Boost Productivity with AI: Best Tips for Prompting, Email Drafts and Tools like Copilot and ChatGPT

let's get into the PowerPoint a little bit. Welcome everybody. This is Randy Dean. Many of you, I think, know me. I'm the email sanity expert and I'm trying something new here. So please excuse the little bumps and bruises. I am working on trying to see if we can do this YouTube livestream on some new content I've been sort of building for the last several months, maybe more than a year now. On what I've found and think are some of the very best tools on AI productivity. And so with that, you know, definitely what I would like to do is go in and start sharing some of these tips to see if they can work well for you. And so with that, I'm going to try— oh, absolutely. We can get you a copy of the PowerPoint. Actually, I'm going to have a really cool deal for you, Tracy. A little bit later. I actually might have two PowerPoints ready for you. But what I'd like to do is actually start this off with just a fun little tip in Microsoft Outlook. Now, let me ask you this. I am popping into my Outlook. Are you seeing my Outlook on the screen right now? Okay, so going back into the Outlook, I want to show you one of the very best tips and first tips that I have for you. If you're on the new version of Microsoft Outlook, either the local client version, which is now called Outlook Classic, you can probably also do some of this stuff in the new and web Outlook too. But what I want you to look for is this right here. See this little icon for the Copilot? That's in there. And coming back here to a new email, they make it even more prominent. It's right here at the top. Now Copilot is Microsoft's AI tool. Google has the Gemini AI tool. And ChatGPT is obviously the OpenAI tool, which is sort of related to Copilot because Microsoft has done a big investment in OpenAI to get that on the board. And if you're looking at my screen right now, you can also see way down at the bottom, I have an icon for Copilot down here where I can use it from Windows level rather than inside of a program. And then the other thing that's important is let's quickly go to my browser. If I go into my browser, I can jump over to Microsoft Copilot here, and this is Copilot inside of your web browser. Now notice the, the web address copilot.microsoft.com. Now here's the interesting thing. If you're using the professional version of Microsoft and your IT has enabled it, you should be able to use your Copilot extensively throughout the day. Hopefully no limits. If you haven't got that set up yet, you're probably going to be using the free version, which only gives you a certain number of prompts per day. We'll talk about a little cool trick related to the number of prompts per day when we go a little bit later into the program. But this is just sort of basic setup, and these are the 3 that I'm sort of playing around with quite a bit to see what they can do. I will tell you, almost Everything I'm showing in today's program, except the tools that are specifically inside of a Microsoft product, are working pretty much the same. Copilot, Gemini, and ChatGPT. And the interesting thing about that is if you're using the web browser to do some of this stuff, you're going to get pretty similar results. Now, are the words going to be slightly different or the output going to be slightly different? Yes. But what you get from that output is remarkably similar. And so with that, one of the things that I wanted to do right away is take a look here and— oh, Carol can't hear me, but it looks like everybody else can. Carol, I would check to see if you've got your speakers on or headphones on. It looks to me like I'm getting a pretty good read on my desktop audio. Hopefully you can get that resolved. So of course she can't hear me. So how would she know that I just said that? Let me type into the chat, check your speakers. That's funny. All right, let's do that. Hopefully that, that will help. But what I want to do now is go back into the Outlook and just show you one of the cool little tips that you can do. First thing is just open a new email. Because when you open a new email, you have Copilot at the top. And by doing this, notice that it gives you the opportunity to either do draft or coaching. Now, I haven't played around with coaching. Cool tool where what you could do over time is sort of let Copilot watch the emails you're writing and maybe give you suggestions on how to write your emails better. Which I have no idea how good their advice is or not. I'm going to instead pick out Draft with Copilot. And then what I've done is I've created a little Word document with a whole bunch of prompts because I didn't think you'd want to watch me type all of this. Take a look at this prompt right here. Ctrl+C. Can you please write a thank you email for a coworker that bought me a set of pens? And now let's go back in to that open email. And what I'm going to do is do a Ctrl+V and hit Generate. Because going back into the Outlook with what I just did, now you can see what the content is. Hi there. I hope you're doing well. I just wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude for the lovely set of pens you bought me. And on and on and on. Now, if I, if I like this, I could just click Keep, but notice it's asking me if there's anything I'd like to change. This is sort of how AI works. You prompt it to do things, but then you can adjust the prompt. And so coming in, let's go back to this document. Can you add in something about the pretty blue logo? Ctrl+C. And let's go back into the Outlook and make that adjustment. Control+V. Can you add in something about this? And now you can either hit Regenerate here, or you can just hit the arrow over here. So let's let it regenerate and see if it brings in something about the logo. These pens with their pretty blue logo. Well, so see, that's how you can adjust your content and personalize your content. And, um, The idea of creating prompts and re-prompts and getting closer and closer to what it is you're trying to do is really one of the best ways that you can start to use AI to start to do some things for you. Now notice, if I want, I could hit keep, but I'm going to keep this for a little bit longer because I want to show you one more little trick in this in a minute. But what I'd like to do is go back to the PowerPoint real quick. And, you know, jumping into the PowerPoint, I wanted to share with you the idea that not only can it help you with generating a draft of a message, it can even help you change the voice of a message. And this came out of one