“Have you considered using AI to…?” This question is quickly becoming the management and leadership mantra of 2026, if not the king of 2025. Artificial intelligence is permeating nearly every corner of business, from boardroom strategy to manifesto dispatch. You can hide behind fear, like the professors of old who wanted to keep chalk and slate rather than move to paper and pencil, or you can embrace curiosity and base your hiring criteria on expertise and sound reasoning.
When we talk about how AI works, it’s no longer science fiction. This is practical everyday tools such as large-scale language models, intelligent automation, and data analysis engines. The real trick is to find ways to use these tools to improve your work, rather than creating something else that you have to “consult” for every task or decision.
One of the quickest ways AI can help is by taking over tedious, repetitive, and low-value tasks. That’s the key to getting your time back for the things that really matter.
Look at your to-do list and find tasks that are rule-based, bulky, and don’t require difficult human judgment. We’re talking about things like: Let your intelligent assistant take care of all your schedule management, including adjusting your calendar, suggesting times, and sending reminders. AI captures information from invoices and forms and dumps it directly into your database or CRM system. AI can help you categorize your inbox, flag what’s important, and draft quick answers to frequently asked questions. We also use tools that can aggregate raw data into standard weekly or monthly reports.
This type of automation is typically done with AI-powered assistants or simple no-code/low-code platforms. Offloading these digital chores to AI will free you up to focus on challenging, creative problem-solving and activities that cannot be replicated by machines.
Generative AI in particular has completely changed the way we create and communicate. Use it to overcome writer’s block by getting the first draft of a company memo, blog post, social media caption, or presentation outline. Once the draft is complete, your job goes to curators and editors. AI tools can also make communications more personal by translating complex technical stories into simple language or fine-tuning marketing messages to fit a specific audience’s culture.
Remember: AI is very useful, but it can cause “hallucinations” (fabricating false information). You should always review everything that is generated to ensure it is accurate, consistent with company policy, and follows all policies. We must always be the final voice and take ultimate responsibility for the content we create.
Beyond automating basic tasks, AI’s real superpower is its ability to chew through and understand large amounts of data much faster than human teams. This gives you a huge advantage when making strategic decisions.
Instead of spending hours creating market research, legal documents, or years of sales data, you can use AI to quickly summarize key findings, highlight trends, and derive core insights. Companies are also using AI for critical forecasting, such as predicting sales, spotting potential supply chain bottlenecks, and modeling financial risk based on real-time economic indicators. And because complex data is useless if no one can understand it, AI tools are becoming increasingly better at turning raw numbers into clear, compelling visuals like charts, graphs, and dashboards that help leadership teams make informed decisions.
With all this power, you have a deep responsibility. Ethical use is not just an optional extra. This is a necessary part of integrating AI in a permanent way.
By learning how to use AI wisely in our daily work, prioritizing its ethical use, and cultivating essential human skills, we can not only achieve more, innovate, but ultimately build a more effective and rewarding future for ourselves and our organizations.
AI models learn from the data we feed them, and that data often contains human biases. We all need to carefully double-check our output and decisions in areas such as hiring and resource allocation to ensure we are not inadvertently making things worse. It also requires strict rules regarding data privacy and security. Never put your client’s confidential, intellectual property, or personal information into unauthorized third-party models. A strong data governance policy is essential. Robust rules are needed for intellectual property, especially AI-generated content, to protect creative and legal property rights. Teams need to be clear about when and how AI is used within the process.
As the rise of AI changes the way work is done, it is important for employees to not only become collaborative partners and experts in AI, but also to focus on developing skills that cannot be replaced by machines.
Successful professionals of the future will see AI as a partner, not a threat. To become an AI expert, it’s important to know how to ask the right questions (aka “prompt engineering”) and critically evaluate the answers. The AI landscape changes every week, so staying relevant means committing to professional development to keep up with new tools and best practices. As AI handles more daily tasks, uniquely human skills such as creativity, critical strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, complex negotiation, and ethical leadership will become most valuable.
Efforts toward effective AI integration are certainly underway, but the path ahead is very clear. AI is more than just a shiny new technology. It’s a fundamental change in the way things get done. By learning how to use AI wisely in our daily work, prioritizing its ethical use, and cultivating essential human skills, we can not only achieve more, innovate, but ultimately build a more effective and rewarding future for ourselves and our organizations. We live in an era where you can simply ask, “Have you considered using AI?” it’s over. Now is the time to confidently lead the conversation about how to use it in practice.
In December, the ASA’s Women in Industry division hosted a webinar on AI to further explain the term and its impact. To learn more, check out ASA’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ASAUniversity
