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If you're on the fence about embracing digital personal assistants, consider the ways they can improve your workplace.
We’ve all heard someone ask Siri about the weather forecast or request that Alexa play their favorite tunes. However, these digital personal assistants can also play a vital role in improving business productivity. They’re popular tools for keeping busy entrepreneurs organized, freeing up valuable time and addressing customer service needs. Here’s how digital assistants can improve your workplace productivity.
A digital assistant is an AI-powered application that understands voice or text commands to answer questions, complete tasks and automate everyday activities. Using artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), digital assistants learn from user interactions to provide increasingly personalized and relevant responses. They can help with everything from setting reminders and scheduling meetings to summarizing documents, drafting emails and answering customer questions.
Business-specific digital assistants can also function as AI chatbots that help ensure your company always provides high-quality customer service. They’re available to answer customer inquiries even when you and your team aren’t working, and many can provide meaningful, context-aware responses or seamlessly hand customers off to a live representative when needed.
These are some of the most popular digital assistants available today:
These digital assistants analyze what users say or type, along with available context, to understand requests and generate relevant responses. For businesses, they can automate repetitive tasks, schedule meetings, answer common customer questions, route customers to the appropriate department and help employees work more efficiently.
Here are some of the many ways digital assistants can boost productivity in the workplace.
One of the biggest advantages of digital assistants is their ability to handle routine tasks with minimal effort. Need to call a client? You can simply ask Siri to place the call. Want Microsoft Copilot to summarize a meeting, draft an email or help organize your notes? It can do that too.
Beyond handling one-off tasks, digital assistants can take care of recurring ones too. You can set reminders, create smart notifications, schedule social media posts or automate follow-up emails so you don’t have to think about them every day. It might not seem like much at first, but over time, these small workflow automation wins can add up to meaningful hours saved each week.
Keeping track of meetings, deadlines and everyday to-dos is much easier with a digital assistant. You can ask Siri or Google Assistant to remind you to pick up printer paper on the way home, set recurring reminders for weekly tasks or schedule calendar appointments with a simple voice command.
AI assistants can also take the hassle out of scheduling meetings. For example, Microsoft Copilot can generate meeting invitations from an email thread in Outlook. Simply click Schedule with Copilot while viewing the conversation, review the meeting details and send the invitation.
When information is just a quick voice command away, it’s easier to keep work moving. Many digital assistants integrate with popular workplace tools, including project management platforms like Asana and monday.com, making it simple to create tasks, update projects and find information without constantly switching between apps.
The productivity benefits go beyond saving a few clicks. According to McKinsey research, generative AI tools — including AI-powered digital assistants — could automate up to 70 percent of the time employees currently spend on administrative tasks, freeing them to focus on more valuable work. That kind of time savings can help teams respond faster, reduce bottlenecks and collaborate with co-workers more efficiently.
If a teammate has a question about a newly assigned task, they can use a digital assistant to quickly send a message or look up the information they need. That can save a surprising amount of back-and-forth over the course of a week.
Typing can sometimes interrupt your train of thought. When you’re brainstorming or trying to work through a new idea, stopping to type every detail can slow you down.
With digital assistants, you can simply talk through your ideas and have them transcribed into emails, documents or to-do lists. Tools like Apple Dictation, Google’s voice typing and AI assistants built into platforms like Microsoft 365 make it easier to capture ideas as they come to you. You can always go back and edit later, but getting your thoughts down quickly helps ensure you don’t lose a good idea before you have a chance to develop it.
Most workdays involve bouncing between projects, apps and conversations. But every time you stop what you’re doing to answer a message, look up information or switch to another program, it takes time to get back on track. In fact, a widely cited University of California, Irvine study found that it takes workers about 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption.
Digital assistants can help reduce those disruptions. Instead of jumping between multiple apps to find a file, schedule a meeting or answer a quick question, you can often accomplish those tasks with a simple prompt or voice command. The fewer times you have to stop and switch gears, the easier it is to stay focused and keep your work moving.
Research is an important part of running a business, but it can also be time-consuming. Whether you’re conducting market research, evaluating new software or preparing for a client meeting, digital assistants can help you get up to speed much faster. Tools like Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT can summarize lengthy reports, compare products, explain unfamiliar topics and answer follow-up questions in seconds.
For example, if you’re thinking about expanding into a new market, you can ask a digital assistant to explain the competitive landscape, summarize recent industry trends and news or identify the biggest players before you start digging into the details yourself. You’ll still want to verify important information, but it can be a much faster way to get your bearings.
Digital assistants can do much more than automate routine work. They can also help businesses:
If digital assistants have become a regular part of your team’s workflow, there are plenty of other AI tools worth exploring. While digital assistants are designed to handle a wide range of everyday tasks, some AI platforms specialize in research, writing, customer service or enterprise automation. Here are a few to consider:
Many of the AI tools that can boost productivity are already built into the devices and business software you use every day. Whether you’re drafting emails, summarizing meetings, researching a new market or automating routine tasks, digital assistants can help you work more efficiently without requiring a major technology investment.
As AI capabilities continue to expand, digital assistants are becoming a standard part of the modern workplace rather than a nice-to-have feature. Learning how to use these tools effectively now can help your business save time, improve decision-making and stay competitive as AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday work.
Max Freedman contributed to this article.