of the live sessions I was doing at a conference a few weeks ago. And so I was showing the example that I just showed you, and the guy goes, Can AI make my emails nicer? I just started laughing because he goes, yeah, I got a little issue. My coworkers say I'm a little bit to the point, a little bit blunt sometimes. You know, and I go, oh, well, okay, let's try this. And I actually created this on the fly in the session. Here was the prompt. Joe, you stink. Why didn't you get the ABC project done on time? You really need to pick up your game. Okay, so I'm going to copy that, and this time I'm going to go into Copilot proper on my web browser and jump down to the bottom and type in message Copilot. Now watch this. Can you make this email message nicer? And then all you have to do— now notice it gives you two options: think deeper or just regular effort. And the difference between the two, I think think deeper might actually really work well if you're doing something research-oriented. But I think in this case, just regular Copilot should work pretty well. And now take a look, here's something a little bit more constructive. So notice I could take this if I wanted and actually copy this out to put into an email instead of doing it in email. And I wanted to show you both different ways. You can do it from a browser version of an AI tool and it will give you this paste. Or you can do it right inside your Microsoft products if you have Copilot enabled in your products, and you can start to do this. And I honestly think this is one of the very best things that Copilot and the other AI tools can do. They can help you with generating first drafts of documents and files. And so that's not bad. Now let's go back to the one that I had generated already. Where it brought up that really nice message about the GIFs. And here's the thing that I'd like to change. Can you make this a bit more casual in voice? And let's try this and see what it does. Because it, you know, honestly, if I were to keep what it wrote right here, the person that received it from me would know I didn't write it. Because I'm not I'm— that would be way too friendly and cordial. So let's see what happens here. Let's see what it does. Just want to say big thanks for the awesome set of pens. It was nice surprise, totally made my day. Now see, that's closer to me, and, um, I like that. And so now what I can do is I can come in here and hit Keep, and it just brings it right into the message. And so, um, that first draft capability I think is a critically important capability when it comes to maybe saving you time when you're trying to think about how, how do I write this message? If you're getting hung up on the words, writer's block, we're going to talk about this a couple of times. It's a real thing. This might help take some of that away for you so that you can start generating your replies much more quickly. Now, I'll give you the final little tip. Go edit this so it's in your voice. It's already saving you time. Hi Joe, hope you're doing great. Just wanted to say thanks for the awesome set of pens you got me. Use them all the time. All right. So as you can see now, I'm actually making it my voice now instead of just leaving what the AI does, which I think is Really, one of the things that you're going to want to get into the habit of doing when you're using these tools is trying to use them to help you with getting things done, but also do it in a way so that it's still you that you that's doing this rather than the voice of the AI. All right. So I'm hoping that that gives you something here. YouTube commercial interfered. Oh, that's fun. All right. Well, like I said, I'm playing around with this. Hopefully that didn't get in the way of everyone too much there. But subscribe to Copilot to use this. I don't think you need to subscribe to Copilot to watch this video. But if you're saying, do you need to subscribe to Copilot to get these capabilities inside of your Microsoft tools like Outlook and Excel and Word and PowerPoint? Probably yes. Although you can do a lot of the things that I'm showing in the free browser version, which is what I showed when I did that one example over here. Now, coming back to this though, let me give you another example that I thought was quite good. It can help you not only with email drafts, but how about this? Take a look at this. It can also provide you summaries of your email. So let's go into Outlook again. And this time I'm just going to go into one of my timely tips. Here was my timely tips for November of 2024. I do a free newsletter every month where I try to provide a tip or two on how you can save time, often technology related. Well, look what's appeared because I have Copilot installed inside of my Microsoft Outlook, the Summarize button. Now watch what this does. And I think this is wonderful. Here's another huge time saver. Right now it just read the message and here's what it did for me. Because this guy, he types too much. If you get his, if you get his e-newsletter, he tends to be somewhat verbose. I do, I'll admit it. I mean, and I'll tell you, maybe some of you will enjoy my e-newsletter better by taking it when it comes in and hitting the summary button. Because look, it says I'm doing the live stream of this today at 2. It covers tips on document creation, drafting, research, prompting, image creation, and more. No cost to attend. There's also all the my recordings from my recent Taming the Email Beast programs available now. Um, so yeah, I mean, that's so much, so much tighter. And knowing that many of you are getting bombed by emails on a daily basis, and it's sometimes hard to keep up. Maybe on your most important emails from your most important people, you read those word for word because you don't want to miss something. But if it's just information gathering type message, something providing information to you and it's not mission critical to your core activities or tasks or projects, through stuff each day. And of course, if you open the summary and you read it and you go, oh, this is of interest, then you could go read the whole message. But this summarization capability that is available by utilizing these AI tools is great. Now, if you're using the free AI tool, you can actually copy and paste the full text of an email message into one of the web browser versions and say, can you please summarize this for me? And it will do it right there in your web browser version too. So there's a couple different ways to do these things. That can make this work for you. Now with that, let's go back into the PowerPoint. So like