3 mind numbing tasks AI is solving today

Whether AI is out to take peoples’ jobs or not is an ongoing debate, one I will save for another day. Some say that AI is replacing a whole class of clerical workers; others fear that even those white collar jobs designated for information workers are not safe from automation.

My belief is that AI will augment most information workers because it’s going to take much longer for AI to do creative work on par with humans.

However, I do believe certain mind numbing jobs whose only alternative today is doing it ourselves or hiring someone else to do it will be solved. In fact, some of these tasks are already being addressed by cutting edge AI companies. Here are my top 3 mind numbing tasks:

Data entry

Data entry is the bane of my existence! And too many people are nodding their heads in agreement. We have to extract important points out of conversations to fill out forms, take notes, or send status emails to the team. So much time is spent doing work around the work that we actually do. However, data entry is vital for business to move forward. We can’t just hand it off someone else right?

At Fireflies.ai, our mission is to automate data entry. We’ve been going full speed ahead trying to reach that goal. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just focus on those meaningful conversations at work and within meetings without having to worry about noting everything down and sending out status emails with notes on what happened?

I truly believe that a treasure trove of information is locked inside verbal conversations. We are building our assistant Fred to capture all those key insights that are said in meetings and calls.

Fred will dial into your meetings, take notes, and send out a status email after the call.

The most important notes from every convo is automatically logged. No more redundant meetings! No more work slipping through the cracks because you forgot to write it down!

Rote work

When I think of rote work, what comes to mind is repetitive work that I have to do every single day, work that I could train a kid to complete. It is work that doesn’t require too many special skills other than understanding basic human commands and simple reasoning. A good example of this in the workplace is scheduling meetings and the constant back and forth to find a good time that works for everyone.

x.ai is a prominent company in this space solving that exact problem. Not everyone can afford a personal assistant to schedule their meetings for them, but x.ai’s virtual assistant, Amy, is here to fill that gap for the common man. Co-founder Dennis explains how he had to schedule 1,019 meetings in one year, 672 of them which he had to reschedule. He did all this by himself and when he “ looked at those two numbers, [he] cried a little thinking about how much time [he] invested in emailing people.”

I don’t blame him! Too much time in the workplace is spent on unproductive work and administrative tasks that hinder us from doing what we were hired to do

Research

Imagine a world without Google search. It’s a dark and scary place, isn’t it? Currently, I ask Google for more things every day than anyone else in my life. With virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, and SIRI in our homes, we’ve grown more accustomed to conversing with AI and asking questions.

Search is such a beautiful thing. We spend a large part of our day hunting for information. When search engines first came along, they were actually the first intelligent assistants doing research for us, almost becoming our second brain. The fact that we can today verbally communicate with AI assistants virtually anywhere, hands-free, is a game changer.

Research specific to work is also being tackled by vertical specific AI.

Companies like Accompany will do research on the person you are going to be talking to before a meeting.

These executive briefings that were once limited to just Presidents and CEOs are now available to everyone in the office.

At the end of the day, I want these systems in my life because it’s making me better at what I do. I really believe that we do our best work when are in a good flow state. All this drudge work actually inhibits us from achieving excellence at what we do. Not only does it kill time but also shatters our focus.

AI assistants are now eliminating mundane tasks, democratizing special privileges down to the common man, and allowing us to do our best work wherever we are.

Krish is a co-founder at Fireflies.ai building an AI assistant that joins your meetings and automatically captures all the important notes.

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