ChatGPT is eating up my admin tasks, one piece at a time

😩 Another post about AI? Yes, we in the start of a epic shift. Bill Gates has been on top of tech since the dawn of personal computing. In his recently released letter on AI, saying during his lifetime he has seen two demonstrations of technology that were revolutionary; the first being the graphical user interface, which I use quite a lot…, and the second… yes the natural language AI development that we are experiencing with ChatGPT. Let that sink in for a while, and be prepared to read a lot more about it 🥳

⌛ Back to the topic of saving time. Today ChatGPT saved me from 10 minutes boring admin work. I know this is not the 10x productivity gain or saving 4 hours per day, but a very concrete example of the value of just using and playing with the tool.

📧 I had handful of e-mail containing text mixed with data and I wanted to extract some data to create an Excel table. The “old” way of doing it would be to set up a table in Excel, read through the e-mails to extract data, enter the data into the table, enter the necessary formulas to calculate the metrics.
Not complicated, but takes 10-15 minutes.

🌟 Using ChatGPT, I entered a prompt simply outlying how the table should look like with headers, what data that I wanted to have in each of the column and that it should end with a few rows with summary metrics.
3 rows of text and everything in plain Swedish, took 2-3 minutes at the maximum.

🎉 The result was exactly what I wanted to have. ChatGPT extracted the data and put it in a table formated just how I envisioned it.

💡 That is amazing! Of course at such a small scale its borderline if to do it manually or with the help of ChatGPT, but scaling it up then the time savings become massive. And since it was about extracting data from natural language, writing a program to do it (that doesn’t use GPT-4) is not a simple task, at least not for me.

🧠 A couple of things it made me think about

📌 There are huge benefits of implementing these tools in your company and start tinkering now now now.

📌 This is a very natural way of interfacing with a computer. Compare writing “=average(A1:A5)” or “calculate the average of first column, row 1 through 5”. This forces us to practice a clear and concise way of expressing ourselves using natural language, which is good also when communicating with your human colleagues.

📌 As with all interactions, trust is a key ingredient to save time, if you don’t have it you need to build control structures which is very time consuming and the gains are lost. This holds true for AI-assistants as well. Yes, I checked the data and calculations manually. Trust is not there yet.

🌐 The graphical user interface is in almost every device I use today, and the same will be true for AI.

❓ What tasks have you automated with AI, and how has it impacted your productivity?

🚀 What an exciting time to be alive