MEDIA COMMENTARY - These People Use AI To Ease The Workload: Are You On Board?

More and more employees are using tools to get on top of tedious tasks – and help carve out more time in their personal lives. - MaryLou Costa

It started with recording voice memos while taking a walk, and using AI tools to convert those into emails or documents to share with colleagues. Three years on, Andy Wilson now has an AI tool for most work tasks you can think of. No more typing up mundane meeting notes and struggling with a cluttered inbox or calendar

AI takes care of it all. Wilson uses Perplexity Pro for research, plus Gong and Zoom AI for meeting notes and follow-up actions, as well as for creating planning documents. There’s also Otter.ai and Dropbox Transcribe for transcribing calls and meetings, Superhuman Email for drafting emails and organising his inbox and Reclaim AI for diary management.

Meanwhile, Gemini Pro offers coding assistance and image generation, while ChatGPT enterprise allows him and his team to build custom models that simulate customer interviews to get feedback on new products.

Then there’s Dash, created by Dropbox, the company Wilson works for as a senior director. This allows him to search for specific facts and stats across his inbox, calendar and documents. Dash can also organise resources for projects to bring different files into one place, and can generate first drafts of content.

Wilson estimates that his army of AI helpers saves him around two hours a day. That’s in line with a recent internal Dropbox survey where employees said they saved around eight hours a week by using AI tools.

For Wilson, with time-saving AI tools he can dedicate more time to his young son and to TeenTech, the skills-building charity for teenagers that he chairs.

“Personally, it’s been fantastic in terms of how I use that time for me. It’s really important that I take my son to nursery in the morning, and that I spend time reading and playing with him, and then putting him to bed in the evening,” says London-based Wilson.

Handing work over to AI is becoming the norm

Within the next year, knowledge workers like Wilson and his Dropbox colleagues are expected to delegate over a third of their workload to AI, according to a survey by work management platform Asana. AI agents in particular – i.e., AI tools that can work on specific tasks autonomously – are being used by 77 per cent of knowledge workers, for tasks like writing meeting notes and organising documents. Resume Now data also show that 97 per cent are turning to ChatGPT over their own manager for workplace advice.

In a separate study by recruiter Randstad, half of workers use AI to problem-solve at work, and 68 per cent use tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot to learn new skills and about new topics – 56 per cent say they’re excited about the prospect of AI in the workplace.

While the cost of Wilson’s array of AI tools is covered by his employer, Ian Jackson in Cornwall is happy to fork out over £100 a month from his own pocket for a number of platforms. He says it’s worth every penny, allowing him to achieve a “month’s worth of work in a week”.

As a senior project manager, he uses coding app Cursor, as well as ChatGPT and Claude for brainstorming, refining ideas, and clarifying his goals, as well as helping him stay on top of changing legislation in his industry. Living with ADHD, the AI tools he’s been using since 2023 have also helped Jackson articulate and structure his thoughts, and stay focused – he has even set prompts on ChatGPT to remind him not to get distracted.

As a result, he believes it accelerates his daily output tenfold. “With ADHD, I always compare it to juggling, but you’re throwing all the balls up in the air at once, and you’re hoping that you can pluck them out of the sky quick enough. AI allows me to do that, whereas before it would always be that you just drop stuff,” says Jackson.

“It’s almost indescribable to explain the impact. It allows me to get the ideas out of my head at a pace that I could never do before. The only downside, he says, is becoming so focused and productive, that he does sometimes find himself accidentally working late, as he’s “on such a roll”.

Seeing the bigger picture

Sara Sabin is an executive coach who works with senior company leaders and entrepreneurs. Her philosophy is that everyone should be thinking about how AI could be used to make work more streamlined and effective, by using it for mundane tasks that don’t really matter whether a human did them or not.

“One thing that contributes to burnout is when people feel there’s no meaning in what they’re doing, so they can’t really see the bigger picture because they get lost in the detail of what they’re doing day-to-day. That’s going to have an impact on your energy levels,” says London-based Sabin.

“If we’re talking about high performers, they like being challenged, they like using their brain and creativity. And so if you can free up the monotony, more of that can come out to play.” But it can be a slippery slope, she warns, where gradually, it becomes more normalised and easier to outsource our work tasks to AI – and where does that leave us?

“The problematic part is where people are starting to use AI to almost outsource their thinking.

People are starting to research less and question less. Your ability to critically evaluate information is being calmed if you’re just using AI to ‘think’ for you,” says Sabin. “The downside I potentially see in the future is if people don’t develop these skills, [we will end up with] homogenous workplaces where everyone thinks the same.”

Sabin’s advice? “Question everything. We go to the gym to work out our body muscles – we need to do the same thing with our brain to develop the skills that are going to make us valuable in the future.”*

This was originally published in the iPaper weekend edition on 27th September 2025