Is AI ACTUALLY Increasing Your Productivity At Work? [360 Video]

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right I am headed back from the office we got the insta 360 on top if you're watching the previous video yes it did survive I am also amazed um I had no idea what to expect to be honest um I'm going to go to Reddit for a topic and um it's going to be about AI you guys seem to like AI topics so we'll go over that um this topic is is AI actually increasing your productivity at work and I think this is an interesting one because I think that probably I don't know I feel like there's probably a lot of ton of divided people and I feel like probably a lot of people that are just more scared than actually having an opinion about whether it's increasing their productivity or not so we should talk about that um I think yeah on this

channel so far I don't want to just make it like an AI Channel in terms of people viewing engaging having thoughts and stuff uh it seems like there's a huge focus at my audience has on on AI how it's applicable um how to navigate that kind of stuff so this feels relevant uh today was super well I guess it wasn't that bad there was snow on the ground here and that's kind of uncommon for like the Seattle Redmond Area uh so I had the insta 360 on top of the car and I think it got video out the back there was there was snow on the front of it so I feel like not a good test run but there's no snow it's not snowing right now uh maybe we'll have some interesting drivers on the road and we'll get that captured but um before

I dive into the topic if you have questions you want answered please leave them in the comments and um if you want them to be kept Anonymous or you want to write more just feel free to look for Dev leader on social media uh happy to try and answer your questions if you send me a message uh another quick note someone suggested this in the comments they said hey can you do reviews of projects and I think that's something I want to open up to folks um I would say though that that's not going to be on this channel because um I want to as much as possible keep this channel while I'm on the road uh for clarity and transparency my main YouTube channel is where I have I do live streams I have edited videos um this one is kind of like I

do it because I'm driving and I would like to be able to use that time effectively but um there's been a couple times where I haven't prepared videos for this Channel and I film them at home it's it's a low effort for me to just talk like this versus going to get it edited it costs me money to get them edited um so uh I would like to be able to try and do project reviews for folks and um I would say if you're interested in that again look for Dev leader on social media send me a message I'll probably get something set up where people can send in submiss uh send in submissions officially but until I have that just send me a message and we can try to organize it so um enough blabbing let's talk about AI so I think from the

perspective of a software developer because I am an engineering manager my take on this would be a a little bit different from my own usage but I think from the perspective of a software developer if I look around at the software developers that uh I'm working with at least and I'm I can't when I say this I'm trying to give you perspective of what I see I'm not trying to say this is universally a truth that's I hope that's clear um most of the developers I am working with are probably using AI mostly just like in Visual Studio because we're at Microsoft so uh mostly in Visual Studio probably you know co-pilot getting autocomplete and that kind of stuff um but I I genuinely like in my core team I don't have people like it's not like people are going to co-pilot and saying like

here like go rewrite all this code kind of thing um or you know go like we're not going to be using chat GPT and putting stuff into that but like you know going to chat GPT and saying hey hey like go write all this and They're copying and pasting directly out of it so what I'm observing and experiencing at work is very what I would say is very different from what a lot of people are talking about and being fearful of and uh when I say fearful I mean not only from a career like AI taking jobs perspective but also more senior people are like fearful that all these Junior folks are like like they don't you know air quotes here like don't know how to program just copying and pasting at a chat GPT so like I don't have that's not my experience at

work um so just a heads up I I can't speak to that happening because it's not happening around me um so I don't really see a lot of that um like aside from just co-pilot usage and visual studio I think the other thing um like there's okay so that's something that's not getting used in my immediate team that I see um but I think there's a couple of use cases that I do see and I think they are pretty helpful so um again it's not like a co-pilot Advertiser I'm just talking about co-pilot because I work at Microsoft and that's that's what is uh more relevant for us and um I would say I see people using co-pilot for like uh meeting Recaps for sure uh hu like I've I'll talk about my own experiences after but meeting Recaps for sure um I've seen people

