NextGen: The four AI tools everyday Aussies are using to clock off sooner

It’s 4:50pm and you look around, your colleagues are furiously busy but you’ve finished all tasks for the day. Here’s four AI tools that increase your productivity, writes Rion Ahl.

It’s 4:50pm and you look around.

Your colleagues are busy on their drafts, preparing for upcoming meetings and updating their project timeline.

No one seems to be close to going home, but your inbox is empty, your tasks are done, and you’ve decided to call it a day.

There’s a few in every office that seem to have that special edge – and in the age of AI, that difference is online, accessible AI tools that are so powerful, they are creating an entirely different class of workers who produce better work at far less effort.

Every day Aussies have chipped in to share the tools they are using with the goal of getting people out the door sooner – so we’ve put together this guide to four of the most common bots that we are all using to speed up our 9-5s.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. ChatGPT has many tools which speed up your work day. (Photo by Yuichi YAMAZAKI / AFP)

1.Deep Research (OpenAI) chatgpt.com

Whether it is drafting emails, creating plans or doing basically any work, ChatGPT has become the unofficial employee of the year in the past few years running.

However, what a lot of Aussies are missing is a feature called DeepResearch embedded within the website.

This will take a prompt that you write (the more detailed the better), ask you a series of questions about that prompt and then spend 20-30 minutes trawling the internet as your personal researcher, building out a several hundred word (if not thousand word) formalised research paper complete with citations.

This cuts much of the grunt work of paper writing and whilst the finished product will come with editing and reshaping by us humans, you’ll likely find that the chatbot can actually dig up many things that we are unable to find.

Big tip: If you ask the chatbot to “Act like a researcher at ____ firm” (where you substitute the name of the appropriate firm), ChatGPT actually adopts that persona to perform better. Always start your chat by assigning it a role to play so that it is able to better give you what you need.

ChatGPT can design incredible artwork for you. Image: ChatGPT

2. Meeting recordings done easy with Otter.ai

Long gone are the days where you have to pay attention to long meetings in the office – or even worse be the one that has to type the meeting minutes up in real time.

Otter records and transcribes meetings and key points before the time it takes for you to brew your coffee.

When can this be used?

Think office meetings, university lectures and other places where notes are the norm. The entire transcript is searchable and comes with action items so you spend less time planning and more time executing on the key tasks that come out of every interaction.

Big tip: You can set up Otter to auto-join your meetings and set it to email you the summary when its done – finally proving the point that that meeting could have just been an email.

AI can help you figure out if you're insured for a cyclone. Image: ChatGPT

3. Your design assistant with Canva AI (canva.com)

The big question for one of Australia’s most beloved startups – Canva – was how it would adapt to the challenge of AI designing which represented a threat to its model of user-based design.

They’ve responded by integrating a top-down AI conversational assistant that takes you from concept to creation of visuals all through a simple chat.

With Canva AI you can generate visuals, create new images, generate content for the designs and build a finish product far faster than the old days of content generation which required intensive graphical design teams.

Big tip: Try to use ChatGPT alongside Canva to generate advanced AI images that work in hand with the intuitive design system of Canva.

Each tool has its own specific skill so using multiple tools at a time will get you the best performance.

Canva unveiled a series of new features, including several AI-powered tools

4. Everything is an audiobook with ElevenLabs (ElevenLabs.io)

Everyone wants to read more but not everyone has the time and that’s where audiobooks come in – but not everything has been recorded in that format yet.

This is where ElevenLabs has stepped in with a tool that lets you turn text into ultra-realistic voiceovers.

Podcasters are using it to preview episodes; university students are converting their textbooks into audio lessons for the car and real-estate agents are turning listings into narrated walkthroughs without the studio time it would typically take to produce high quality audio.

Big tip: Clone your own voice and have it teach you the content you need to know – ironically you’ll become your best teacher.

We are in a golden age for AI right now.

The last few years have seen an explosion of AI products that are exceptional at making individual professionals much more productive in their workflows rather than replacing or impacting entire jobs.

There’s a pattern here: everyday Australians aren’t waiting to be disrupted.

They’re using AI to reclaim their time, reduce friction, and refocus on what matters. Whether that’s deep work, family time, or just the freedom to knock off early.

In the words of a friend:

“Everyone thinks I’m a genius at work — but I’ve basically gone back to the high school days of taking credit for a group project when my classmate Frank GPT did all the work.”

Rion Ahl writes about the future of business through NextGen – a weekly column exploring the frontiers of innovation through the lens of young Australians. Amidst exponential technology and a rapidly changing global order, NextGen discusses those optimistic and determined to shape what’s coming.

Originally published as NextGen: The four AI tools everyday Aussies are using to clock off sooner