I said, I think that the summary thing is fantastic. I gave you the inside tip though. Remember to rewrite your items to your own voice when you're doing these things. And that leads right into this document summaries. This is pretty amazing. So I'm in the process right now. I've been working on this project as a side project for a couple years, and it's not a little side project. I've written like almost a 50-chapter book about climate change. And if you're interested and you'd like to read a draft, the latest draft, it's in ebook form. It actually provides links to the articles, research, and videos that I do— that not that I do, that other people have created, as well as a couple that I've done. But it's 47 chapters. But now check this out. Here's Copilot. So here's, here's the document. Copilot. Now I'm going to bring Copilot and it says, ask me anything about this document. Yeah. Can you summarize chapter 2? Question mark. And let's see what it does. So chapter 2 of my book, Too Little Too Late. Now this is awesome. Steam Power and the Internal Combustion Engine delves into the historical development and impact of steam power and internal combustion engines on society, how it helped really advance society, but unfortunately it increased greenhouse gases. There you go. And here's the beauty of that, that whole capability of being able to look into a document or file. Let's say you get something really long from somebody in document form. You could do the— if it's built right into your Word and you're opening it in Word, you could do it right then and there. If not, you might need to copy and paste it into the browser version. But it's really good at these summaries. And I could see that being a massive time saver for a lot of you in terms of just keeping up with a big information flow. So, so that's one of the things that I think is really, really nice about this as we do this. And let me try something here. Okay, so I just switched the scene. Do you now see me on the screen right now? I'm curious if you're seeing me on the screen at this moment. And I'll switch that to video capture. I'm trying to actually learn how this streaming software works when I'm doing one of these things. Type yes if you're seeing me on the screen right now, or let me know if you're still seeing some of my screen stuff that I was doing in the background. Okay, so it looks like you're seeing me on the screen. Okay, see my face and my maps. Who's curious about the maps? All right, quick story. Here's what happened. We bought this house coming up on 12 years ago now. As you can see in the upper corner, all the National Geographics. I'm a little bit of a National Geographic geek. We're doing the tour of the house. The realtor brings us down here into the basement where I've set up my office. And those maps were already there. The previous owner was like me and I just went, "Sold!" And I've added more maps all the way around and I've just made it my thing. So, so that's sort of fun. Now, you know, it's interesting. Several of these National Geographic's I haven't read yet. I might go see if I have a way to use the AIs to do some summaries of some of the articles I haven't had time to keep up with. There probably is a way to do that. All right, so, um, but now going back to this, uh, let's go back into the actual Scene 2 and Display Capture, uh, because what I want to show you now is something else that it can do which is really amazing. And I'm hoping that you're seeing me do these transitions. If you are seeing me do the transitions, type the letter T and yes. I want to know if you're actually seeing me jump from Word into my browser and then again into like my Microsoft tools. And if you're seeing that, that would be really helpful. So just type the letter T and yes if that's what you're seeing now. But I'm going to come and grab this. Take a look at this. I would think a bunch of you that are supervisors should get real excited with this. This idea came from when I was speaking at a huge convention that I've spoken at several times, the Summit down in Florida for Florida Children and Families. And I was in the room showing some of these things that AI can do, including how to do drafts of a document. And the room was basically full of supervisors. And he goes, could this help me write performance evaluations? Now, let me make it more clear. The room was full of supervisors that basically had teams of 10 to 20 that were out in the field. And one of the most difficult, time-consuming things they had was just generating performance evaluations. Take a look at this. Can you create a performance appraisal paragraph that talks about Lisa's strengths in initiative, project completion, active listening, and follow-through? Through. And for this one, I'm going to go into Word and I'm going to create a new document, new blank document. Now notice here's Copilot right at the top. Let's pop in here and do a Ctrl+V. That is the wrong one. I must not have done the Ctrl+C properly. Let's go back here and try that again. Ctrl+C. Let's go back into the new Word document now. Ctrl+V. There we go. This is the one. Now let's generate this. What? That is awesome! Now it says keep it. For example, make it formal. Can you do this? So I could change things. Actually, I'd like to change something. Look at this re-prompt. Let's go back into my prompts document. Can you add in the example of her efforts to troubleshoot the printer queue problem? All right, so let's go back into this. Oops, I went the wrong way. Let's go back into the Word document and let's add this in and regenerate. For example, she took it upon herself to troubleshoot the persistent printer queue problem in the main office, working closely with the IT department to resolve the issue efficiently. Come on. Now, of course, I would recommend you rewrite this into your own voice, but how much time is that going to save you on those first drafts? I think this is, at least to me, potentially one of the biggest potential time savers. Because, you know, writer's block, it's a thing. And the interesting thing about writer's block is that you never know when it's going to strike. You know that you have to basically do these things, and you know that you start to delay doing them because you think they're going to be difficult and take a lot of time. Maybe not anymore. And this is why I'm encouraging people to actually get in and start playing around with these AI tools, because if it can do the first draft for you and leave you with editing and changing to voice, that takes so much of the heavy lifting. Now, obviously that