Hey there. Welcome to Day 2 of our 5-day practical AI series!

Yesterday, we explored how to personalize your ChatGPT experience with Custom Instructions.

Today, we're diving into new research by MIT that reveals the real-world impact of generative AI on productivity.

By the end of this email, you'll understand:

  • The dramatic productivity gains AI can unlock

  • How AI is reshaping task structures and skill demands

  • The challenge of "secret cyborgs"

Let's get into it.

The AI Productivity Revolution: By the Numbers

We all know the saying: AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI will.

So to truly grasp what that means, and why it matters — we’ll be breaking down a recent MIT study that examined the effects of ChatGPT on mid-level professional writing tasks.

How the study worked: Researchers recruited 444 college-educated professionals across various fields like marketing, consulting, and data analysis. Participants completed two writing tasks typical of their professions. Half were randomly assigned to use ChatGPT for the second task, while the other half served as a control group. Researchers measured time taken, output quality, and other factors to assess AI's impact.

The results are nothing short of revolutionary: individual productivity time savings range from 20% to 70% for the tasks, with output quality often higher than without AI.

Here are some of the most important insights from the study:

1. Productivity Skyrockets:

  • Time spent on tasks decreased by 37% (that's 10 minutes saved on a 27-minute task!)

  • Output quality increased by 0.45 standard deviations

2. Inequality Decreases:

  • Lower-performing workers benefited more from AI assistance

  • The productivity gap between high and low performers was cut in half

3. Task Structure Shift:

  • Time spent on rough drafts dropped by over 50%

  • Time spent on editing more than doubled

4. Job Satisfaction Boost:

  • AI access increased job satisfaction by 0.4 standard deviations

  • Self-efficacy (feeling skilled/effective) increased by 0.2 standard deviations

Real-World Impact & Secret Cyborgs

But here’s where things get interesting…

Two weeks after the experiment, 33% of participants who were introduced to ChatGPT were using it in their real jobs, compared to just 18% of the control group. This rapid adoption rate suggests we're at the beginning of a major shift in how work gets done.

However, there's a dilemma: Many people actually using AI in their work don't like to share their use cases.

We like to call them “secret cyborgs" — machine-augmented humans who keep their AI use cases hidden.

But why are they not sharing these breakthroughs with their employers (or anyone publicly)?

  1. Organizational Policies: Many companies have banned ChatGPT use due to vague legal concerns and regulatory worries.

  2. The Power of Perceived Human Touch: AI's ability to write like a human is valuable, but only if people think it's coming from a real person.

  3. Fear of Job Loss: Workers worry that revealing how much of their job they've automated could lead to layoffs.

The Challenge Secret Cyborgs Create

“AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI will” is proving true. 

Even this early in the AI age, we’re seeing developers coding 3x faster with Cursor, writers leveraging Claude to edit their content 2x faster, business operators summoning Zapier and Lindy agents instead of hiring new employees, and the list goes on.

But when these "secret cyborgs" keep their use cases to themselves, the most impactful AI applications remain hidden from the public.

That’s why we created The Rundown AI University with a mission to help our audience unlock the practical AI use cases that are hidden from the public.

We realized that with the largest following in the AI community, we’re in a unique position to gather the top AI use cases from our audience (over 1M+ AI early adopters), reverse-engineer their success, and deliver actionable daily guides on how to actually use AI in your work.

Right now, we have over 150+ practical guides for using AI in your daily work across almost every industry imaginable (from marketing to sales, to coding, you name it).

With our use case guides, you can start implementing AI immediately, potentially saving hours a day.

Your Action Steps

Time to put these lessons into practice. Because if not now, when?

  1. Audit your work processes: Identify your most time-consuming tasks and consider how AI could help.

  2. Experiment with AI for brainstorming and editing: This could significantly speed up your creative process. Fun fact: The email you're reading was edited (but not written) by Claude.

  3. Stay informed: Keep up to date on the latest AI developments with our daily AI newsletter.

Tomorrow, we'll explore how to master Gamma AI for creating beautiful presentations from prompts. You won't want to miss it!

Stay curious & see you then,
Rowan & The Rundown Team

P.S. If you’re curious about the 150+ practical use cases we’ve collected in the AI University, you can check out our landing page with more details here.