[Illustrations: Studio Pong]

42 ways you should be using AI right now

Agentic AI can make life—and work—easier. You know this. But are you doing anything about it? Time to get off the sidelines and into the game.

Speaking at Cisco’s AI Summit in February, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that concern over hypercapable AI replacing human knowledge workers en masse was overblown. “You’re not going to lose your job to AI,” he declared. “You’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” You could regard this prospect as ominous in itself. Or you could seize the opportunity to become that “someone who uses AI.” These days, that doesn’t just mean querying a chatbot. It means harnessing AI agents. Using them can free up time for you to do your best work. Here’s a guide to getting started, avoiding pitfalls, and staying on top of the latest developments.

The easiest way to dip your toe into agentic AI is to experiment with features built into apps you already use. Many large, established productivity platforms offer their own agents, and while the industry hype level is high, some are genuinely useful:

The project management platform Asana emphasizes the wide-ranging skills of its agents by calling them “teammates.” At your instruction, they can perform work such as mapping out timelines and performing competitive analysis based on market data.

Few long-established platforms have embraced AI as wholeheartedly as Canva, the design tool. You can use its Canva AI feature to crank out first drafts of presentations, PDFs, videos, apps, and more, then edit them as you see fit.

Google Workspace Studio

Part of Google’s Workspace suite, this tool lets you create agents to handle simple ongoing tasks—say, sending summaries after Google Meet meetings or monitoring your Gmail for messages that require a response.

Notion started out as a flexible, collaborative note-taking app. Now it’s evolved into a command center for AI-fueled workplace productivity. Along with being able to perform automated work using Notion’s own features on your behalf, it can access data from external sources such as Slack and Google Docs.

Do you live in Slack? So does its built-in bot, giving it access to the information reflected in conversations and channels. It calls on this repository of work-related data to help it prep you for meetings, review projects in progress, and more.

The video-calling giant’s agent can schedule meetings, propose ways to achieve agreed-upon goals, and share........

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