Easy Ways To Leverage AI and Boost Productivity

What would an extra 2 to 3 hours in your day mean for you?

In this age of technological advancement, no advisory vertical has been spared for disruptive improvement. We now have software and apps for virtually every single problem that one has encountered.

All you need is to break down your day into certain types of activities, and you will find a pattern that can be automated or at least rendered twice as efficient.

We have curated below some of the leanest apps that are AI enabled and that you should know by now if you want to run your advisory capabilities at the next level. 

Communicating knowledge can be a challenge so that clients can both read and understand what is being conveyed. Often this requires a lot of clarity and reformulation of complex ideas into simple sentences and structures. So it does not help that a lot of time is taken to compose and review emails and advise with more formatting and grammar related issues then what is a real value to the client.

For those who are creating a first draft, one of the great apps possible takes into consideration text to speech capabilities. To utilise this all you need is any device with a microphone.

This type of functionality can be accessed in both Google Docs and Microsoft 365. Simply head onto the search function and look for voice typing and dictation. Both these apps have invested millions into developing the most up-to-date voice recognition devices that understand virtually every accent in which English is spoken. 

If you do not have a paid license, Google Docs also has free versions of the software on the mobile app through which you can dictate and compose both emails and documents. Alternatively, you can also download Google Chrome extensions such as “voice in voice typing”.

Often the structure of emails tend to include a lot of verbiage that are included as a matter of formality and politeness. These can be greetings, caveats, requests for more information and closing remarks. 

Now you can deploy your little robots who can analyse your content and suggest the remainder of your sentences.

You can utilise G Suite Smart Compose or Office 365 tax predictions to make email writing and advice writing twice as fast.

Some other efficient tools to consider are Word Tune and Rytr,  where you can select sentences, phrases, words, adopt for a casual or business tone.  You can select whether you prefer to write succinct or expanded sentences.

The classic advisory firm requires proof reading in a four eye review. If you employ junior staff, a lot of time is spent in proofreading and correcting sentence constructs, grammar, or structuring. There is simply no time and often a key messages one wants to convey to clients I lost in such distractions.

For those who review their own writing, this can be tedious and one can get to a point where they simply do not see any mistakes any more. For this we recommend utilising apps such as Grammarly for the Hemingway app. 

It is amazing how the AI improves exponentially every six months the more people use it. 

These apps can be used to check your writing for common errors, clarity, engagement, delivery, readability and tone. Indeed if you are having a bad day, are a bit flat, you may fear being harsh in your tone. Grammarly can help you detect whether you are being overly formal or very warm in your tone.

You can even use Grammarly and Hemingway to support your writing and learn from their advice and the most important if you are writing advice or articles that can find its way to be published, you can also use their plagiarism checker to find any close match on the Internet and publish documents in multiple databases.

If you are old school and prefer listening back to what you have written, you can also activate the text to speech functionality and listen back to what you wrote.

 This type of feature can be found in apps such as Microsoft Word in the review section where you can command it to read aloud. There is also a Google Docs feature.  You can download chrome screen reader extensions such as chrome vox. However you will have to go to tools, accessibility, settings and then turn on your screen reader support. You can even change the voice of the reader to your preference.

Writing advice is not enough, and often clients will want to go beyond the technical jargon and truly understand in an interactive way as to how the analysis and proposed solutions can affect them, and have the ability to brainstorm through a Q&A session.

If you want to go beyond powerpoint, or Google slides, there are a number of other apps you can utilise.

You can use Snag it to capture, edit and share screen images. You can then utilise it with another app called loom, that allows you to personalise the experience by recording a video message on your camera and desktop. If your video is going to be broadcast in a large screen in front of many people, and you need to high-resolution, you can use an app called Camstasia. 

Other than Google meet invites or Teams meetings, there are many of the smart ways of creating template meetings with smart agendas and relevant documentation that you can attach.

For client onboarding meetings, one can utilise tools such as ignition or go proposal or utilise the full extent of the features in apps such as Calendar Lee, timely, acuity scheduling, or even Microsoft bookings.

One should regularly review, refine and update templates to ensure completeness, accuracy and brand consistency. The Google ecosystem is very good for creating templates and it makes it very easy to say virtually every email you have composed, every type of meeting you have composed, and every type of slides you have composed as a template.

Utilising the right tools the right way can help us liberate more time and more energy for the rest of our day