AI doesn’t have the best reputation. From accusations of plagiarism to cheating students, there are plenty of negative headlines when it comes to using AI. However, when used properly, AI can be a beneficial and valuable part of your workflow and can even boost your productivity.

The key is using AI within its limits. A recent Gallup study found that 40 percent of U.S. workers are now using AI tools at work, which means the other 60 percent is at risk of getting left behind. Just look at another recent study, which shows that workers who use AI (within the boundaries of its capabilities) can boost their productivity by upwards of 40 percent, while those who use AI outside of those boundaries reduce their performance by 19 percent. In short, as long as you use AI to help you do your job, you have the opportunity to increase your gains by a hefty amount, but if you let AI take the wheel, it’ll have the opposite effect. 

With all of that in mind, the other important part of using AI to increase your productivity is finding the correct AI tools. Below is a list of tools that can help out in various ways, from creativity to productivity, and many of them come from names you already know. 

AI Chatbots

Let’s get the most obvious tool out of the way first: the humble AI chatbot. You can find these everywhere. ChatGPT is the most famous, along with Google Gemini, Claude, Grok, and many others. They are mostly interchangeable, especially since each new release from each company leapfrogs the competition, until the next update is released. However, the most famous is currently ChatGPT, and there are tons of guides on how to optimize it for your workflow. 

So, what can a chatbot do for you? Loads of things, it turns out. The chatbot itself is basically a giant summary of everything the AI was trained on, so the best use case is asking it questions and getting ideas, suggestions, or answers to those questions. You can also automate AI to perform tasks for you, have it check or assist you in writing computer code, and summarize PDFs. The list is far too long to put here, but if you wanted to get into AI, looking into chatbots is a good first step. 

Most Adobe products have AI built in

Adobe has some of the most popular and powerful creativity apps in this space, and many of them have AI built right in to enhance existing functionality. For example, in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe has put in an AI assistant that you can talk to for help navigating large PDF files. You can ask it questions about the contents, ask it for a summary, or ask it to identify specific details. It not only does these things, but provides citations for them, so you can quickly review the relevant sections yourself to make sure the AI didn’t get it wrong. 

The more creative stuff has AI as well. An example of that is Actions in Photoshop. When you use Actions, Photoshop will use AI to analyze the image and then deliver a list of recommended edits. All you have to do is accept the recommendations, and Photoshop applies them automatically. Photoshop can also use AI to remove objects from images, turning what was once a complicated, multi-step process within Photoshop into something that takes a minute or two. 

Adobe keeps a handy list of all of its AI tools within its apps if you want to see all of the other possibilities. 

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot could technically be listed under the AI chatbots above, but we think it’s unique enough to get its own mention. Copilot is built on OpenAI’s GPT models along with Microsoft’s Prometheus. It’s also built directly into Windows PCs, meaning there is no complex download or installation setup. (For once, there’s no Apple equivalent to Copilot, which means Windows has the AI edge for the moment.) Plus, it’s nice to be able to use a chatbot without the need for a web browser. So, on the surface, it functions like a chatbot and can be used like one if you wish. 

On top of that, Copilot is also built into various Microsoft apps, just like Adobe does with its apps. It’s built into the Microsoft 365 suite and can interact with many of the apps there. Microsoft is also working on AI agents for PC that will give you the power to do things like asking the AI to change settings or open apps on your behalf. Since this particular AI tool is built into Windows, you might as well give it a try and see if you like it. 

Grammarly helps with your writing

Of all the tools on this list, Grammarly is the one I use the most. I can usually nail my grammar without any help, but I’ve always been iffy on punctuation, and Grammarly has helped with that immensely. This tool has been around for ages, and I generally use it most often as a browser extension. For the most part, Grammarly analyses your writing in real time and then gives you suggestions on how to fix it. Its word replacement suggestions can make your writing a little stiff for my tastes, but I haven’t missed a comma in years, and that’s all I really care about. 

In recent years, Grammarly has also experimented with generative AI. It works mostly like an AI chatbot of sorts. You ask it to help you write a topic and give it some contextual information, and then Grammarly’s bot helps you write something up. You edit it to your tastes and then ship it. This is something the company generally markets to businesses, but it is available for personal use as well. 

Otter.ai

One that you’ll have in almost every professional setting is talking, and a lot of it. Otter.ai helps with this by giving you a quick, easy way to transcribe almost any social interaction in your work environment so you can read back through it later if you need to. Once transcribed, you can ask Otter’s AI chat to summarize or find specific parts for you, making it quite easy to comb through the information to find what you need. 

You can mash the two together with the brand’s AI channels, which lets you ask the AI questions about prior meetings and also with your teammates at the same time, giving you access to both people and transcriptions at the drop of a hat. Between meetings, presentations, and even things like keynote addresses or college lectures over Zoom, there are plenty of ways Otter.ai can be helpful. As a journalist, it’s hugely helpful for quickly transcribing conversations, but that’s just one of its many use cases.

NotebookLM

Alongside meetings, research is a fact of life for many jobs, and NotebookLM is actually pretty wonderful for this. The idea is pretty simple. You take your sources, be they PDFs, Google Drive links, YouTube videos, or even just pasted text, and you dump them all into NotebookLM. From there, you can ask the AI questions, and it’ll use your sources specifically to find the answers. The AI can go outside of your sources as well, but will tell you when it does. You can even turn everything into a summarized podcast and listen to the information. 

This one is nice because it’s not restricted to a web browser. There are apps available for phones as well, so you can do this on your phone if you’re on the go. Using AI outside of a web browser is a big deal for me, at least, and interacting with it in a native app is much nicer in some cases. If your work requires you to pore through a lot of information, NotebookLM is worth a shot. 

FeedHive

In an increasingly social media-driven world, AI can help you manage that kind of stuff as well. FeedHive is about as good as it gets in this space. On the surface, it’s a social media management platform. You can post from various accounts, manage your DM inbox, schedule posts, and do all of that. That alone is handy for businesses or influencers. However, there are some AI tools included that can help in other ways. 

FeedHive can also view things like analytics to follow post engagement, activity, and more data about each post. It then uses AI to help you plan your posts for when your followers are the most active, along with the right hashtags to help you get the most engagement. There isn’t any data to show how successful this is, but any edge can be helpful when you’re competing against tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people. This one is mostly for business or influencer use, but beginners in this space can definitely use the data to help them.

Remember: Think beyond ChatGPT

There are a ton of other ways to use AI at work, such as generating images or as a companion bot to lift your self-esteem on rough days. While researching this article, we found a surprising number of people who use AI chatbots just to have something to chat with while working from home or studying alone deep into the night. Such interactions can also be helpful, as having something to bounce ideas off of and giving you digital high-fives can help make things feel less lonely and monotonous. 

Whatever AI productivity tools you decide to use, it’s important to make sure that you’re always doing your own work. The Internet has taken a dim view of companies and individuals using AI to create things, and so as long as you do it ethically, you should be okay. 

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.