People of AI: See how these Microsoft employees use AI to save time and find joy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping employees everywhere work more efficiently and strategically, giving them back time for other pursuits. Here’s how people developing AI-assisted productivity tools at Microsoft are also using the technology to boost creativity, learn new skills and find joy in all they do:

Meet Sumit:

Sumit Chauhan longed for “a smart assistant who’s with you all the time, everywhere, with all the information of the world at their fingertips” to help her as a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Office product group. She found that assistance through AI tools.

Chauhan says she had a “moment of wow” when she realized how much AI tools such as the new Microsoft 365 Copilot could help — especially in removing “drudgery” from daily work, like summarizing her email inbox or compiling multiple reports into one synopsis to share with colleagues.

“Summarization, in a world where we have so much information thrown at us from all different corners, is pretty powerful,” Chauhan says. “It leaves me as a human free for more creative thinking and more creative tasks.”

Meet Jon:

As a corporate vice president of design and research for Microsoft 365, Jon Friedman loves designing things. What he does not love is writing.

AI tools help Friedman communicate more clearly and quickly by converting his bullet points into easily understandable prose. That gives him more time for designing — and for coaching his daughter’s eighth-grade basketball team.

Friedman had never coached before, so he asked an AI tool called Bing Chat for tips and got a week’s worth of practices for beginning basketball players for his daughter’s team. AI is an “invisible superpower,” he says, that “helps us learn and become masters of new things.”

Meet Jaime:

Jaime Teevan is chief scientist and a technical fellow at Microsoft and has been an AI researcher for decades, since getting her Ph.D. from MIT. So she reads a lot of reports and goes to a lot of meetings.

To make her work more fun, Teevan started asking AI models to summarize reports in the form of rhyming poems. “It makes the process of preparing for a meeting a little bit joyful,” she says.

The poetry also gives her new perspective and insight, Teevan says. “These tools aren’t just about doing things faster,” she says. “They’re about doing things in a more creative and collaborative way.”

Learn more about AI at Microsoft.