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Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
Where this information is located:
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
2 and 3: I expect the Claude Chrome add-on could handle those, depending on who each website is set-up. Two issues though: first, Claude is actually pretty slow going through Chrome, and no guarantee it wouldn't be faster to just do it yourself. Second, you're opening yourself up for all kinds of security risks at the moment.
1: As a below post says, agents can now use computers directly, but it's not great yet. Not knowing much about the situation, I expect an MCP would be enough, but it heavily depends on the software.
Tbh, the easiest solution would be to see if any of these have some kind of "Export to csv" option, then just chuck those files at Claude/ChatGPT/Whatever and tell it what you need
Most of them would have, but if I go that far by myself, it's probably easier just to sort and filter manually and forget asking AI. This is the kind of routine work which I think is not considered when the talk about "administrative work will be automated away" is going on, be that alarm about job losses or boosting about 'it'll make everyone so productive'. Yeah, if all I did was write emails and reports, sure it'd be easier to tell Copilot 'just email Jenny about I got your email' but it's not. It very much is not.
AI agents are still in that awkward spot: "I spent 3 hours automating a task that would have taken me 5 minutes manually". Except previously only those skilled with computers could try this on a small range of tasks, and now anyone can do it for pretty much anything.
You absolutely could spend a week setting up Claude or Codex or whatever, putting in all the connectors and skills you need, and running a bunch of trial runs to fully automate a big chunk of your job. You'll still end up bottlenecked by stuff. Depends how much you actually enjoy working I suppose
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