use it for like there's a lot of acronyms at mic Microsoft I'm sure this is the case for many companies but um like every day I learn like two new acronyms or hear two new acronyms I can't say that I learned them um so constantly like either new teams new Services you're hearing about new acronyms so it can be really helpful to go to co-pilot and just be like hey tell me about this thing um and because of how co-pilot is we're able to access a lot of that information uh and it's super convenient to just have it like I don't know give us details about things so we don't have to go like search them up like if I if someone told me an acronym and was like go find out what this means and you can't use AI like I wouldn't even know

where to go search at Microsoft like the footprint is so enormous that I just wouldn't even know where to begin so being able to go to co-pilot and saying like hey like what is this it might tell you that acronym is like five different things but you might see an example and like I work in Office 365 uh site of things we call it substrate for the infrastructure of Office 365 so I could be like oh like no This Acronym in substrate and then it could give me a better answer so getting information about things uh has been very helpful um sometimes troubleshooting some things can be interesting so I'm trying to think there was an example the other day we were looking up an error code for something and um we were like well we don't know what that means means CU it's numeric

and we're not robots so it was like okay like you can ask co-pilot like tell me about this error code give me details about it uh so we were debugging some stuff with that so that's a common use case I've seen is like more informational and um there was another one I was just thinking of that I wanted to mention oh um document writing so not to say I know it's probably going through people's heads like immediately so all of your documents say in the vast realm of in the vast realm of substrate let's do a deep dive into like no I don't mean like that I mean um basically you could do a bunch of things it could be I wrote down a bunch of bullet points like give me a paragraph structure the opposite like I literally the other day I was in

a situation where I was like I think I might use AI to to paraphrase my cuz I write Vari for both uh kind of like how I talk I go off on tangents I try to add details into things my writing is very similar I try to add in a lot of detail and that can be very distracting I realize I'm doing it and um like can't stop myself but I have awareness of it so the the idea is that like oh why don't I go use co-pilot and I could have it like trim down some of my you know the points I've made to make it more I don't know succinct and still get the point across so I've seen people like in design documents trying to use co-pilot for for some things like that and um I don't know I think like again

I look at that like absolutely like a tool um you know if you need help trying to organize thoughts make them more clear rewrite things because you're like I think that's the point I want to make but I'm not sure you know if I'm not sure if it's coming across clearly like hey co-pilot could you could you help with that um I think that's a great strategy but it's interesting right cuz all the things I just mentioned like these are like things software Engineers around me are using in their workflows and um I said very little about the actual code writing part right so I think that that's I don't know an interesting take on things I when I speak about this stuff I'm obviously unable to represent all of Microsoft Microsoft is huge so I'm only speaking about like my immediate team and what

I see around me so um you know I'm I'm giving you this context so that you're not like oh that's how therefore this guy on the internet says that's how Microsoft does everything like I'm absolutely not saying that I'm just telling you what I observe around me so uh kind of interesting they're not leaning into it so much for code um I think that conversation does come up though where people are more Curious regularly like hey how how are you guys using it for code like anything I should be trying to do like trying to take advantage of so I think like I said that conversation comes up a lot but I don't um I don't see it getting actively like I don't know certainly not problematically people talk about it online fast lane let's go um but yeah I think like that's correct me

if I'm wrong but I think that most people are talking about their experiences with what they're observing with AI and software developers coming in being like you know Junior got hired they can't program anything all they do is they use Ai and copy and paste like at a chat GPT or whatever else you're using I just like yeah that's not the experience I have um I have a bunch of Junior developers on my team and uh not an observation I have um oh there was I think actually I should mention this because I think it's kind of interesting and I don't think that maybe this isn't a shared experience that everyone has but for some people it might be very very relevant um so my direct reports are primarily in uh you know in the US but I do have other employees that work in

like Latin America and then I have essentially what you would call almost like dotted line reports from from China and Vietnam and uh what's interesting about this is like I I'm I'm mentioning this because I have had people tell me directly like in 101 and stuff like hey English isn't my you know I it's not my first language I'm I'm not confident and even though in my opinion they speak English very well like I don't have any concerns or challenges but they're very very like I don't know like a hyper awareness that they want to do better with their English and uh I have seen actually some documents come out of you know come over from people where I'm like oh I just the way that it's written I'm like I I believe that from you know I've seen examples before and I see examples