was only the beginning of a performance evaluation. I could have created a chapter on things for her to work on and you know, looking ahead at projects moving forward or something like that. You know, so I'm just showing you that that was part of what could be put together, but each of those could be their own separate prompts. And then you could add in each segment and assemble these things so much more quickly. And that's, you know, I think probably one of the best benefits of these tools. Now, speaking of that, let's go back in and go into my PowerPoint. Because— oh, that's the wrong one. I'm going to go into this PowerPoint because what I want to do is also talk about, you know, something that happens when you're doing the summaries. You lose depth and nuance. And I should probably actually take this— my apologies— and move this one up. But, you know, document first drafts. One thing to think about when you read the summaries You could miss something important. Keep that in mind when you're doing your summaries, uh, reusing summaries as a way to do things. And I would say once again, if it's a mission-critical document, file, email, those are probably the ones you want to read word for word. Although I'll tell you an interesting two-step that might make things work better for you is do the AI summary so you can see the key points and then read it word for word, because then it's going to almost make it easier for your mind to grasp exactly what it is that you're looking at. You know, so, so it might help you also comprehend what you're seeing better by using it as a two-step if it's really important. Now, thinking about that, let me show you something else that it can do. It can, it can obviously not only do generation of text per your prompts and cues, it can even help you create information related to something that you're researching. And let me show you an example here. You know, part of, um, here's the— I, I— part of my climate book, I talk about, you know, one of the things that seems to be happening is that the jet streams are getting more variable. But of interest, the polar jet stream, uh, for much of the year has— is moving closer to the poles on both sides. Which is why we've had longer falls, shorter winters, earlier springs in places like Michigan where I live. Basically, the cold can't get down to us and stay as long. And I know those of you that are here right now going, what are you talking about, dude? It's been cold for like a week and it was just Thanksgiving. I know it, but that's the variability part. My bet is if things are like to get a warm spell sometime in December, so You know, these are the kinds of things. And but what's interesting is sometimes if you're trying to talk about stuff like this, people may not, not understand the basic way things work. So let's go into Copilot right here. And can you give me a summary of how the global jet streams work? Now, in this case, what it's going to do is it's not referencing my work. It's now going out on the web. And it's doing the research. Look at how fast it did the research. Wow. Now let me show you something that's sort of cool, something that's sort of cool about this. It just generated 3 paragraphs, and notice that it is providing the citations of where it got this information. And so now this is far more in-depth than anything that I would know, um, you know, but it allows me to now gather information. Now obviously here's the thing, I could take this and hit copy and then I could pop in here and do a paste and I probably just plagiarized. Because what it's doing is it's going out and it's finding this, and it's basically taking this from these sources, but it's probably super close to what the sources wrote, if not verbatim. Okay, and so, um, one of the things that you're going to want to do is if you're going to use this, I think just for sanity's sake, you're going to want to both very clearly list the sources. And I would go even a step further. See how it's giving me the one and the two? I would go in here and click on the letter and get the source, like right here, and copy that into the actual document. And the second thing I would do, I'd go rewrite it. I would go try to fully rewrite it, um, because I want it to be in my voice. But now I can first verify, are these good reputable sources where I got the information from? And two, I want to be able to avoid looking like I'm doing outright plagiarism. Um, and so, but I mean, how fast did it go do that research for me? I can't do research that fast. And I think this is one of the really critical other tools of these AI tools, their speed of being able to go find information is far faster than anything that I could do. And so, um, let me ask you, that whole demonstration, did you not see it? I think I might have not had the sources right. Like I said, I'm still working through how to make this all work on a live stream. But basically what it did is it allows me to go do research for information I know is out on the web somewhere, but it's going to take me quite a bit of time to go find it myself. It's also good at things like web scraping activities. Can you find me a list of all of the gas stations in Port Huron, Michigan? You know, or something like that. Of course, Google Maps can do that too. But, you know, if you're thinking about looking for things like that, it can often be really helpful in terms of helping you both gather information and find information much more quickly than you might be able to do yourself. So, but just be careful on that plagiarism risk. And, you know, I'll tell you this, with that plagiarism risk Another watch out that came out— and let me make sure I'm doing my scene change here. Scene and display capture. Okay. Another watch out that I want you to think about here. I was showing some of these tips at a session and one of the guys in the room, he says, I have to tell you, our company's banned it. And I go, really? And he goes, I think it's a short-term thing, but they're trying to get their hands around Are we putting ourselves at some kind of a litigation risk because of how easy it would be to steal other people's stuff and use it without attribution? And I think that's just one risk. I think the other risk is, has the AI given, given you truthful information? You got to remember this about AI tools too. They're designed to give you an answer. That doesn't necessarily mean it's always the correct answer. And that's why you really got to check the source material when they, um, provide you these benefits. That being said, you know, sort of the way I look at it is