Innovative Ways You Can Use GenAI

Wondering what meals might you prepare given the ingredients you have on hand? Challenged to read your most recent medical report? Interested in how solid your stock portfolio is and whether you could improve it by selling some shares?

These are the kinds of personal questions generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) may be able answer as more people grow more familiar with the technology.

Until now, GenAI has been used chiefly to create "content" — text, audio, visual images and video — and applications have skyrocketed in the past two years. As people have become more become accustomed to working with GenAI, they are also finding ways to use GenAI in their personal lives to do work well beyond content creation.

When GenAI tools first appeared, many employees were understandably concerned about how they might affect their jobs or replace them entirely. With experience, though, those concerns are beginning to ebb, with more workers now reporting optimism.

A recent report from Deloitte, for instance, found that among experienced workers:

• 81% say AI tools have improved their quality of work.
• 79% report increased work satisfaction.
• 74% have identified improvements in the type of work they do.

Early career workers were somewhat less optimistic, but still positive — only 24% of early career workers said they were concerned about their jobs being replaced, compared with 14% of long-time employees, for instance.

Among all groups, though, experience with AI tools on the job has led to a number of productivity-enhancing uses in their personal lives as well.

One woman used GenAI to review a homeowners association contract for a project gone wrong, and quickly found ways the contract had been breached. A man exploring his Medicare supplement plan options asked his AI tool to compare several plans and provide a list of pros and cons for each. A couple that loves to travel regularly uses their GenAI tools to help them quickly access reviews, plot the best and most economical travel paths and more.

Many GenAI tools are really high-powered search engines that can provide relevant and highly nuanced results in seconds.

H.P. Newquist, who has covered the technology of AI since the 1990s and speaks frequently on the potential and perils of its use, has used AI tools "for giving me a weather forecast for trips involving different cities and different temperature zones to aid in packing the right clothes — and keeping them to a minimum."

Newquist asks ChatGPT to give him responses in both English and French so he can get practice in reading French. He's also used AI for help with minor DIY household repairs and for getting new book recommendations based on past favorites.

Sara Lobkovich, a leader-development and career coach who works with neurodivergent and menopausal women and is neurodivergent herself, says she has come to rely on GenAI tools to boost peace of mind.

For instance, she shares, "I use these tools to help me parse and respond to feedback that overwhelms me. I've even had conversations with GenAI about the impostor feelings and nerves I have." She adds: "For those of us who live with brain fog, cognitive impairment or neurodivergence, they really can be a very important adaptive technology piece."

In the workplace, GenAI tools are quickly proving to be powerful personal assistants for helping with everything from lead generation to client intake to advanced competitive analysis.

At Sickies Garage Burgers & Brews in Las Vegas, CEO Ken Harris, working with a local AI specialist, has generated contact lists for schools and colleges for their sports teams and extracurricular activities, including event schedules. Staff can then reach out to these prospects with confidence that they're likely to be interested in what Sickies has to offer.

"Developing this sales channel is something I always wanted to do but it wasn't practical because of the time and cost to generate the prospect leads," Harris says. "Now, with AI, I don't have that problem, and all of our resources can be devoted to direct contact with the customer." Based on the success he's already seen in Las Vegas, he has expanded the program to Orlando, Florida; Fort Worth, Texas; and Omaha, Nebraska.

Hirsch Law Group founder Gordon Hirsch wanted to enhance his firm's client-intake process, which generally involves a lot of manual data entry, question-asking and back-and-forth, he says. So he turned to AI. "The goal was to make this process not just faster but also more insightful by ensuring that every piece of data collected was relevant to the client's legal needs," he says.

He used AI to create an onboarding form that not only tailors questions to prior answers, but also includes "contextual hints or guidance based on legal nuances that might affect the case."

For example, he says, "if a client mentioned involvement in a business dispute, the questionnaire would shift to ask about the nature of the business, their role, and specific instances of conflict, all while pulling in relevant legal precedents or questions to assess the case's strength." The tool also has "built-in checks for potential conflicts of interest with existing clients, cross-referencing with our database in real-time."

Marketing firms have also found GenAI to be a powerful tool for automating labor-intensive tasks like competitive analysis. Aaron Whittaker, vice president of demand generation and marketing at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, for example, developed a process to analyze earnings-call transcripts and investor presentations using AI to identify subtle market strategy shifts that traditional analysis might miss.

"AI revealed a fascinating pattern," he says. "While our main competitor publicly emphasized customer service investment, their actual spending increasingly focused on automation and self-service tools."

Whittaker has also used GenAI to analyze customer-support tickets. "Instead of just categorizing issues, we prompted: 'Identify emotional patterns in customer language and correlate them with specific product features or service interactions'," he says. "This revealed unexpected connections between certain product updates and customer frustration that weren't apparent in standard satisfaction metrics."

Using GenAI tools, Whittaker says, isn't about replacing human analysis, but uncovering patterns and insights that enhance human decision-making. "These tools work best when we ask them to find connections and patterns that might be missed by conventional analysis," he says.

Whether using GenAI tools for personal or professional purposes there are some key best practices to follow to optimize the results received and minimize flawed results.

The type of query or "prompt" (as AI instructions are referred to) that you use with GenAI are more in-depth and multi-layered than the typical Google search. As you interact with your tool, you're, in essence, training it to provide increasingly more relevant and fine-tuned results.

Newquist recommends providing the AI tool with some context before diving into details. For instance: "Can you examine a list of stocks and give me a one-year history on each of them?" before providing the list. "Do this first instead of sending a list because an AI may try to do some things without context—and in your queries, context is everything," he says.

Based on the responses generated, you can continue to drill down for more detailed and granular results.

Those results, though, need to be carefully vetted because tools have been shown to "hallucinate" or provide false outputs. It's important, says Newquist, to double check the data once an AI gives it to you. "Just as you check your utility bill or the work of a repairman, you need to ascertain that everything is correct."

It's also important to make sure that any information you enter is not personal, confidential or proprietary. While organizations may have proprietary tools that are designed to avoid this kind of input, the tools you're using personally may not. It's important to review and understand the terms and conditions of any GenAI tools you use, especially regarding the ownership of data.

From preparing a special meal to strategizing a business expansion, AI tools are proving to be go-to aides for answers to a wide range of questions and needs. Use cases are likely to continue to emerge, simplifying many tasks and providing new and more innovative insights into the common challenges and opportunities we face at work and at home.

Lin Grensing-Pophal 

Lin Grensing-Pophal is a freelance business writer with a background in HR/employee relations and marketing/digital marketing. She is accredited through SHRM, the Society of Human Resource Management, as a Senior Professional in Human Resources and Senior Certified Professional. She also is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Association of Ghostwriters.  Read More