now and I'm like I believe that you're using AI for this and it's like I'm not saying that in a bad way I'm saying like I think that that's actually a really cool opportunity for individuals that may have previously been feeling like they're struggling a bit with their English they can actually go put it into an llm and say hey like help me out with this um so be curious like I don't I can't speak about this firsthand because I don't have uh you know I'm not living through that scenario but if you're watching this I would be very curious to hear from you like are you someone where English is not your first language and that is a huge benefit that you're getting out of using an LM I don't I don't know I feel like I'm observing some of that and like it's

not bothering me like you know they're using co-pilot which is internal and they're rewriting parts of documents and I I feel like it's to help en their English so um yeah would love to hear from you if that if you're finding like that's an added benefit you're getting but yeah uh you know to wrap that part up I find that my immediate team and sort of peripheral software Engineers are not they're not using AI in the same way that a lot of people are kind of talking about in the media which uh I find interesting still using it for productivity things I gave you a whole bunch of different examples so I think that they're finding it valuable but uh I'm kind of curious to see when I'll see more and more of my immediate team and surrounding Engineers being like I don't know just

like using AI a lot more for the coding part so be curious now for myself I've already kind of mentioned a couple things that the engineers are doing that I'm also doing so uh I I write like I do a lot of writing at work um I don't use AI so much for writing I gave you an example where I was like maybe I should try to make this more succinct I don't think in the end I ended up using co-pilot but that was my plan for this big document I was writing get all my thoughts out you know the more verbose it is the more co-pilot has to work with and then let's have it refine it for me I don't even think I used AI in the end I think I just did it by hand and it was fine uh but that

was my thought like I should lean into co-pilot for this um meeting Recaps for sure so I I mentioned it earlier but I wanted to give you a better example I was having a a follow-up conversation with one of my product managers and we remembered that we had this conversation with another individual another stakeholder and there was an interesting point brought up in the conversation and we couldn't remember the detail about it it wasn't the focus of the whole conversation but we remember that it happened to come up and we said man like I can't remember and we both knew that it happened but we couldn't remember so we used the meeting recap and we used co-pilot and we said you know where in this meeting was this talked about and it did an amazing job and this I know everyone's going to freak out

like yeah we use teams at Microsoft I know I know know the uh you know the anger that's uh that's rising up inside of you right now when you hear that but yes we use teams I actually don't really have a problem with teams um there's always I mean there's challenges with every piece of software but you know teams does what it's got to do for me and I'm not going to sit here and complain but we use teams we use co-pilot and uh it basically found the part in this meeting it gave us the time stamp it like basically let us click right to it and then uh part of the transcript and describe to us this speaker is talking about this topic here's what they said and then I could press play and it was like essentially right at the point where they

were talking about this thing that we were like we need to go figure this out so super valuable um to be able to like to do that because otherwise yes with recordings and transcripts at least it's not lost but I would have to go back and essentially watch this meeting on like 2x speed and hope that I can go find it so this was a huge opportunity in terms of productivity uh I thought that was super cool that we could do that and it like it just worked and really well so uh that was kind of cool um what else at work I don't I don't have a ton of and some like I'll I'll talk about some things that have been recommended to me that I should probably lean into a little bit more so I don't use AI a lot at work actually

and I think the reason for that is that and this is just my personal experience um from using chat GPT and stuff outside of work um I have seen how it writes things and it makes me a little bit hesitant that I'm like okay for for getting written content because I am a content creator I'm like I can tell I'm not saying like uh like with perfection but there's some obvious tells when something's written by chat GPT right maybe not every time but there's some obvious TS and I think I've seen enough of that where I'm like I don't want that to like to shine through in anything I'm doing at work because it might feel like inauthentic like for example if I was writing a message to an employee right we have to do our these conversations we call Connects where we're basically getting

on the same page as our employees talking about their accomplishments their next steps and I would feel personally I would feel very bad or awkward if if I used AI to go summarize my points back to the individual and it just read like it was from a machine you know things like delve and the vast realm like there's just things that stand out and you're like no one talks like that man I would feel very bad if that came through through and I think for that reason I've shied away from some of the AI tools at work specifically for writing but it's not really a good reason because it means I'm not actually trying them so I want it to be very clear about that that I think there's actually some opportunities where I could be using them more and getting more benefit but it's

