AI in the Workplace: 3 Practical Ways to Boost Your Productivity and Skills

Table of Contents

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• Meet the Expert: Kat Kemner, AI Instructor at General Assembly
• Pro-Tip: Start With an AI-First Mindset
• #1: Use AI to Strengthen Your Soft Skills
• #2: Automate Repetitive Tasks Using the RACE Framework
• #3: Treat AI as a Thought Partner – Not Just a Tool
• How to Balance AI Efficiency with Human Critical Thinking
• Will AI Replace Jobs? Kat’s Perspective
• How General Assembly’s AI Courses Work

From attending meetings on your behalf to developing critical soft skills, AI tools are reshaping workplace efficiency in unexpected ways. But how can you move beyond basic automation to truly leverage AI as a thinking partner? Kat Kemner, AI Instructor at General Assembly, shares her insights on leveraging AI to address real-world workplace challenges, develop leadership skills, and prepare for the future of work. Plus, discover how General Assembly’s AI courses are helping professionals across all industries harness these powerful tools – whether you’re a complete beginner or looking to upskill.

Meet the Expert: Kat Kemner, AI Instructor at General Assembly

Kat Kemner is an AI instructor, subject matter expert, and lifelong learner at General Assembly. She teaches courses like GenAI 101, Prompt Writing, AI for Workplace Productivity, and AI for Career Transition, and she consults on AI-driven training for enterprise teams.

“I see AI as a tool to multiply human potential,” Kat says. “It gives us superpowers – but only if we learn how to use it intentionally.”

Pro-Tip: Start With an AI-First Mindset

Before we dive into specific efficiencies, Kat emphasizes the importance of an AI-first mindset.

Most people approach tasks like this:

“I'll do the work first and bring AI in at the end to polish it.”

But highly effective AI users reverse that order:

“I have a problem. Let me bring AI into the thinking immediately.”

Instead of treating AI as a finishing tool, an AI-first mindset treats it as a thinking partner from the very beginning. Whether you're drafting a strategy, building a presentation, or defining project requirements, AI can help you explore possibilities, surface angles you may have missed, and shape the direction of the work – not just the final version. The key difference is that one approach uses AI as a tool to complete your work (essentially a checkbox), while the other utilizes AI as a thinking partner from the outset. 

This shift alone can significantly increase speed, clarity, and creativity. And adopting an AI-first mindset is what separates casual AI users from those who achieve exceptional results.

Kat sees two major workplace inefficiencies where AI already delivers immediate impact:

1. Meeting Overload

AI tools can attend meetings on your behalf, take notes, and automatically send follow-up summaries to all participants. The result? Hours saved each week – and fewer afternoons lost to catching up.

2. Information Overload

The cognitive fatigue from sifting through a company’s worth of knowledge represents one of the most significant pain points in modern workplaces. Valuable information gets lost in what Kat calls “the corporate void,” even though it could be reapplied in different situations. AI can not only track this information but also structure knowledge bases and retrieve relevant content based on your specific objective.

Three Practical Ways Professionals Get More Efficient with AI

#1: Use AI to Strengthen Your Soft Skills

“Everyone thinks of AI as a task finisher,” Kat says. “But AI is incredible at helping you improve the human skills that shape your career.”

While most people think about AI’s technical applications – writing reports, analyzing data, automating tasks – Kat discovered something more powerful a couple of years ago: using AI to get better at the human stuff.

As Kat puts it, “AI can serve as your always-available, never-judgmental coach for developing the soft skills that actually determine your career trajectory.” The way you interact with people matters more than just automating emails and writing one-pagers.

AI can help you develop several core leadership skills:

• Empathy prompts: Share a difficult stakeholder scenario and ask: “What perspectives might I be missing?” and “What motivations could be driving this person?” AI can surface alternative viewpoints you wouldn’t have considered, helping you walk into the meeting more grounded and less defensive.

• Improving Communication: Paste a policy, report, or presentation and ask: “What questions will my manager have?” or “Where is this unclear?” This helps you anticipate concerns – a hallmark of strong communicators.

• Enhancing Influence: Ask “How would I adapt this message for a data-driven stakeholder?” and “What arguments would resonate with a CEO vs. a peer?” AI models can help you tailor communication to different audiences.

• Learning Agility: AI can transform complex concepts into visual explanations, analogies, and step-by-step breakdowns. This makes learning faster and personalized.

There’s a narrative that AI may be atrophying our communication skills when we constantly use it to write papers and emails. While this concern deserves consideration, using AI to develop empathy, improve communication, and enhance your ability to influence others can actually have the opposite effect, making your soft skills far more effective. How you connect with others and communicate has more impact on your career than almost anything else.

“Most people use AI to finish tasks. Far fewer use it to understand humans better,” Kat says. “But soft skills are what determine your career trajectory.”

#2: Automate Repetitive Tasks Using the RACE Framework

Once her students adopt an AI-first mindset, Kat encourages them to focus inward – on the repetitive, energy-draining tasks that quietly consume hours each week. To make this practical, she teaches the RACE Framework, a simple, repeatable approach for building automated workflows that actually stick.

