Increase your personal productivity in an AI-enabled workspace

Artificial intelligence can draft a memo or summarize a meeting instantly. Deciding which memo matters, whether that summary is accurate, or what to do next still requires human knowledge.

That’s the premise of Personal Productivity in an AI-Enabled Workplace, an MIT Sloan Executive Education course led by MIT Sloan distinguished senior lecturer Robert Pozen that he developed in conjunction with Renee Fry, co-founder and CEO of estate-planning software provider Gentreo. 

“People think of productivity as input-related: If they increase hours, they’ll become more productive. Our approach is output-oriented,” said Pozen, who has served as president of Fidelity Investments, executive chairman of MFS Investment Management, and a senior official at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

“We help people figure out what they want to achieve, set priorities, and implement strategies to get those priorities done by knowing when to use AI,” he said.

Here are three takeaways for leaders from the course, which also addresses how to craft a daily schedule, shut down procrastination, run an effective meeting, and communicate under pressure.

Use AI as a co-worker, not a crutch 

The proliferation of AI tools can become a hindrance, Pozen said. He encourages workers to identify the precise tools that are useful for their needs and then prioritize human judgment for the rest.

“The main objective is to use AI to help reduce the amount of time that you’re spending on relatively routine things, to leave you with more thought time and more judgment time,” he said.

He recommends the following pairings of tools to tasks:

• Claude for synthesizing long documents and board memos.
• ChatGPT as a versatile generalist for brainstorming and quick drafts.
• Microsoft Copilot for work within Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and PowerPoint.

“The goal is to learn to use AI as your chief of staff rather than a novelty,” Fry said. Like a chief of staff, AI can act as a force multiplier, making sure an executive can focus on key relationships and strategic decisions. Whether ensuring that the decisions that really matter get to you, helping you prepare for meetings, or serving as a sounding board for ideas, AI can be there to help on an everyday basis.

Personal Productivity in an AI-Enabled Workplace

In person at MIT Sloan

Register Now

Focus AI-assisted research on your final product

Before asking AI to gather copious information and then asking questions, do the cognitive work of identifying the questions you need to answer, and then use AI to help get the answers quickly.

“Right now, the problem isn’t getting enough data. The problem is that you can overwhelm yourself with data on almost any subject,” Pozen said.

Pozen recommends “starting at the end”: developing tentative conclusions after a few rounds of targeted research, and revising them as new evidence emerges. For a three-month project, he suggests reassessing those conclusions every two weeks. This approach surfaces the hardest analytical questions early and suggests a direction for further research. 

Fry pairs this approach with AI research exercises, keeping the emphasis on evaluating evidence and refining conclusions as the work progresses. Class participants work through case studies, using AI tools such as Perplexity and Claude to gather and organize evidence, and then test their tentative conclusions. 

She encourages users to ask their AI tools, “What was left out? What is missing?” Through that process, they learn to evaluate their evidence, ask the right questions, and avoid collecting more data just for the sake of having it, when it may not be needed or relevant.

Delegate work without abandoning judgment

Before passing a task to AI, consider what’s at stake and whether the task tends to be repeated, Fry said. These considerations set the criteria for her and Pozen’s AI Delegation Decision Rule, which they developed for the course. 

The rule offers four approaches to any task: 

• Keep it: If the task is high stakes and rarely repeated, you should do it yourself.
• Systematize it with review: If the task is low stakes and often repeated, you can set up a standing prompt or template and check the output each time.
• Use AI for a quick assist: This is usually best for one-off, low-stakes tasks where you can let AI draft your response and move on.
• Automate it: This is best for routine, low-risk tasks that can be easily handed off.

Even when AI does assist, the work isn’t finished, the instructors agree. Pozen’s “last 30%” principle describes AI as getting work to 70%, with human judgment needed to complete the rest. Employees remain responsible for checking the results and protecting data, including AI-assisted work received from others.

“Today, workers need to get hands-on, daily practice with AI tools, build the habit of verifying before relying on AI results, and protect confidential data with the right guardrails,” Fry said.

Like Pozen, Fry emphasizes preserving independent judgment as AI accelerates productivity. Workers still need to set priorities, evaluate AI outputs, and persuade others. Those are skills that AI cannot fully replicate. 

(To that end, MIT Sloan senior lecturer Ben Shields joins the class to offer exercises on presenting and impromptu speaking that are aimed at helping students organize their ideas, tailor their messaging, speak persuasively, and respond confidently on the spot.)

“AI is collapsing the time it takes to produce the first draft of almost any knowledge work. That moves a professional’s value toward what the tool can’t do: setting priorities, judging whether the output is right, and persuading people,” Fry said. 

That’s why the course offers strategic approaches to increasing personal productivity combined with selected AI tools to implement these strategies. 

Robert Pozen is a distinguished senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was executive chairman of MFS Investment Management, vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, and president of Fidelity Management & Research Co. Pozen is the author of “Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours” and co-author of “Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work … Wherever You Are.” 

Renee Fry is the co-founder and CEO of Gentreo, an online provider of affordable, accessible, and easy-to-use estate planning tools. She is the former CEO of Sustainable Manufacturing Co. and a founder of Making Care Easier. Fry previously served in Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s cabinet, overseeing business and technology.