No visions of the future in this post. No think-pieces. Just ten tedious jobs that AI does well enough, today, to give you back real hours — chosen because they displace nobody's artistry, only your own lost evenings. (If you want the thinking behind that distinction, it's in our first post.)
Two ground rules before the list. First: a human checks everything — these tools are fluent, confident and occasionally wrong. Second: no personal data in consumer AI accounts — nothing that identifies donors, staff or participants. (Here's why.)
- Meeting minutes. The classic, because it works. Record the meeting (with everyone's knowledge), get the transcript, and ask for minutes in your house style: decisions, actions, owners, deadlines. Check the names — AI mangles them — and you've turned an hour into five minutes.
- The first draft of the funding report. Not the whole report — the drudge layer. Paste in your activity data and ask for the narrative summary of what happened: participant numbers, sessions delivered, milestones hit. You write the reflection and the story; it writes the scaffolding. (More on the ethics of this in AI and the funding application.)
- Alt text and image descriptions. The access job everyone believes in and nobody has time for. Paste or upload each production image and ask for a description; fix what it gets wrong about your show. A season's worth of images in an afternoon.
- Untangling the inherited spreadsheet. The one with merged cells, three date formats and a column called "MISC2". Paste a sample (minus personal data) and ask what's inconsistent and how to standardise it. It will also write the formulas you've been avoiding, and explain them.
- Long documents into briefings. The 60-page consultation, the new funding guidelines, the local authority strategy. Ask for one page: what's changed, what affects us, what has a deadline. Read the original later if the briefing says you need to.
- First pass at the rota. Give it the shifts, the staff, the constraints — who can't do Tuesdays, who can't lock up alone — and ask for a draft. It won't be perfect; it will be a far better starting point than a blank grid.
- Reformatting between systems. The venue wants the tour schedule as a table; the funder wants it as prose; the website needs it as listings. Paste once, ask three times. This is pure transformation — the thing AI is actually for.
- Plain-English versions of official documents. Your insurance policy, the licensing conditions, the co-production agreement — summarised so the whole team understands them. Not legal advice, and the original remains the truth; but "what does clause 14 actually mean?" is a fair question and you'll get a useful answer to check.
- Routine correspondence. The tenth polite reply about hiring the hall, the follow-up chase for the missing invoice, the "thank you, but no" to the unsolicited proposal. Draft, personalise, send. The warmth is your edit; the typing was never the valuable part.
- The job description and the ad. Give it the old JD, the new reality of the role, and your values statement; ask for a first draft and a plain-English person spec. You'll rewrite a third of it, which beats writing all of it.
How to actually start
Don't try all ten. Pick the one that made you wince with recognition, do it with AI this week, and time the difference. Then tell a colleague — not on principle, but because the hours only add up when more than one person claims them. An organisation that saves twenty hours a month has effectively hired half a day a week of extra capacity for the price of one subscription. What you spend those hours on — that's the interesting question, and it's the subject of another post.
The image above was AI-generated — as ever, we'll always tell you.