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Brain Circuits

How to beat boredom with GenAIĀ 

Published 12 March 2025 in Brain Circuits ā€¢ 3 min read

GenAI allows human talent to focus on more creative, complex tasks, leading to greater job satisfaction and well-being. Quentin Gallea outlines three ways you can use it to automate routine tasks, and how to get more out of the technology through experimentation.

Automating routine tasks

Humans are not very effective at these. Letting the machines do it for you means you can focus on more cognitive-intensive tasks where humans have a comparative advantage. Use GenAI models to:

Write emails

Generate automatic, generic email answers in applications such as Microsoft Outlook, freeing up time to compose more complex or personal emails, or do other tasks.

Take minutes

Take the minutes of meetings via videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and share the results with participants, freeing them from the burdensome task of notetaking and editing, and allowing for full engagement without diverting focus or resources.

Glean information from reports

GenAI programs are highly efficient at gleaning information from reports, however complex. Many of us have a long list of documents to read as part of our work. Instead of reading entire documents in search of specific information, give it to a GenAI model and ask the questions that need answering.

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Experimenting with the tech

The above are only a handful of examples of GenAIā€™s capacity to free up time and create space for more valuable tasks. You donā€™t need a computer science doctorate to experiment with the tools. Hereā€™s how to start:

Talk to the model

Explain tasks to the GenAI model exactly as you would train a person to create an app.

Develop your own GenAI app

Ask your coders to create an app to boost productivity, help colleagues, or connect with clients.

Play around with prompt engineering

Better inputs (prompts) into a GenAI model make for better results. Writing better prompts ā€“ ā€œprompt engineeringā€ ā€“ enables the model to carry out its tasks better, whether thatā€™s generating code, writing emails, analyzing text, or engaging with customers via chatbots.

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Key learning

Whether itā€™s through automating mundane tasks, enhancing creative processes, or developing new skills such as prompt engineering, the potential for growth and innovation using Gen AI tools is unlimited. Given how fast the world of AI is moving, you stand to gain a serious competitive advantage by integrating the tools into your business early.

Authors

Quentin Gallea

Quentin Gallea

Researcher

Quentin Gallea is a researcher at the Enterprise for Society Center – E4S (UNIL/EPFL/IMD), a lecturer and consultant, and author of the course, “ChatGPT for productivity: beyond the myths“.

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