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How you're using AI at work right now

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO
/
AFP via Getty Images

On The Indicator's recent Jobs Friday episode, we told a few stories of how you all are using AI on the job. A high school teacher creates custom lessons, like an AI-generated pop song about monopolies and a Keynesian chatbot; A wedding photographer makes unwanted tables and exit signs disappear from her client's photos, but has to keep an eye out for creepy mistakes; A software engineer told us how AI is both boosting his productivity and triggering anxiety.

We couldn't fit all the insightful, surprising, useful and unsettling ways you are using AI at work into one episode of The Indicator, so we've collected a few more use cases for you here. Overall, a portrait emerges: While many of you say AI is a time-saver, sometimes freeing you up for more face-to-face work, it also makes mistakes that beg for careful (and time-consuming) oversight.

Making words "sound better"

Many of you said AI is helping you write, often through an iterative back-and-forth process. (Some of you even used AI to email us — check out listener Paul Elder's conversation with Gemini about emailing us, which he gave us permission to share here.)

"Make this sound better" is Nick Messina's go-to prompt whenever he writes a proposal as a civil engineer in Portland, Maine. Then, he fine tunes it. "Most of the time the result is a little too fluffy with a lot of adjectives," the 29-year-old wrote. "I have to dial it back to make it sound more like the words of an engineer rather than a marketing influencer."

He also uses AI to summarize reports, but has run into some trouble with that use. In its summaries, AI has "described numbers that were nowhere to be found" in his original charts.

Even so, Messina says that AI gets him about "80% of the way there" on clerical tasks. "I have no doubt in the future it will design bridges for us," he wrote.

Freeing up time for human work

The budget at the public library in Norwood, Colorado — population 526 — where Erin Dann works is "razor thin." So, the 46-year-old, who is tasked with designing programs for all ages, has outsourced some of that work to AI. The tool lets her "spend less time at my desk and more time with my patrons," she wrote.

She's asked AI to write a song about rainbows set to the tune of "London Bridge" for preschoolers and to draft permission slips. Right now, she's working with AI to design an English language learners course for adults that she hopes to launch soon.

"I usually heavily edit whatever AI spits out," Erin wrote, "but even just having an outline to work from is very helpful."

Role play

Jeffrey Anvari-Clark, a 47-year-old listener in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has been using AI to get more done as an assistant professor of social work. Jeffrey has prompted AI to pose as a client while his students roleplay as social workers. He's also used it to come up with "exemplar assignment papers" based on rubric criteria for his students to model their own papers on.

Writing in Deutsch

As an auditor, Genevieve Cory, 54, grants certifications to companies who are supporting cycling in Munich, Germany.

German is not Genevieve's native language, so AI helps her write letters of congratulations to people who have accomplished certain items from a list of dozens of possibilities in the language.

She's trained the LLM she works with to accept a 'yes-or-no' checklist of accomplishments, then rephrase everything with a 'flowery congratulations.' Genevieve has to look over the letters before she sends them, though — occasionally, it adds a sentence referring to a previous candidate.

Speaking in code

A number of you told us that AI helps you with another type of language: code. Thomas Weinandy, a 36-year-old research economist, told us that he started using AI to help him work in Python about two years ago. But he did so in secret, because his company didn't have any AI guidelines.

To avoid giving up any sensitive data or code, Thomas would fill his queries with random words, like types of fruits. For example: "I have monthly sales data in the format {"apples": 1, "bananas": 2, "cherries": 3}. Python code to explode that pd df column vertically."

After a year, Thomas's company started encouraging AI use. Now, he uses the tool daily for coding assistance, research, brainstorming and preparing for interviews (he chats with an AI speech tool to practice his answers). "I estimate that I am now 30% more efficient at my job," the economist wrote.

Paul Elder, 53, is an IT infrastructure engineer at an insurance company. He's not a programmer himself, but part of his job requires writing a type of program called script.

Script writing used to be a time-consuming process for him requiring a lot of internet research or help from an actual human programmer. Now, Paul can get a script done "after a brief conversation" with an LLM.

But, Paul's caution to us: AI can make mistakes. Paul runs every AI-generated script through a different AI for "independent review." Once, an AI returned him a script with a "severe error that could have caused a system-wide meltdown." The near-catastrophe reinforced an important lesson for Paul: AI is not a replacement for human expertise. "I must understand my job, the systems, and the potential risks."

Not everyone finds it time saving to have AI help, including Lynn Pepin, a 29 year-old software engineer in Connecticut. They say, they are increasingly expected to use AI tools in their work, even though they find AI products "unethical and unproductive."

"They're too erroneous too often," Lynn said. "Even when these tools do things right (and they increasingly do!), I spend more mental energy going over the generated code with a fine-tuned comb than I would writing it myself."

And more …

Thanks to everyone who wrote to us about how you use AI at work. We'll keep covering the changes AI is bringing to the economy on The Indicator and on Planet Money. In fact, we're working on a Planet Money episode now about how to think about which jobs are more or less likely to be changed or eliminated by AI. Stay tuned for that. And if you have more innovative or anxiety-inducing ways that AI is changing your industry that you think we're missing, please reply to this email and tell us about it.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Ella Feldman
Ella Feldman is a summer fellow at The Indicator from Planet Money. She is pursuing an M.A. in business reporting at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she's also taking classes in audio and data journalism.