5 ways that artificial intelligence is changing how we work

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The workforce transformation has begun.

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Artificial intelligence may be transforming industries by changing how people do their jobs. Generative AI is creating the most buzz because it’s the most user-friendly—and perhaps you’re already exploring how you can use AI at work.

Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini can boost your productivity and provide you with valuable insights—but proceed with caution. You’re the professional, and it’s crucial to vet absolutely everything that an AI tool generates.

Artificial intelligence is poised to transform essentially every industry, and many enterprises are already using the tech in sophisticated ways. Here are a few examples of how companies* in different sectors are using generative AI.

*Note: This is not an exhaustive list—it’s a mere sampling of the ways in which AI is transforming work as we know it. Examples used in this article are for educational purposes only and are not an endorsement of any of the companies mentioned.

Medical services provider HCA Healthcare (HCA) is collaborating with Google Cloud to use generative AI to better support doctors and nurses. The health care provider in 2023 began testing an AI-based solution to reduce the burden of physicians’ administrative tasks.

Here’s how it works:

HCA is also experimenting with generative AI to improve patient handoffs between nurses—a typically manual task requiring nurses to communicate detailed patient information. HCA is aiming to use generative AI to standardize and automate the process.

The banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is bringing generative AI to corporate treasurers. The Payments division announced in December 2023 that it’s developing a conversational analytics assistant that enables corporate treasurers to interact with their payments data in plain language.

“With a conversational analytics assistant … prompts and questions such as ‘show me a bar chart that captures how balances across my different accounts have changed over the last three months,’ ‘what’s my average quarterly payment frequency to my suppliers,’ and ‘show my last quarter’s foreign currency flows organized by currency pairs’ have the potential to be answered clearly and in seconds,” explains Tony Wimmer, head of analytics and insights for JPMorgan Payments.

Although JPMorgan has yet to release the finished product, it’s reporting that initial results are highly promising. Using generative AI, corporate treasury processes like information retrieval, reporting, and analytics are being completed in seconds rather than days.

The technology company Adobe (ADBE) is using generative AI to change how marketers work. Building on the Adobe Experience Cloud—a comprehensive suite of digital marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce tools—Adobe Sensei GenAI is designed to be a generative AI “copilot” for marketing professionals, designed for such tasks as automating workflows, generating personalized content, and using predictive analytics to help inform decision-making.

Writers, designers, and analytics professionals may also benefit from using Adobe’s generative AI. The company integrates generative artificial intelligence across many of its creator tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Firefly (an app solely dedicated to AI image generation).

The global conglomerate Bayer (BAYRY) is using generative AI in its agriculture division. The enterprise in March 2024 announced that it is testing a chat-based “expert GenAI system” that “quickly and accurately answers questions related to agronomy, farm management, and Bayer agricultural products.”

The chatbot aims to improve how farmers and agronomists get information. Bayer is using many sources of proprietary agronomic data—including extensive internal data, insights from thousands of software-testing trials, and the aggregated experience from Bayer agronomists—to train a large language model.

Toyota (TM), specifically the Toyota Research Institute, is making car designers better at their jobs. The research organization in 2023 released an algorithm that enables designers to “optimize engineering constraints while maintaining their text-based stylistic prompts to the generative AI process.” The algorithm is designed to work in conjunction with tools like ChatGPT Google’s Gemini.

Toyota designers can, for example, request a suite of designs based on an initial prototype sketch with specific qualitative properties such as “sleek” and “SUV-like”—while also optimizing the design for specific quantitative performance metrics.

The objective of rolling out the technology is to “amplify automobile designers and engineers,” according to a press release from the Toyota Research Institute. The tech was codeveloped by the institute’s Human-Centered AI division.

Generative AI is changing how many of us work. That may feel scary, especially if you believe the reports about AI “taking our jobs away.” But artificial intelligence can also enhance our productivity, analytical capabilities, and creativity.

Generative AI is just the latest retelling of a tale as old as humanity itself. A new technology disrupts the status quo, jobs are threatened, and eventually we adapt. New jobs—some that didn’t even exist before the new technology—replace the old, and society thrives in new, productive ways.

Learning about how artificial intelligence operates and how you can use it effectively may be the best ways to harness the power of this innovative technology.