How to boost your productivity using AI?
✔️Productivity,👨🏼💻iMagazine,⭐️Featured
Everyone’s talking about AI these days. Artificial Intelligence. It’s everywhere – on the news, in podcasts, at dinner parties. While the concept has been around since the Terminator movies which scared us into thinking machines would take over the world, it wasn’t until ChatGPT burst onto the scene a few years ago that AI became something we could actually touch, play with, and use in our daily lives. In this article I’ll be sharing my own experiences using AI and how at the end of the day, I believe it’s an amazing productivity booster.
- What is AI? Will it take our jobs?
- How my team and I are using AI for work
- Tip 1: always verify AI
- The “creepy” side of AI – voice, video, and graphics
- Tip 2: be authentic!
- AI features coming to Nozbe
- How AI impacts productivity
What is AI? Will it take our jobs?
AI isn’t just chatbots. It’s also technologies that create graphics, generate videos, and even clone your voice. And with all this power comes the inevitable question: is AI really that good, or does it just make stuff up? And most importantly – will it take our jobs?
So, let’s talk about jobs. While some jobs will change, I don’t think it’s going to make us all unemployed. What I believe AI will do is improve our work. Especially the tedious stuff – the boring tasks we didn’t want to do anyway, or the ones that used to take hours of mind-numbing effort.
This isn’t new. Every major technological shift changes the job market. Who would have predicted that “YouTuber” would become one of the most respected professions today? Or that the phone – a device once permanently attached to a wall – would evolve into a supercomputer in our pocket?
AI is following the same pattern. It automates and enhances our work. But here’s what excites me most: for some people, AI doesn’t just improve productivity – it gives them genuine superpowers. And I’ve seen this happen right here in our Nozbe team since we started to use it daily at work.
How my team and I are using AI for work
Let me share some real examples from my own life and my team’s experiences:
Replacing “googling”
Instead of searching by typing keywords into Google, clicking through links, and browsing websites, you just ask a question and get an answer. I have Perplexity on my iPhone and I’ve gotten used to simply asking it things directly. It’s faster, cleaner, and often more useful than traditional searching. What’s great is that it incorporates sources into its answers, including sometimes YouTube links, so I can always verify its truthfulness.
Treating AI as a tutor
My daughter uses AI in a brilliant way – she doesn’t let it do her homework for her. Instead, she uses it as a personal tutor. She asks it to create exercises on specific subjects, works through them herself, and then asks the AI to check her work and explain her mistakes. That’s using technology the right way!
Data analysis that would take hours
We use Claude at Nozbe, and I’ve been amazed by what it can do with data. I uploaded our sales statistics in CSV format and started asking questions: how many customers have accounts with 1-3 users? How many have more? If we assume an average price of X dollars per user, what’s the revenue percentage at each level? Instead of calculating all this myself, AI draws nice conclusions – and sometimes Claude even suggests things on its own, like comparing our SaaS metrics to market averages. I love being able to ask questions about my data and get quick answers.
Translation in your own style
Here’s one close to my heart: when I write my monthly iMagazine column, I actually write it in English first because I feel more comfortable that way. Then I have Claude translate it to Polish – but here’s the key – based on my previous columns. This way the translation sounds like me, not some generic machine output. Then I read through the Polish version and make corrections, but it saves me lots of time.
Automation that saves the day
Our video wizard, Paul, once made a mistake with file names for a promotion. Instead of manually fixing hundreds of files, he asked AI to prepare a script that would rename them according to the correct format. Within seconds, the files were fixed. What could have been hours of tedious work became a minute of clever automation.
Marketing materials that almost write themselves
For our Black Friday promotion, Magda, our marketing wizard, did a test. She uploaded our previous year’s email content and asked Claude to update them for 2025 with a few small corrections. When she read through the results, she said there were surprisingly few errors. The AI understood the context, maintained our tone, and did 80% of the work.
Creating content from content
Paweł creates scripts for our social media Reels based on our “No Office” podcast. He uploads the transcription and asks AI to generate catchy scripts for short videos. Three scripts for three Reels – done. Again, later I review the scripts, edit them and make sure they sound like me. However, yet again we are saving time.
