In this instructional YouTube video, Helena Liu presents three underutilized AI workflows designed to dramatically boost personal and professional productivity. The first workflow shows how to build a custom learning curriculum: using Perplexity to retrieve a curated list of online resources for a chosen topic (e.g., Python), importing those URLs into Google’s NotebookLM, and prompting NotebookLM to generate video‑style lectures, slide decks, and tailored lesson plans. The second workflow demonstrates rapid creation of polished reports and visual dashboards: a user asks Perplexity (with its finance tab enabled) to analyze a company's SEC filings, then copies the generated text into Google Gemini Canvas, which can instantly transform the content into a full‑featured website or an infographic, ready for sharing. The third workflow explains how to turn ChatGPT into a persistent expert assistant: the user commands ChatGPT to conduct deep research on a domain (e.g., copywriting), exports the resulting knowledge base as a PDF, and uploads that file into a dedicated ChatGPT project folder so future conversations automatically draw on the curated expertise. Throughout, Helena emphasizes the speed, accessibility (many tools are free), and the surprising quality of the outputs, encouraging viewers to adopt these techniques, like and subscribe, and enroll in her free AI course.
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Today I'm going to show you 3 severely underutilized ways that you can use AI to boost your productivity. Now, if you're new to my channel, hi, my name is Helena, and on this channel I talk about everything AI, agents, automations, you name it. So if you want to be in the know on the latest tech breakthroughs, please make sure you like and subscribe. That's also going to help out this channel so much. All right, with that being said, let's dive into technique number 1. So let's suppose you want to learn a new topic and you want someone to teach it to you. You don't just want to go on ChatGPT and say, teach me blah, and you have to read a whole entire paragraph. Now you can actually get AI to create slides and a lecture to teach you any topic that you want. I actually shared this technique with a friend of mine who's homeschooling their kids. Let me show you how you can do this. So first, we're going to go into Perplexity and we can use the following prompt. Okay, I have finished writing my prompt. Here's what I wrote. I'd like to learn Python. Please give me the top 20 to 50 resources that you can find online that teaches this. Note, the site is not the product page. Give me the URLs only. So basically, we're getting Perplexity to do research for us right now on this topic, and we just want a list of resources. And you can see Perplexity has given me the top 30 pages that teaches Python. Now, the next step is we're going to copy all of these resources and get it into NotebookLM. You can get started with NotebookLM for free. It's a free tool that Google has put out, and it is absolutely fabulous. It's one of my favorite tools here. So what we're going to do is copy all of these links here and bring it into NotebookLM. So to create your free account, with NotebookLM, simply go to notebooklm.google.com, and once you're inside, click on Create New Notebook. And you can see here at the bottom, we can train it on different sources. So, you can train it on anything in your Google Drive, websites, YouTube links, as well as just copied text. In our case, we want to train it on websites. So, I'm going to paste in all of the resources that we just got from Perplexity and press Insert. Now you can see NotebookLM is learning all of our materials here and it learns it super fast. There's no way I can get through all of these sites within seconds, right? And then after NotebookLM has learned all of these resources here, we can go over here under Studio. You see where it says Video Overview? This is where we can get NotebookLM to create a custom lecture for us and we can give it specific instructions here too. So if I press on the pen button up here, I can give it a specific prompt. I want to learn Python, for example. And this is how you can actually get it to create the lecture specific to the type of style, the type of goals that you have, and the specific topic that you want to learn here as well. So once you put in your prompt, just click Generate. And by the way, the prompt part is optional. Now, I actually showed this technique to my friend who is homeschooling her kids, and now she's able to create a whole bunch of lectures to supplement the teachings that she's giving to her children as well. Now you can teach them on any topic and you can create lectures just like this. So this process does take a few minutes and once it's done, you've got your own video lecture that you can watch through. Now, if you do not prompt it, it's going to give you the broad overview. So after we have created this initial lesson, we can go back to Studio, click on the pen icon again and tell it the specific section of Python method that we want to dive into, and then it's going to create another lecture for you. So essentially you're designing your own curriculum, and if you're not sure what order of videos to create it in, you can always chat with Gemini here and it can create an entire curriculum for you. So this is how you can create any online course that you want on any topic. It's quite astonishing that Google can just now create these lectures with voiceovers, with slides within minutes now. It just blows my mind, really. All right, so that's the first technique. You can now teach yourself anything, whether you're a visual learner or audio learner. Now AI can create any lecture that you want on any topic that you want. Now let's go on to the second technique, which is where you can use AI to create any kind of professional-looking report or interactive dashboards within minutes. Okay, let me show you how to do that. So first, we're going to go back to Perplexity, and let's suppose that I was a financial analyst and my boss told me to analyze a stock. So I can put in the following prompt, right? So