R – Review

Start by observing your day-to-day work. “What are you doing over and over? And what makes you lose energy?” Kat asks.

GA students often spend a week tracking these moments in real time – not relying on memory, but noticing the friction as it happens.

A – Assess

From that list, identify which tasks could AI help with? Which ones should AI help with?

Those are not always the same. Sometimes the best tasks to automate are the ones that sap your motivation, not necessarily the ones that take the longest.

C – Create

Pick one task each week and build the automation. This could mean:

• Writing a long, reusable prompt

• Creating a custom GPT for a weekly deliverable

• Asking AI to design the workflow for you

• Setting up a small automation using your preferred tools

“You don’t have to boil the ocean,” Kat says. “One process a week becomes a flywheel.”

E – Evaluate & Evolve

At the end of the week, reflect for five minutes:

• Did this actually save time?

• What should change?

• Could this workflow evolve into something more sophisticated?

This “review and refine” step is where adoption happens – and adoption, Kat emphasizes, is the true catalyst of workplace efficiency. 

During her workshops at General Assembly, Kat ends with a simple assignment: Choose one thing you will change in the first week back at work.

• Look at their daily and weekly routines

• Identify one task that fits the RACE model

• Decide how they’ll apply AI to improve it

“It takes five minutes,” Kat says. “But that one action often creates the momentum that transforms how people work.”

#3: Treat AI as a Thought Partner – Not Just a Tool

Problem-solving is a core part of every job. AI can accelerate it.

Kat recommends using voice mode with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to:

• Brainstorm 10 different solutions

• Analyze tradeoffs – ask it to act as a skeptic, identify blind spots

• Pressure-test strategies and rollout communication

Try prompts like:

• “Act as a skeptic. What risks am I missing in this approach?”

• “Brainstorm 10 solutions to this workplace challenge.”

• “Find historical parallels or existing frameworks for this problem.”

Even if you don’t use an idea directly, the process sparks new thinking.

AI can also help with your own career problem-solving, acting as a career coach or resume reviewer. 

“AI can help you clarify what you want and connect your current skills to future possibilities,” Kat says. “That kind of clarity fuels real efficiency.”

How to Balance AI Efficiency with Human Critical Thinking

Kat emphasizes being intentional. Ask yourself:

• What does your company allow?

• What tasks feel appropriate for AI – and which feel uniquely human?

• Where do you need to preserve your own judgment, creativity, or ethical sensitivity?

There’s no universal rulebook yet – even experts don’t entirely agree. The key is to think critically, discuss norms with your team, and revisit your boundaries as tools continue to evolve.

And for anyone hesitant? Kat emphasizes that curiosity and skepticism can coexist. You don’t need to be “all in” on AI to start exploring it.

She offers two simple, low-pressure ways to experiment while keeping your critical thinking intact:

1. Start with a task where you already have expertise. Try prompting Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT in an area you know extremely well. Use your existing knowledge to evaluate its output – this builds confidence, not dependence.

2. Try using AI in your personal life first. Kat often recommends experimenting with something low-stakes, like asking for personalized book recommendations or brainstorming ideas. The point isn’t perfection – it’s simply getting comfortable with how the tools respond before applying them at work.

You don’t have to abandon your skepticism – just don’t let it prevent you from exploring what’s possible. Learning, experimenting, and adjusting are part of the modern skill set.

Will AI Replace Jobs? Kat’s Perspective

Kat holds space for both realism and optimism. “No one knows exactly what will happen,” she says. “Not even the experts.”

But historically, people who embraced new technologies – not avoided them – remained the most employable. Her favorite quote is “You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI.” – Scott Galloway

Kat sees the future as human + AI, not human vs. AI. In the next year, we’ll likely see:

• AI becoming more proactive than reactive. Tools will anticipate needs before you ask – drafting summaries, analyzing data, and recommending next steps. 

• Predictive analytics will scale. AI will synthesize ongoing employee, customer, or product signals to uncover trends far earlier than today’s static reports.

• Personalization – AI will adapt more deeply to individual users in tone, preferences, interests, and learning style. This will make AI feel more like a personalized coach than a generic assistant.

There will always be roles where empathy, creativity, persuasion, and human nuance are irreplaceable.

“AI can help us learn faster, communicate better, think more deeply, and discover what we’re capable of,” she says. “Humans are awesome. AI just helps us unleash more of that.”

How General Assembly’s AI Courses Work

As an Instructor at General Assembly, Kat teaches AI courses specifically for working professionals who need practical skills they can apply immediately.

Who Should Take These Courses?

These courses welcome both complete beginners and professionals looking to upskill. You don’t need a technical background — just curiosity and a desire to work more effectively. The programs are designed for professionals across all industries who want to leverage AI without becoming programmers.

What Makes General Assembly’s Approach Different

General Assembly emphasizes practical application over theoretical knowledge. The focus is on developing usable skills that directly translate to workplace value, rather than just understanding how AI works conceptually.

The learning environment brings together professionals from diverse backgrounds, creating opportunities to learn from others’ experiences and real-world use cases across different industries. 

Find out more and read General Assembly reviews on Course Report. This article was produced by the Course Report team in partnership with General Assembly.