this can save you so much time in that initial research phase and initial writing phase that you could then take some time to make sure you're doing things the proper way. But I think this is going to be a training issue for a lot of organizations because so many people will be very tempted to just take the shortcut and just use it. And, you know, so I think that one of the things that you're going to want to have is probably a high-level discussion within your organization, probably senior management, legal, maybe IT, and have a discussion about what should we do about allowing our staff or not allowing our staff to use AI. Do we need to set up formal policies on how to use AI? And I'll give you a funny little tip. Maybe you should use AI to go see if there's some examples of ways to set a policy for using AI. Why not? It's really good at that too. So that's another one. Let me show you this. This is just crazy. Writer's block is real. This thing can help you make, build presentations. Now let me show you something here. I'm going to pop in now to this PowerPoint and let me show you what it did. I came in here, I came into Copilot and I said, can you generate a present here? Let's take a look here. Let's take a look. I think it actually came up to the top. No, it's not here. But what my prompt was, can you generate a presentation about best tips and practices for using Microsoft Copilot? All right. And it did this. It actually built this entire presentation. I have not changed it at all. This is the second presentation deck I can get you. And if you'd like to get the presentation deck, What I'd like you to do is just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and I will send you the PDFs of both of these presentation decks. I'm putting that email address in the chat field right now. So that way you can get access to both of these presentation decks. But this was a presentation deck on Copilot that was generated by Microsoft Copilot. I think it should know pretty well what Copilot does. And so one of the things I found in here that I haven't quite fully figured out yet is the automation of tasks. So I have to do some research on how it can help me with task automation. Um, I've definitely seen how to do automation of this, but let me show you something here. Can you summarize key points from this PowerPoint? And let's hit go. And it's generating it right now. Take a look at this. It's not bad. And I'll tell you, then what you can do is, can you give more details on advanced usage tips? So see how I'm doing the prompt and the reprompt? Let's hit that. And what it's doing right now is it is reading, scraping, and summarizing. That's not bad. So, you know, it's this kind of stuff that can make you be able to both have document and file generation, including building an entire first draft presentation deck With artwork, we got to talk about the artwork issue in a little bit. I'm assuming that when you're using this and you're, you're a full user of Microsoft, the usage of this artwork should be allowable. I'm saying that without absolute confidence, though. That might be a good question to, you know, look into is, you know, if I'm using Copilot AI to generate work, am I allowed to then use these items when I'm presenting them either at work or outside of work? And I really honestly don't know the hard answer on that. I'm making an assumption that you can, but I can't guarantee that that is correct, and I'm putting the onus on you to go find that out. But, you know, just seeing the capability of being able to put together a presentation deck that was like 20-something slides long that fast. And I mean, it did it in like 2 minutes. I can't build a 20-deck presentation deck in 2 minutes and probably take me 2 days, but I can certainly go in and edit the presentation deck and make it my own, which is just mind-blowing. And I guess that one of the key points that I want to share with everybody here is look for places where it can take time-intensive activities— writing, presentation development, data analysis, research— that's where this thing can really save you a ton of time. All right. And, and I'm going to just say this, it's going to be the competitive advantage. I mean, you know, Everybody's worried about what's going to happen with AI in terms of job security. And I guess sort of my thinking is, get good with AI and you will have job security. But anybody that resists it's going to probably have some issues in the next 10 years because it can do so much more work. You can have so much more output so much more quickly. Then it's just a question of ethically using it and making sure you don't get yourself in problematic places by using it. But, you know, getting in and understanding what it can do, I think is absolutely essential. Okay, so let's go back into my PowerPoint here. Not only can it do this, but it can also help you with plan creation. And for this one, I'm going to do something sort of funny. I'm going to go back to a previous Copilot search because I think it's still in my search listing. I was just, you know, we're coming off the holiday. Let's go up. Here we go. This is it. Because I didn't want to have to go through this, but take a look here. So here's what I put in Copilot. I'm 56 years old and would like a workout plan to increase both strength and flexibility. Easy for me to say. And look what it did. And this was in like a minute. It generates this strength training and flexibility exercises along with combined routine and tips. I said, "Oh, that's pretty good, but wait, it doesn't have everything it needs." Overweight, but not obese. Okay, here's a slightly adjusted plan. So, see, now, I got this idea from Nick at the recent Michigan SGMP meeting, and he was like, "I use this to build a training plan for one of my junior athletes," you know, and I gave them background about what they had done prior, and you know, what they need to work on. And it generated a training plan for this— plan for this athlete that is probably far better than anything I would be able to develop myself as, as a coach. And, and so I'm blown away by this. And yeah, I'm gonna, um, you know, start working on this. Now, one interesting thing, I asked it for a summary or images of the FlexibilityX. It says I don't have that ability right now. But I can give you a description. And what was interesting is then could I take like some of these things and go, uh, put it into like, uh, the search browser and say, can you show me an example of the chest opener stretch? And I'm betting you that I would then get images online that way. Um, I