42 WAYS YOU SHOULD BE USING AI RIGHT NOW

AGENTIC AI CAN MAKE LIFE—AND WORK—EASIER. YOU KNOW THIS. BUT ARE YOU ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT? TIME TO GET OFF THE SIDELINES AND INTO THE GAME.

- BY HARRY MCCRACKEN

Speaking at Cisco’s AI Summit in February, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that concern over hypercapable AI replacing human knowledge workers en masse was overblown. “You’re not going to lose your job to AI,” he declared. “You’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.”

You could regard this prospect as ominous in itself. Or you could seize the opportunity to become that “someone who uses AI.” These days, that doesn’t just mean querying a chatbot. It means harnessing AI agents. Using them can free up time for you to do your best work. Here’s a guide to getting started, avoiding pitfalls, and staying on top of the latest developments.

EXPLORE YOUR APPS

THE EASIEST WAY TO DIP YOUR TOE INTO agentic AI is to experiment with features built into apps you already use. Many large, established productivity platforms offer their own agents, and while the industry hype level is high, some are genuinely useful:

ASANA AI TEAMMATES

● Project management platform Asana emphasizes the wide-ranging skills of its agents by calling them "teammates." At your instruction, they can perform work such as mapping out timelines and performing competitive analysis based on market data.

CANVA AI

● Few long-established platforms have embraced AI as wholeheartedly as design tool Canva. You can use its Canva AI feature to crank out first drafts of presentations, PDFs, videos, apps, and more, and then edit them as you see fit.

GOOGLE WORKSPACE STUDIO

● Part of Google's Workspace suite, this tool lets you create agents to handle simple ongoing tasks-say, sending summaries after Google Meet meetings or monitoring your Gmail for messages that require a response.

NOTION AI