almost like I'm I'm too hesitant to try um my my use case as a manager is probably you know different if if you're a software engineer uh how I might want to use it so that was just one thing I thought of but um you know I have had people say like you know when you're starting your say you want to do like your take a few minutes on a Monday to come up with like an agenda for the week or you're closing out your Friday of the week and you wanted to summarize some stuff that went down um for your own notes or whatever you're doing like use co-pilot or you know whatever you want for if you're not using co-pilot use something else we have access to co-pilot this way and it's hooked up to everything so like why not right so it

was suggested to me like hey co-pilot you know for for this week or for the next you know two days or three days whatever like tell me about my important meetings what I should be preparing uh who I need to follow up with and you know kind of give it a prompt where it's like instead of you trying to sit there and coming up with your even the structure for your action plan like basically you prompt it in a way that you know kind of gives you some of that and I I think I need to try that more so that's one of those things like that's not I'm unsure of it because it might write something you know that reads funny like that's just for my eyes anyway so if it happens to say delve into the realm of whatever uh whatever that's fine

it's weird but it's just for me to read so that's okay um but I should try that right because that something that I need to do and sometimes if I'm feeling stra for time I might skip that and then you know it's like that could just be a productivity boost to try so um kind of saying this out loud is a bit of a mental note for myself um but yeah I think there's probably things like that that I should be doing more uh not necessarily I don't know like I could I be using it for writing more sure but I think I have the opposite problem at work is like I need to get my my writing reduced maybe I should should be using it more actively for summarizing things uh same thing with emails right uh I work in substrate uh you know

exchange if you're not familiar uh Exchange Server is like one of the big things that we have for Office 365 for email uh it's a very email heavy culture and um I send verbose emails as well maybe I should put that through co-pilot and have it make it more is syct more actionable so I think there's a couple things like that I should try out more but I'm going to switch back to software engineering because I realize a lot of you probably are software developers and you're going Nick I just don't care about your stupid manager like it's boring um I get it just wanted to share my experience so I'll share my experience as a as a software developer because I love to code outside of work um I personally use AI regly when I'm coding uh so definitely uh having co-pilot in visual

studio for me um you know it's uh I I've talked about this before having Visual Studio in general for me I'm like very dependent on having a good ide I love intell a sense I love autocomplete uh but having co-pilot my experience was when we first when I first started using co-pilot at home I was like this is like it's it's basically just you know autoc completing like absolute nonsense and I remember thinking like this AI stuff is such a joke that was my honest reaction in the beginning I was like this is so dumb anyone who says that they're getting a productivity boost out of this like you're just full of like it's so bad and then what happened and I don't know like to be honest I don't know if it's because it was just learning on my local repositories or what um

but I probably used it for about a month I just like kept it on and I'm glad I did cuz I probably would like otherwise I would have turned it off and would have just always had that mindset but I kept it on and I feel like what started happening was that it's I find personally it's very good at picking up the patterns of the structure of code that I write maybe that's just how I program maybe it's because I use a lot of the same pattern turns over and over I don't know your mileage will vary um this is just my experience but I've had uh you know a really big productivity increase from co-pilot being able to autocomplete stuff uh is it perfect no absolutely not but um I use it you know very regularly to the point where if I lost co-pilot

inside a visual studio I would I would absolutely feel it I would be kind of waiting there for the you know the more verbose autocomplete versus just like you know fill out the method name kind of thing so definitely um you know definitely built a dependence on that um I definitely use it for what's a good example I don't like asking it for things that are like completely unknown to me so to give you an example if I'm like hey I need an API to go interact with something I don't like using it for that at this point because I feel like the information's outdated so either it doesn't know at all or it tries and it gives me something and then I'm like hey cool like co-pilot or you know uh chat GPT new and then I go to use it and then I'm

