Commentary: Using AI at work doesn’t have to be daunting

WILL AI HALLUCINATIONS GET ME INTO TROUBLE? 

Another fear that people have about Gen AI is its tendency to “hallucinate” or to give wrong answers confidently. This has led to cases of lawyers and students getting into trouble over fake citations.

The bad news is that we cannot eliminate hallucinations due to the way that Gen AI works. 

The good news is that AI apps hallucinate far less today, and you can further reduce hallucinations by providing references and data.

For example, if you want Gen AI to generate a market trend report in your company’s specific format, you can upload an earlier report and the latest market data. Gen AI will follow the reporting format while updating it with the latest numbers. This way, Gen AI is less likely to tap on its training data or online sources. 

Major Gen AI apps such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google NotebookLM allow users to create project folders to store reference documents, where they will pull information from when responding to prompts. Just make sure you do not upload any confidential or sensitive data, and always verify the output.

WHAT CAN I AUTOMATE WITH AI? 

Once you have gotten the hang of prompting and uploading data, you can start automating your workflows.

If this sounds complicated, breathe easy, because automation is simply asking the machine to help you with repetitive tasks. 

For example, if you routinely check documents to ensure they are business-compliant, you can upload the company’s requirements and then ask Gen AI to do the checking for you. Say you receive a purchase order – Gen AI can compare it against your procurement guidelines and flag any missing information.

And if you dislike taking meeting minutes (like everyone else), you can first record and transcribe the meeting using free apps or tools on your smartphone. Then, paste the transcription into Gen AI and ask it to “organise transcript into meeting minutes”.