The best way to work harder is to work smarter. Productivity apps have been a staple of most professionals’ lives for years, but with the advent of AI, productivity apps have become powerhouses of progress for designers, coders, and project managers.

There are already many kinds of AI productivity apps, and the field is rapidly expanding. You’ll find tools that help you with repetitive tasks, help you focus on deep work, give you actionable insights, and much more. Today, we’ll look at six of the best in 2024.

Trello

Trello is a top-rated task management tool among design agencies because its Kanban-style boards can easily be adapted to different projects and schedule requirements.

Trello uses AI to help you flesh out your project planning into meaningful steps. For example, if you have a “launch product” task, Trello can help you expand on the task to include a checklist of different sub-tasks you need to complete at that stage. It’s a fantastic way of making a vague plan more concrete.

You can automate almost anything in Trello and connect it to different apps. For instance, when a QA checklist is complete, you can message the marketing team on Slack to kick off a launch plan.

AI tools work best when fully utilized; Trello helps with this by monitoring your usage and prompting you to automate it when it sees a repetitive task.

Cody

Cody is a personal assistant for business that knows everything about your organization. You can ask Cody anything, and it will come back with the correct answer in a fraction of the time it takes to find the data manually.

Unlike most AI tools, Cody is trained on your individual company data, and so it only returns relevant information. You can ask Cody anything, for example, “How many sales did we make in Albania last year?” “When is Gemma in Accounts’ birthday?” “When will we need more warehouse staff?” “How many Type 401s do we have in stock?”

Cody can even help you build a customer knowledge base to improve customer relations.

Best of all, Cody cites the source for all of its answers. So, rather than giving you a figure for projected growth over the next quarter, it will provide you with the figure for projected growth over the next quarter based on sales for the last five years. That kind of specificity means you can trust the answers Cody gives you.

UIPath

UIPath is a process-automation tool for business. It uses AI to mimic human interactions with digital systems, freeing your team to focus on unique or deep-work tasks.

Let’s say that every time you release a new product, you want to craft an email to notify your customers that it’s available, create a new sales document to record sales, and schedule a marketing meeting to help push the product; UIPath can help with that.

UIPath works best at scale in fields like insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing, where it works with millions of documents. However, there is a free version for individual use that can be very helpful for anyone streamlining their document processes.

Zapier

A lack of integration is one of the biggest inefficiencies in the modern workplace. Why else would copy+paste be one of the most common interactions on a keyboard? We constantly find ourselves moving data between different apps and systems to the point that it sometimes feels like we’re facilitating the computer, not the other way around.

Zapier is a fantastic tool that connects systems not designed to work together. You can connect almost anything with a Zapier workflow; for example, when a new sales inquiry is logged, you can create a new project planner, set up a Zoom meeting to kick off the project and use Google Calendar to invite your team. It happens instantly and correctly each time.

Zapier is integrated with ChatGPT 3.5, which allows you to create chatbots, without code, that integrate with your systems, making human interaction with your processes more straightforward and less error-prone.

Otter

Meetings are an essential part of any collaborative process. We make decisions, receive feedback, and strategize together. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t fully engaged in a meeting because we’re busy taking notes. This leads to the unenviable situation that a handful of people dictate to the rest of the team, and not everyone contributes to the discussion.

Otter uses AI to capture the content of meetings, transcribe them, and even summarise decisions. Never again will anyone utter the phrase, “I thought we decided to…” because everyone will be clear thanks to Otter.

Not only does this mean more clarity for everyone involved and greater engagement from all participants, but it also makes meetings more efficient by ensuring you don’t need to cover old ground in the next meeting.

Clockwise

Clockwise is a scheduling app that helps your team make the most of its time by intelligently scheduling meetings. Clockwise uses AI to move meetings to the optimum time, helping your staff focus on more critical tasks.

Clockwise’s real power is demonstrated when integrated with Jira or Asana when it can take into account the data in those tools to plan the most efficient meetings.

Never again should you be wasting time waiting for a meeting to start. For teams that find themselves rescheduling thanks to factors outside of their control, Clockwise can keep them on track while allowing the flexibility they need to respond to urgent events.

Using AI Productivity Tools

AI productivity tools are designed to help you and your team work more efficiently in a variety of different ways. AI-powered productivity apps can help you complete tasks more quickly, automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and help you make more informed decisions. These tools take care of the mundane, repetitive time-sinks that you can’t avoid so that you can focus on creative and profitable tasks.

AI productivity tools train themselves based on your personal work needs. So the more you use them, the more efficient they become and the more they can help you. Used consistently, AI can cut through the subjectivity and help you transform the way you work.