like this is absolutely not right like it's completely crap and maybe it's because it was using an old API version maybe it's hallucinating whatever but I've had really poor experiences with trying to be like hey I need an API for integrating with whatever like write me an example like uh you know call on this a web API for some service it's just not a good experience for me um but there's sometimes I'll ask at things like uh I'm trying to design something like this uh I'm just trying to think of an example I have something that is this is contrived I'm trying to invented on the spot I have something where I need to access a shared resource and I need this kind of behavior um it's going to be all you know in single process I'm trying to optimize for minimal contention here's some

other characteristics about this like you know walk me through what this might look like and what's cool about that is like that's a problem I know how to go solve just as an example I know how to go solve it but it's almost like uh you heard about like rubber duck debugging right like I get to actually go have this thought in my mind about how I would do it ask AI like what are your thoughts on this and what's neat is that it'll often suggest at least one thing where I was like oh like not sure that was on my radar it might not be super important but it might be interesting and it might be it might be just enough where I'm like maybe I should like dig into that a little bit more right so I'm trying to think of like in

my contrived example I can't really invent something else on top of that but um the point is that I use it for trying to think outside of the box a little bit more or kind of validate some of my assumptions another example is uh and I've talked about this on on this Vlog before but um for SQL queries I write a lot of SQL and the stuff I build uh I know how to write SQL I don't love writing SQL uh I like having visibility into my SQL queries oh this road is such garbage the construction they're doing is a nightmare actually if the insta 360 doesn't fall off from me driving over these things maybe we can I can show show you how crappy the road is so you know um but yeah like I there's times where I'm like I don't want to

go putts around with this sequel query like it's it's more complicated than I want to spend time doing like I know it's possible I know that I could come up with a naive version of it I don't want to go sit there and optimize it so I will describe the optimization I will give the query sorry the schema to chat GPT so it has the schema I explain what's going on uh and then you know I can say go write a query that's optimized for this and then I can say um you know I can go measure the performance of it and if I'm not happy with it I can do an explain query plan I can talk about where the in indices are I can describe more of the system that it's not necessarily aware of right because there might be other things that

I'm just talking about the context of the SQL query and I'm like wait a second if I zoom out a little bit like I was doing a single inserts here and if I zoom out a little bit more and give it more context about the code it might say yeah you're doing single inserts inside of this Loop like why didn't you batch them all and like by the way like here's how you would go do that structure your query to go do the inserts in a batching way and now go try it I'm just making up an example right so I've been using it like that where sometimes I need to zoom out a little bit and uh I've been finding that super helpful so I use it for that um but honestly to go writing code from scratch probably the only thing that I'm

doing that and like uh in the in the typical or I shouldn't say typical um you know the feedback I was saying where people are like they're just copying and pasting they don't know how to program I literally do that uh with that site is it v.d or whatever um that it's basically like chat GPT for front end development and it like shows you the the the rendered like front end code like I am such a terrible front end developer I've been programming for forever and if like I can I can make stuff in Wind forms I can make stuff in WPF um I can make it very functional I can make it you know friendly for users in terms of user experience I understand these Concepts but web development and making things like pretty are just two things I have never built up the

skill so I can make things functional but you'd be like that and it it might have a good user experience but it doesn't look pretty especially with if it's web technology in general just like it's out the window for me so I use v.d I will describe things and I don't I just copy and paste it I don't even know what's going on and it works so that's one thing where I I'm happy to admit like I am just blindly using Ai and getting some results out of that and it's working for me so I will keep doing that for my frontend development now something else to end this video because there's a camera on top of the car you may get to see all the dogs if they're all waiting for me in the window so that might be a little treat you can

see the TT in the driveway I'll have the editor go zoom in on the TT there it is and all it's glory and as we get close to this window as I back up you can go focus on that you will see our little Zoo there's our dogs we got Arya the big one we have Laya and Loki are the smaller ones and they're awesome so anyway that's um what I got to say about using AI at least to my workflows and some of the workflows of Engineers that I work with um and I think everyone's going to have a different experience it's obviously going to keep changing be curious to hear what your experiences are like you know is out the window for you you don't even use it because it's just not not working use it for everything are you one of those

people that's like I don't want to become over Reliant so I'm trying to to work around it would love to hear um yeah hope that was interesting I see you next time take care