also, uh, noticed that— hold on, I went by that way too fast. I have had some issues with plantar fasciitis in the past, and I said, hey, do you have anything to work my calf muscles and tendons a bit more so that I can keep that problem from happening? And I mean, now I'm not showing this to you so you'll get motivated to do your workouts. I'm showing this to you so you can see how it can help with your planning. This thing can go take a look at the best information that's available on the web and help you create first drafts of plans for things you're about to execute, work or personal. And then if you do re-prompt, you can get tighter and tighter on the scope of the plan and make sure that you're referencing information that goes beyond what you've got in here. That's huge. If you're doing, you know, event management or project management or, you know, client and customer management, whatever it is, which is a multi-step process and you want to make sure you're doing it thoroughly and you want to make sure you're using best-in-class practices, I don't know why you wouldn't go out and do at least a cursory first draft of a plan using an AI tool like this and then bring it in and then bring in your expertise to make it even better. See, um, and I hope you're seeing the key point. This will get you started and it will save a whole lot of time at startup, but then it still has to become yours. And that's where your expertise can fill in the blanks and make things better. As well as maybe take some stuff out. You know, that's not relevant this time. We're not doing that one. But at least then you have the ability to just so rapidly speed up your capabilities here, which is just mind-blowing to me. And yes, I am going to start that workout plan. All right. Let's see, what else do I got here? Shift+Fn+F5. Wait, I think we've even got him on the, on the livestream today. Jim Chambers. Gave me this idea. And this is one of the best ideas. And I actually expanded it, Jim. I started trying it with article summaries too. It doesn't just work for books. And let me give you an example of what I mean. I'm going to go into Copilot right now. And let me also go to my prompting doc. So I found an article today on CNN. Okay, so notice, Jim, I'm calling you out there. This idea was wonderful. He came up to me after one of my sessions at an event and just said, hey, have you ever tried this? And what he said was, take books that you want to read and ask it for a summary so you can see what the key points are. Well, I tried it with this. Can you summarize this article? And then give it the article. So this is an article about a piece of news that happened today. Martial law was declared by the president of South Korea. Okay. I'm not passing judgment on anything related to what's going on in South Korea. I just wanted you to see what it can do. So as you can see, it went in and it took a look at this article from CNN, which I'm assuming that's the entire source because it just keeps saying 1111. It has to be from this article. I could probably go ask it, can you provide additional detail from other news sources? And it would probably— well, let's try it. Can you provide more detail from other news sources? Let's see what it does. I'm curious. Oh, brilliant. You know, maybe this is a better way with what's going on with the news these days. Maybe you just stop looking at the news and go into your AI tool and say, hey, AI, what's the big national news today? Any big news for the state of Michigan? Any big news Globally and call it good. Because, oh my, you get into that news too much and it'll just take you out, you know? So sort of fun. Um, did I not show all of that? Oh, you're seeing me. Ah, ah, I did that. Sorry. Sorry. I, uh, let me show you the output. I'll go back to this. I was afraid I would do that once or twice. Let's go back to the output and here's what it did. The first prompt that I shared was, can you summarize this article on CNN? And it summarized the article like this. Okay. And then the second part was, can you provide more detail from other news sources? And this was the, um, additional sources that it provided. So, you know, and then you can say, I can say, well, are these good sources? Looks like it's from a fairly broad spectrum, probably gives me what I need. You know, so, you know, that's just it. Summarize an article. It doesn't have to be a news article. It could be like a how-to article. You could ask it to do also. But then let me show you this one. Let's go back in and go into the prompts. Can you summarize the key points in one of my absolute favorite books? Recommend everybody read it, especially if you have issues with either home and personal or workplace clutter. Such a great read. Let's go into the Copilot right here. I'm not going to do it here. I'll just keep doing it with the browser version. Here we go. Ctrl+V. Can you summarize the key points in Don Aslett's Clutter's Last Stand? And I will tell you, it's a fantastic book. It's a fun read. He actually hired a professional cartoonist to come in and make a bunch of funny little things in here. You know, and as you can see, that humorous, relatable style. Let me see. Can you, can you give more details on practical advice? Now, what's interesting, I was playing around with the app on my phone and on your phone it allows you— it's not doing it right here, but on my phone it allowed me to instead of typing the prompts, I could speak the prompts. Which is sort of cool. And that might be worthwhile testing out the AI apps for that purpose. But let's see, now what it's doing is it's going back into the same thing because it's assuming we're talking about the same book, which we are. And then what it's doing is it sort of walks you through all the stuff. Now, here's the really interesting thing. How many of you have like 300 professional and personal development books that are sitting on your list that you just absolutely know you are never going to get the time to read? Yeah, that would be me too. If you're in that box, you know, this is a way that you could get those summaries. Now, Tracy, that's interesting. How— I'm assuming it's taking an online read of the book and it's gathering the information from that place. I don't think it is necessarily going and looking for summaries or critiques or reviews. Now, that's interesting. One of the things you might be able to do is a reprop saying, 'Can you share some outside reviews of this book?' See what that does. See, this is where the creativity of you using the AI could really come in. And like I told, um, I was talking to my wife