Ways to Use AI in Daily Work, featuring Owais Lightwala
[AI Generated] TRANSCRIPT:
“So I've saved, I don't know, 1,000,000 hours in the last year, not writing 1 grant from scratch - because the purpose of grant writing is not to be artistic, it's to get the money.”
Let's talk about how we can use AI in our daily work. This is a High Five for arts leaders and creative entrepreneurs, and with me today is Owais Lightwala, who has been a theater producer and is now a professor and researcher at TMU working in areas of creative entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation. Welcome Owais.
Thank you so much for having me.
So the five things I'm going to share with you are literally five things I did with AI this week. I'm very excited about the possibilities of AI and what it does for me in my life.
Number one: I just used it recently to help me deal with a very tense workplace conflict where there was a lot of complexity in the situation.
There were hurt feelings. People were angry. I needed to write a very careful email that wasn't defensive, but was also, you know, drawing a split. I literally used the AI to run through all of the scenarios, and it helped me coach me through the situation.
Number two: I used it to write a very complex grant application. The way I write really good grants with AI is that I feed it past grants that I have written and my own writing, and give it samples of how I think good writing looks, and ask it to mimic me rather than write in its own terrible generic style.
So I've saved, I don't know, 1,000,000 hours in the last year, not writing every grant from scratch - because the purpose of grant writing is not to be artistic, it's to get the money. So you want to be efficient, and you want to be clear and effective in your communication.
Number three: I used it this week to help me with teaching.
I'm a teacher and a professor, so I use it to help me improve my lesson plan. I use it to help me design a really interesting simulation role play assignment that I made for my students, where they're going to be in a simulation of a conflict that happens in their simulated workplace. And they're going to play all these roles. It's going to be really fun.
It saved me tons and tons of time to not have to write out all the characters and all the situations for them.
Number four: I was reading an article in which there was some mention of Nietzsche, and I couldn't remember whether or not they were using him correctly. So I went on a whole rabbit hole of learning all about Nietzsche all over again. And I got into this Nietzsche on Buddhism philosophy conversation.
This is nothing to do with work, but I'm a curious person, and so I learned things all over again in a way that was, frankly, much more clear than when I did undergrad philosophy in university.
And number five: I was also using it to do some financial forecasting for figuring out whether or not the purchase of a vehicle makes more sense than the leasing, and it did all the calculations. I even gave it some details about tax credits and business finances, and how to think about this and think about that asset for its opinions. It did a whole bunch of research for me. That's number crunching. Gave me some really, really good advice that, again, if I had built my dream spreadsheets, would have taken me all week to do this math.
And those are five things that I did, with AI this week that, made my life better.
That's amazing. What an incredible range between writing sensitive emails, financial forecasting…. I'm going to say them out of order. Can you tell me what they were again?
Workplace conflicts, grant writing, teaching assistant, philosophy coach and financial forecasting.
That is absolutely fascinating. And I really am intrigued by the broad range of uses of AI and how it's saving you time, but also giving you different scenarios and, different information to engage with.
So where can people find you online? Very easy on my LinkedIn, of course. Just Google or search on LinkedIn for Owais Lightwala. My website is owais.ca, where you can find my contact information. Some of the stuff I'm working on, also on, what used to be called Twitter @owaislightwala. So, yeah, just a quick Google search away.
Fantastic. We will find you there. Thank you so much for sharing these, amazing and really useful, tips to you as I and for everybody watching and listening, how are you using AI and where do you see an opportunity to delve deeper, have supports and be more efficient using AI?
Thank you so much for watching this episode, and join us in the new year for new episodes of High Five.