How to lift the burden of work and reclaim time with AI

I still remember the day when I learned how to create pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. I could suddenly analyze huge amounts of data and create interactive reports in seconds, saving myself weeks of drudgery. This was a complete game-changer. It felt like I had unlocked a superpower.

I’m reminded of this pivot table revelation as I look to the new generation of AI and see a similar game-changing moment on the horizon for us all. Today, many of us are weighed down at work by the constant inflow of emails, notifications, and meetings. It’s just too much to keep up with, so we always feel like we need to catch up. This is the digital debt we all carry.

People are eager for AI to help them cut through this drudgery. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey, 70 percent of employees say they would want to delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. It’s no mystery why. Who would say no to having a superpowered digital personal assistant?

Lifting the burden of work

AI can help free us from this digital debt by becoming our copilots and taking care of the busywork. Imagine coming back from a long vacation to face an overflowing inbox, a list of missed meetings and announcements, and an outdated to-do list. Now imagine asking your Microsoft Copilot to highlight only your most important emails, show you the moments when your name came up in those missed meetings, and provide a list of personalized, up-to-date action items. What if you could catch up in a single day instead of an entire week?

AI opens up so many possibilities. It has already begun to help workers in many different ways. For instance, CarMax has sped up the creation of text summaries for its car research pages by using AI. With Azure OpenAI Service, CarMax created 5,000 of these summaries in just a few months. This allowed CarMax’s marketing team to shift their energies to projects with greater impact and value, such as developing original campaigns and writing creative, longer-form content.

Global construction company Strabag SE partnered with Microsoft to build an AI solution that assesses risk for their construction projects. They live in an industry with razor-thin margins, so picking the right projects makes a big difference for their business. Strabag SE’s solution analyzes potential projects, compares them with past project data, and provides project managers with a risk assessment that helps them make decisions quickly. Instead of burning time to do risk assessments, project managers can now focus on making projects successful.

Finally, consider Nota, the software as a service (SaaS) startup harnessing Azure OpenAI to help reverse the closure of local newspapers in the United States. Nota offers AI-assisted tools that add value to articles already written by journalists by generating SEO-optimized content and video summaries of their articles. These tools do much of the heavy lifting needed to drive traffic and produce revenue in the digital world, empowering local journalists to focus on their craft.

In the coming months, we will showcase more customers and how they are using AI in transformative ways as part the Pivotal podcast.

Reclaiming our time

These examples show how AI can augment all types of workers and give them a chance to reclaim their most precious resource: time.

Instead of filling this extra time with expectations of even more work, I see this as time we can give back to individuals. We know workers today are already feeling exhausted under the weight of their digital debt and looking for purpose in their jobs, especially post-COVID-19. AI will free up time for more creativity and innovation. This will reinvigorate our relationship with work and give people a chance to feel more engaged and inspired.

Others might choose to spend this extra time to acquire new skills, or to just relax and focus on their family or hobbies. Put that time toward whatever makes you happier and more fulfilled. This is one of AI’s impacts on the workforce that I’m most excited about. AI will be a key for unlocking well-being and helping people thrive in their professional and personal lives.

AI gives us the gift of time and allows us to find higher-quality ways to use that time. Imagine the possibilities this creates as we all search for happiness and success in our lives. As Arianna Huffington reminds us, “We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.”