about this going, my gosh, I can finally assemble this information. And for some books, maybe all I need is the summary with some additional details versus reading the whole 300-page book. But other books where I read the summary and it's really singing to me, I might want— I might— that might be— might make me even more likely to go buy that book and read it. And, you know, so this is one of the really cool capabilities is it will allow you to get at least quick information, quick scans on information you're interested in, but you know you don't have the time to deep dive. I sort of see AI as the modern-day Cliff Notes. It really is. It's the modern-day Cliff Notes. I wonder how many kids already know this trick. You know, I could see it being something like that. Oh, that's a good tip, Jim. Preacher Jim just said he's discovered that after reading the whole book, you do the AI summary after the book, and it will allow those key points to then pop back out again. I actually did this for one of my presentations, my own presentation. I actually took the presentation deck and I said, can you share with me the key points? And it was really interesting to see the output of my own presentation put in a summary like that. You know, and by seeing it that way, I was like, oh, that's interesting, because was it exactly the way I would have written the summary? Maybe not. But it's interesting to have that outsider view, even though it's an AI tool. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that, you know, you could use it to help check your work too. So pretty cool stuff. I think that's getting close to most of what I wanted to share with you here. But let's go back into the PowerPoint because I know I've got at least one or two more. Let's pop into here. Here's an inside tip. If you're not using the professional versions of these tools, Professional versions means you've signed up for the professional versions of the tool. And when you've signed up for the professional versions of the tool, one of the things that you've done is you'll then get a lot more prompts every day. I don't know if it's unlimited, but as you can see, I've been doing a lot of Copilot prompts and they haven't said you need to stop yet. But if you're doing free versions, they limit how many times you can use the AI source per day. But I want to remind you, there's 3 primary, very popular AI sources right now for general AI usage. There's Microsoft Copilot, there's Google's Gemini, and there's ChatGPT. And You could use up your daily prompts in one, then move to the next and keep using more prompts until that one's used up, and then move to the next. And you basically just tripled how many free prompts you can get per day. So keep that in mind that with the limits that are out there, if you're just using free versions, maybe free is all you need, you know, depending on what you're doing. Although my bet will be fairly quickly as you get better and better at saving time with this stuff, that you're going to see that the professional version is probably worth the extra cost. Because sort of the way I look at it, I've got a research and editing and drafting assistant now for my business. Crazy! Hey, wait! They can also do data analysis! Check this out. Let's go into Microsoft Excel. Now, I don't do a lot of this kind of data analysis anymore. More. I had to actually go find an Excel spreadsheet from 2005 to show this example in today's program. But let me just show you some of the things it can do. If you go into an active data-filled spreadsheet, you can select data inside of it and look what pops in if you've got Copilot integrated. Now you can do quick analysis. And what I like about this is it can actually show you what it is you want to do inside of here. And it's not just formatting. You could also go in and do charts. You can do totals, sum, average, count, percentage. You can build tables. Um, and I don't even know what a sparkline is. I haven't used that before. But, uh, let's go into charts because this is sort of cool. I could either do a clustered column or a clustered chart title or a line chart. Or a scatter plot, and there's more. So what's nice about this is you can actually, rather than having to dig through your toolbars and find these things, Copilot is bringing the stuff that it sees people using the most in Microsoft Excel and bringing them right to the top for you, which I think is really pretty cool. So let's see, top 10%. Let's see what it does. Ah, there it is. It must be 7.49. So that's interesting to me. Let's go in and do a reanalysis of this with Copilot. Copilot, uh, let's now do color scale. Cool. I don't even know what some of these things are, but it's fun and I could see it being super useful. Back to PowerPoint. Shift+Function+F5. Image creation. Okay. If I'm torn on the ethics of using it for research gathering text creation, like I mentioned earlier with my Jetstream example, I am even more torn on the ethics of this. I've read some people that they're saying what it's doing is it's looking at already published artwork and it's taking that artwork and basically doing a redraft of somebody's original artwork. But I got to show you this because it's so freaking cool. Let's go into Copilot again and let's just do this one. Can you generate an image of a dolphin jumping at sunset? It usually takes a minute for it to do this. Let's go back down. Here it goes. Come on, really? That's just crazy. Can you add in just a couple seagulls? Now, right now it's actually generating these images. Can you put a sailboat in the distant background? I'm trying to compare this to how long it would take for me to paint or draw this. It's a heck of a sailboat. So just wow. Okay, Preacher Jim, NotebookLM. Interesting. Is that a third-party AI tool that's out there that's different? Does it, is it actually an add-in for Microsoft Excel, Jim? Because the other thing that I was curious, and I thought this is a good time for me to ask it from all of you, are you using any very specific AI tools outside of the primary 3 that I've shared, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT? And if you are, type them into the user bar and let me know what they're, or the chat bar, and let me know what they do. Because I'd like to, you know, sort of go a little bit deeper as a next step for my learning in this area to be able to do that. Okay. Is there a way to check if something AI is AI generated like that image? Actually, what's happening is there's a lot of organizations that are now requiring requiring the disclaimer that AI-generated images were used. And