I can say, analyze these SEC filings of, let's insert company. In this case, let's say it's Starbucks, of Starbucks with ticker symbol SBUX. But this could be anything that you want. And I told it to specifically analyze these specific sections, right? I wanted to look at its financial health Growth and profitability, risks, competitive position, management discussion, evaluation metrics, red flags, and investment verdict. Now, something that you may not know about Perplexity is that when you click on the globe icon here, you can actually turn on the finance tab here. And no, you don't have to be on the upgraded plan to do this. I'm actually on the free plan right now. So when you turn this on, Perplexity is actually going to specifically do research on SEC filings. So if you're looking to invest in a stock or if you work in the financial industry, this is super helpful. But you can use the same technique for anything that you want to research as well. So we're going to press Enter, and now Perplexity is going to basically write up a report for us on everything about Starbucks. So within seconds here, you can see that Perplexity has written us a whole detailed report, but we're not done yet. Let's take this up to the next level, right? So let's say you really want to impress your boss. What you can do is actually have AI analyze and start visualizing this data. And no, you don't have to know how to use complex data analytic tools. Let me show you how to do this. Now, what we're going to do is copy this report here, and what we'll do is paste this into Google Canvas. So we're going to go into Gemini here, and if you have a Gmail account, you will automatically have a Gemini account as well. If you need to sign up, The website is gemini.google.com. Now, before we give Google all of this information, we're going to go down here, press on Tools, and then make sure the Canvas option is turned on. Now we can say paste in all of the data that we have, and that's all we need to give it. Then we just press Submit. Okay, within a few seconds here, as we can see, Gemini has opened up a whole canvas on the right side of our screen here, and basically it's just regurgitating the text that we have just given it. Now, once it finishes, you can actually hover down and click on the Create button. And now we can select how we want to transform this data. So if we click on Website, for example, now we can have an entire website made that will display all of this information. So let's give it a few seconds for that to generate. Okay, so it's been about a minute and a half and our web page is finished. I mean, Imagine taking this to your next board meeting. Like, how impressive is this going to look? It looks like you put in a whole bunch of effort into this, but you've only like spent 2 seconds on it, right? So this is why this is one of the things I love about AI. Another thing that you can do inside of Canva is turn all of the research that you have just done on whatever topic that you want into infographics. So again, click on Create, and then this time instead of going to Webpage, go to Infographic instead. So now we can create a whole infographic about all of the stock research that we just did on Starbucks. It's absolutely fantastic. So as you can see here, Gemini is going hard at work creating our financial infographic, and within minutes it will be done. All right, so it's been about 45 seconds or so, and our Starbucks infographic is done. So you can see we have charts representing the data, and we can even go back to Gemini, prompt it here if there's specific sections that we want to change in this dashboard as well. And once we're ready, we just press Share. Copy the content, and boom, we're done. We're ready to share this report. Now, it's so much easier to create professional-looking reports that's going to just wow your boss. All right, so now let's move on to technique number 3. So instead of telling ChatGPT something like, you are an expert at insert blank, and then putting in your prompt, what's an even better way is to tell it to do deep research about that specific topic that you want ChatGPT to be an expert at. Let's suppose it is being an excellent copywriter. So I can put in a prompt that looks something like this: do research on the most compelling copywriting techniques that get people to buy. Dive deep into the psychology. Now I can just press enter, and now ChatGPT is going to do deep research on this topic. All right, so it's about 10 minutes later, and as you can see, ChatGPT has finished doing research on the best ways to write compelling copy. So what you had to do to get higher click-through rates, etc. And now what we're going to do is just copy all of this research that it has done and paste it into a new Google Doc. Okay, I've pasted in everything here and you can see ChatGPT wrote 18 pages in 10 minutes. Very impressive. Now we're going to download everything here. I'm going to download it as a PDF. And I'm going to go back to ChatGPT and I'm going to go to the project section and start a new project. Let's call this copywriting. So instead of telling ChatGPT, act as an expert copywriter in the future, I can put all of my text in this specific folder or project here so that it's all organized. It's easy for me to find, and I know this specific chat section or project will always be trained on the best copywriting techniques. Now, how we do that is we're going to press on Add File, and this is where we're going to add in the PDF that we had just downloaded, just like this. And now whenever we start new chat threads in this specific project, we know ChatGPT already has all of the latest research about this specific topic. All right, so those are the 3 super underrated ways that you can use AI to significantly increase your productivity. If you got anything out of this video, please like and subscribe and support this channel. I've also got an absolutely free course on AI, so if you want to dive deeper into this topic and learn more about the latest tech breakthroughs, make sure you sign up for my free course below as well, and I'll see you guys next week. Bye for now!