Tip 1: always verify AI
Here’s something I cannot stress enough: AI is a tool, not a replacement for human judgment. Always check calculations – see if it’s making mistakes somewhere. Always have someone who knows the language review translations before publishing. Always read through finished materials thoroughly – correct them, edit them.
AI can hallucinate. It can be confidently wrong. It can make things up that sound completely plausible. This is why human oversight isn’t optional – it’s essential.
Think of AI as a brilliant assistant who needs supervision.
The “creepy” side of AI – voice, video, and graphics
Now let’s talk about the stuff that feels like science fiction.
Voice cloning
We’ve been playing with ElevenLabs at Nozbe. I uploaded audio samples from my podcasts – both the ones I do here and on the Nadgryzieni podcast – and it created a synthetic version of my voice. “AI Michael.” Now, when I write a script in English, I can generate it with my voice but with a perfect native accent. I could even have “myself” speak in languages I don’t know. It’s both amazing and a little unsettling.
Video and graphics
Paweł has been experimenting with various AI video tools. For now, both video and graphics come out looking quite artificial – you can tell it’s AI-generated. But we see potential for B-roll footage, where you don’t need perfect realism, just something visual to accompany audio.
NotebookLM from Google
This one is fascinating. I’ve been creating episodes of “The Podcast” using NotebookLM. I simply upload my iMagazine column as a note, and the application generates a podcast – a conversation between two virtual hosts discussing my article. Then I record an intro and publish it. The same content, presented in a completely different way.
Tip 2: be authentic!
Here’s my warning: you have to be very careful with all of this. The goal isn’t to replace authenticity with AI-generated content. It’s to use AI as support while keeping what you create genuine and real. The lines between science and fiction can be very blurry if you use these AI tools too much!
AI features coming to Nozbe
Now, why doesn’t our app, Nozbe, already have AI built in? Here’s the honest answer: we didn’t want to “add AI” to Nozbe just because it’s trendy. We wanted to add AI in a way that makes Nozbe genuinely useful, not just buzzword-compliant.
But first, we needed to understand AI ourselves. That’s why we spent all of 2025 experimenting – learning how AI works, what it’s good at, what it fails at, and how it could realistically help our customers be more productive.
And now we have many ideas. AI features that will help you create new projects, assist with adding tasks, and analyze your data in ways that weren’t possible before.
However, we have to be very mindful of our users’ data. We don’t want it leaking to OpenAI or any other company. That’s why we’re introducing AI features carefully this year, one by one, testing if everything works well and using our own AI servers where needed.
If you want to see what we’re building, I invite you to check out our webinar on AI at Nozbe where I’m showing these features and explaining our approach.
How AI impacts productivity
Now that we’ve discussed the many uses of AI, let’s talk about how it can improve your productivity:
- Saves time on tedious tasks – you no longer need to spend hours on mind-numbing tasks. AI can do many of these things for you!
- Lowers the barrier of entry – this is key. Over the years of writing my column for iMagazine I’ve been always repeating that the real boost to productivity is to lower the barrier of entry. Make it easy to start. When AI does research or translation or initial concept for you, it’s easier to start editing it and working on it. You have no excuse.
- Feeds your curiosity – as I mentioned above, when you feed AI with data you can ask questions and get answers pretty quickly. This way you can experiment, ask more questions, and get to the very bottom of each problem quicker.
- Teaches you to delegate tasks better – to be able to feed the data to the AI, you have to prepare it. Just like in real life, before you delegate a task to someone, you have to set expectations, prepare context, etc. AI teaches you to become a better manager.
- Gives you superpowers! – in the end, being able to have a quite capable assistant in the form of AI always ready to help you out, gives you superpowers. You can now do more in less time and focus on what’s really important. Where your input is the missing ingredient.
AI isn’t here to replace us. It’s here to amplify what makes us uniquely human: our creativity, judgment, and ability to make decisions that matter.