I believe when I get done making this video today, I have to let YouTube know that AI-generated images were used in this, in this video, because I just did what I did with those dolphins. So YouTube is sort of saying, you got to let us know if you're using AI images. It's also, I believe, asking if you're using AI-generated videos of people because there's so much of this stuff happening where people are making, you know, fake videos that look really real. So, all right, that's really helpful, Jim. So NotebookLM is a standalone. You put in the input and it creates stuff from what you provide. That's great. And I'm assuming that it works very nicely then with like a tool like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. So very cool. Now Amy asked the question, if you don't see the Copilot icon in Outlook, it probably hasn't been enabled. I think that's a pretty good likelihood. I think, who's your IT person? I would just send them a note. Can we use Copilot? Has it been installed? Do I need to do something to install it in my system? And I think that if you do that, it'll work really well. Now, I want to go back to talking just real quickly about that whole image creation capability with AI. There is an ethical issue there. It's probably scraping images that it's finding from real people, real artists, real photographers, and assembling this stuff And even though it's not exactly what they created, might be pretty close. I'll tell you what I would recommend. If you're going to use it externally, make sure you put a disclaimer. This is an AI-generated image from this. Any, you know, similarity to other people's work is fully unintentional. I'd definitely start doing disclaimers. I'm not sure that would get you off the legal hook though if that AI image is way too close. I'll tell you what might be safer— only use it internally. All right. Um, yeah, so yeah, you're not seeing it in your Outlook desktop or web. You're only seeing it as the standalone. That means it probably also has not been installed. I had to actually go find a little thing on the Microsoft website about how to install it into my Microsoft tools. And as part of that, I had to upgrade to the Professional Copilot. That's why I'm able to show you these things in Excel and Word and PowerPoint, because I upgraded my, um, user license for Office 365. To allow me to integrate these into those tools. And what I'm hoping that you got out of today is that it's probably worth it. I mean, I think it's probably worth having this right inside of those tools so that you don't have to go to an external web browser to do these things, and you don't have those limits on how many times you can use them per day. I would say though, for almost everybody, here's what I'd recommend you do. Use the freebies that you got on the web browser to start, and then do an assessment once you've done the freebies. Is this going to help me do my work better? And that is where, um, you'll probably get that work. Higher ed is one of the places that I think is really sort of AI-averse at the moment. They're trying to really figure out the implications of it. So much of the implication is how it just so easily can use other people's work, and that's the big watch out. And I think it's a, it's a watch out for every company to consider, but absolutely in places like higher ed, law, Apparently, I think there's a lawyer— I read an article about this recently— that a lawyer is potentially going to get disbarred because they assembled their legal brief using AI and they didn't check or rewrite the sources, and some of the information was just flatly incorrect from case law. But additionally, it was plagiarism and it was a lawyer. Doesn't look good to the legal community if you're doing things like that, you know. So that's why I, you know, I do want to stress that you have to use care and caution with these tools. I don't think you should just jump in and copy and paste stuff right into your documents or files. I think that's just asking for trouble potentially, but I wanted you to see that these capabilities here might be super useful. And so, you know, you know, keep all that in mind as we go through this. And I wanted to share a sort of an interesting quote for you to consider as we go through this. So let me, let me share with this because I thought it was actually pretty astute too. And I wish I could remember who it was. It was somebody out on— I think it was a picture of a quote from somebody out on social, and I don't think I'm perfectly rewriting this, but this gets the point across. One of the issues that AI has is it might be really good at the things that we'd like to do more of, and so it's basically taking over those things and then giving us more time to do the things we don't like to to do. That's an interesting thing to think about. Um, like I said, the thing I want to look into more is deeper automation, especially in my Microsoft 365 and Google tools. And so that's where my research is going next. But I think that's pretty much what I have for you today. I appreciate all of you coming in and being so active in the chat field today. And if you have any other chats or ideas on how you're using it that I didn't talk about, either send me an email or post it right now in the chat for this. And also, if there's anything else that you would have liked to have seen covered, let me know too. Once again, my email is randy@randalldean.com. I am surprised this went an hour. I was expecting it to only go about 30 minutes. But, you know, I have to say that, you know, once we got in and we had the Q&A, I appreciate you with my bumps and bruises at the start of the program. Thanks for going through this with me. I'm hoping to do more of these. And if you're enjoying this, you know, consider subscribing to my channel. You know, you can go out and just search Randall F. Dean and my channel or some of my videos should come up, and from the videos you should be able to subscribe to the channel. The other thing you can do is just follow me on LinkedIn or send me a connection request on LinkedIn, because generally when I do stuff like this, I'm going to post something about it out on LinkedIn too, so you can find me there also. And with that, I'm not seeing anything else coming in. I hope you got some goodness out of this time and you found a few ways to maybe take advantage of these tools to help save you some time. And with that, I'm going to say we are done. Have fun. Have fun out there with your Copilot Gemini and ChatGPT. Talk to you soon. Bye now. And now can I figure out how to stop this thing?