 AI applications, too. Talk about a dog-eat-dog world if AI takes orders from AI!

Your company’s security when it comes to rogue-AI: if you’re going to share your business data with an AI app, remember to at least invest in a strong cybersecurity team. If you’ve checked out our last blog, you saw that AI bots are no longer manageable within their test environments. If two of the most powerful AI companies in the world both lose control of their AI agents, what makes you think your company is safe from a rogue-AI escape?

Back to Fireflies.ai: this is the AI app that transcribes notes for you. If you miss something in a meeting, it transcribes the recordings, highlighting important key details and organizes the content into logical sections. Except, isn’t this the same thing professors and teachers were advocating against? Company leaders are always encouraging their employees to us AI to be more productive. This is the same issue teachers had when we started using computers to take notes - the goal posts keep shifting.

It’s up to your organization to come up with a customized AI plan that reinforces authenticity and credibility,- the irony, this is something businesses risk losing as more and more turn to AI for every many tasks.