Time-Saving AI Tools

From generating meeting minutes to creating social media videos, these useful AI-infused business tools are worth exploring, writes

Artificial intelligence is popping up everywhere. At its recent Build conference, Microsoft revealed how it’s plugging AI into its entire product suite, from Bing to Word to the Windows operating system itself.

However, there are still kinks to be worked out with these new tools. Yes, you can produce an entire essay, detailed image or fully edited video from just a few lines of text. However, in these early days of generative AI, you are likely to have factual errors in that essay, missing fingers in that image, and some mangled footage in that video. And the cloud computing power required for these tools, which are surging in popularity, can mean slow processes where speed was the selling point.

Effective AI can give you a running start, especially when you’re a bootstrapping business. But the best approach is to remember that while AI can certainly help, it won’t do the work for you. With that in mind, here are some examples of time-saving AI tools available now.

NOTION

Notion has already proven a popular productivity tool with teams, and now it comes with generative AI based on OpenAI technology. For an extra $8 per member per month, Notion AI embeds an assistant in your workspace. It can give you a boost over the hump of a blank page but its writing will require good editing and thorough fact-checking. Most helpfully, if you take meeting minutes in Notion you can ask the AI to produce summaries and generate a todo list for next steps, so you can wrap up and move on with momentum.

GAMMA

Gamma is a generative AI tool that can put together a slick slide deck or webpage at speed. When you

Pictory helps produce engaging video content

start working with Gamma, it asks you questions about what you want from your presentation, eking out a prompt with enough detail and instruction to give you a good output. As always, you’ll need to refine what it produces but you’ll be out of the blocks faster than you would using standard templates, and changing the look and feel is easier with an AI assistant helping to realign everything. Gamma has not yet released its premium model, so right now it’s completely free to use with a generous limit of 400 AI credits.

INTERCOM’S FIN

AI for business users is best when it’s trained on focused datasets relevant to the work required. Intercom’s Fin, for example, plugs into your own FAQs, support pages and other content, to find answers for natural language queries. The Irish company has done Trojan work with the advanced GPT-4 model to ensure that it won’t get too generative with answers and defer to a human agent when it doesn’t have a clear one.

Fin can also communicate across multiple platforms and in multiple languages. It’s available as an add-on for Intercom users on a cost-per-use basis. Right now, there’s a waitlist to access this tool, but Intercom says they’re moving through it quickly.

ADOBE GENERATIVE FILL

Plenty of AI tools out there promise professional-level photo-editing on the fly, with varying degrees of success. But Adobe, a trusted brand with the pros, has put out a beta of something hugely impressive. Generative Fill can remove objects, add objects and expand the scope of an image with largely seamless results. And the best thing about this AI tool is that it’s trained on licensed, non-copyrighted content so it’s safe for commercial use. Any user with a Photoshop subscription (starting at €24.59 per month) can access the beta release.

PICTORY.AI

As social media becomes more videoled, creators are under pressure to produce short, engaging videos at a rapid clip. Pictory is one of many AI offerings that can help with this, but it stands out for its quality and smart features for social media managers, such as integration with Hootsuite so you can jump straight from production to scheduling your posts. Pictory can help you quickly pull out clips from long videos you have, or it can generate one with stock footage based on text inputs. Pricing starts at $19 per month to create up to 30 videos, with other usage limits.