Feature5 Ways Companies Are Using AI to Boost Productivity
AI use has become ubiquitous in the workplace. Consider these statistics:
- Gartner predicts worldwide genAI spending will hit $644 billion this year — a 76.4% boost over 2024.
- According to a Deloitte survey, 78% of companies expect to increase their overall AI spending in the next fiscal year.
- In a 2024 McKinsey survey, 78% of respondents said their organizations use AI in at least one business function — up from 55% a year earlier.
Much of the reason for the popularity of genAI (and all other iterations of the technology) is its ability to speed up productivity. In fact, some studies show that generative AI tools can increase employees' productivity by as much as 66%.
Let's take a look at some areas where organizations can use AI to speed up outputs:
1. Producing Content
McKinsey reports that content generation is one of the most popular uses of AI, with text generation being the most popular content-related use. AI can pull from various resources to generate content from text to images to video. AI is also being used to augment human-generated content by adding supporting materials.
Marketing and sales departments tend to be the most prolific users of AI to generate content, according to McKinsey, but the research firm says that other departments are increasingly using the technology.
2. Automating Multi-Step Processes
Agentic AI, AI systems that can act autonomously, adapt in real-time and solve multi-step problems based on context and objectives, are becoming more commonplace.
A Gartner 2025 trends report says that AI platforms are enabling enterprises to build, manage and scale AI agents. Agentic AI platforms that integrate orchestration, real-time learning, governance and data security capabilities will differentiate providers in the next evolution of AI and automation.
AI agents start as intelligent assistants that are task-specific tools designed to aid human users. At the initial stage, these AI agents struggle with more complex requests. Adding task specialization inference capabilities evolves AI assistants into single autonomous AI agents (agentic agents) which can operate independently, performing complex, end-to-end tasks with minimal human intervention. An example is an AI-driven cybersecurity threat response agent that scans network traffic, system logs and user behavior patterns in real time.
3. Aiding With Compliance
“I know companies and organizations that have used AI tools to assess what areas of vulnerability they are in for practices based on different legal requirements,” said Jeff Le, managing principal at 100 Mile Strategies, LLC. “This has helped with speeding up some regulatory review within organizations and frees up more time for lawyers and counsel to focus on remedy and fix rather than checklists.”
In the public sector, there has been sharper time demands on legislative staff at the federal and state levels given the increasing speed of the political cycles, Le added. “While going to legislative counsel is still the gold standard for bill creation and analysis, I have seen staffers utilize AI to help build prospective legislative frameworks that can help their bosses introduce language and recommendations faster.”
4. Summarizing Meetings
The most impactful way we use AI is for meeting summarization, said Darian Shimy, CEO of FutureFund. “Tools like Fireflies or Otter.ai automatically record, transcribe and summarize key takeaways from both internal and client calls while also detailing important action items."
Instead of having someone spend 30 minutes writing up notes, Shimy continued, you get an actionable summary instantly, with follow-up tasks extracted automatically. AI saves time and reduces misunderstandings since everyone gets the same recap.
5. Boosting HR Efficiency
HR departments are using AI to answer employee questions, according to Tim Crawford, CIO for AVOA, a research and advisory services firm. “There are a lot of general questions that get asked of HR teams regularly — ‘I’m looking to understand my health care options; How much vacation time do I have?; What are my tax withholdings?’”
Though these types of questions are common, the answers differ from individual to individual. “AI provides a way for employees to ask questions and quickly get the specific answers that are pertinent to them,” said Crawford.
However, this use of AI is only in its embryonic stages, he explained. “One of the challenges with AI, particularly in the HR space, is that you’re talking about potentially sensitive topics and data. You want to make sure that you have the right data… There is a difference in what you can do and what you should do because of governance models and some of those guardrails that you have to put in place so that when someone is using AI, they are using it in an appropriate way and only get access to the information that they actually need.”
While some companies say they use AI for recruiting purposes to attract candidates and to help sort through applications, the primary use of the technology in this area of HR, according to Crawford, is to draft recruitment/job notices.
The Bottom Line: AI Isn’t Just a Time Saver — It’s a Strategic Advantage
AI is no longer a novelty — it’s a necessity. From marketing to HR to compliance, AI is proving it can do more than speed up busywork. It’s reshaping how work gets done, helping employees focus on higher-value tasks and enabling organizations to operate with greater agility and precision. But the real gains will come to those who treat AI not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a catalyst for smarter, more strategic growth.