AI to lighten your daily administrative load: Five GenAI hacks
"I'll just quickly write a report" - and an hour later you're still working on it… We all run into it: a pile of emails, messy notes from that last meeting, an Excel file full of unstructured data… All while your to-do list is already never-ending. But don't worry! Did you know AI can help you handle your administrative tasks more efficiently? Eva Blondeel from Ghent University collected five tools that you can start using right away.
Via some smart applications, GenAI or generative AI can support you in handling routine tasks - big or small - more quickly, in adding structure to administrative chaos, and delivering high-quality work. Discover five easy GenAI hacks you can try out today.
- AI as an email assistant
- AI as an analyst
- AI as a report writer
- AI as a software coach
- AI as a personal assistant
With clever prompts, you can finally get on top of your to-do list!
AI as an email assistant
What can it do?
Your inbox is overflowing and you don't have time to carefully respond to everything? GenAI can support you in several ways by efficiently analysing your emails and proposing suitable replies.
Whether you need to draft a new email based on clear instructions you provide, rephrase a draft you've written, schedule meetings, or summarize long messages: with the right instructions, context, and expectations, GenAI helps you communicate faster and more clearly!
Thanks to AI's self-learning capabilities, the system will get to know you better over time and gradually generate responses that align more closely with your style and expectations.
Any chatbot can be used for this (Copilot, Gemini, Claude…). My personal favorite for text processing is ChatGPT, since it allows you to create projects that remember your instructions.
Prompt idea
"Rephrase this email to make it more concise and professional. It's an email to a potential client who has shown interest in our services. The email should be friendly and should ask to schedule a follow-up meeting. Also ask for their availability."
Personalize
Improve your prompt with standard phrases or preferences that make your emails even more personal or targeted, such as:
- "Don't use generic opening sentences."
- "End with a call to action."
Use "projects" in ChatGPT
Are you using the paid version of ChatGPT? Then you can create a project for this purpose. You can add standard instructions:
- "Always respond to emails in a natural, professional tone."
- "End every email with: 'Kind regards, Eva.'"
Projects remember the context of your previous interactions. This way, you build a relationship with your GenAI assistant: it learns your style and preferences, making your emails smoother and more consistent and allowing a simplification of your prompts.
AI as an analyst
What are the options?
An AI tool can help you draft and update standard texts for reports, memos, and policy documents. You provide the figures or key information, and the GenAI tool takes care of the rest:
- creating a clear and professional report
- in a fixed format with an introduction, summary…
- with conclusions, trend analyses…
AI can ensure that you consistently use the same format and can easily adjust the content based on new input. That way, you don't have to start from scratch each time, and you maintain consistency in your reporting.
Prompt idea
"Use these figures to write a short monthly report with an introduction, interpretation of notable trends, and a concluding summary."
Create a template
Have GenAI create a template for your monthly reports or policy notes. That way, you never have to start from scratch again.
Use reasoning models
Do your data still need to be analysed before you can turn them into a report, and do you have a paid account? GenAI can help with that too: ChatGPT's Data Analyst or a strong reasoning model like Gemini 2.5 Pro can analyse the data for you.
There's also NotebookLM: this GenAI tool can analyse multiple documents at once and generate a report from them (including in audio formats, like a podcast). It's useful for combining different information sources on a single topic and obtaining insights more quickly.
AI as a report writer
From notes to a polished report
Taking notes during a meeting, brainstorm session, or phone call is one thing. Turning them into a formal report afterward is often a different, time-consuming story. Use GenAI tools to transform your notes into a clear, complete, and well-structured document.
ChatGPT's Canvas mode helps you convert typed notes into a neatly structured document, with clear subheadings, a logical flow, and concise conclusions and action points per participant. This saves you time, and the report is immediately ready to share with your team, with no extra formatting needed.
GenAI can also help edit existing texts. Whether you want a draft checked for spelling, tone, and structure, or need a specific sentence rewritten to be clearer or more active - you'll instantly receive usable suggestions.
My personal favorite for text processing? Claude! Prefer another tool? Copilot and ChatGPT are great options for this as well. And definitely try out the European tool Le Chat, too.
Prompt idea
"Turn these bullet points into a structured meeting report with a brief summary, an overview of the discussion points, and action items per participant."
Create text variations for different channels
Did you know that text-processing tools are perfect for rewriting information for different channels? For example, if you're launching a new product and you already have a technical sheet, you can have it rewritten for various platforms: your website, a brochure, LinkedIn, Facebook… Try this prompt, for instance:
"Generate a professional LinkedIn post of 3-5 sentences based on this project proposal. The post should contain a concise core message, end with a question directed at my network, and include no more than 2 relevant hashtags."
AI as a software coach
Get more out of your software tools
Use GenAI tools as a coach to get more out of the software on your computer, or to generate code. Take Excel, for example:
You provide the data yourself - e.g., by copying your Excel table or giving an overview of your data structure - and GenAI supports you with formulas, suggestions for structure/format, and data cleaning. Starting from a clear prompt that includes context and expectations, it explains which formula is best suited for your situation and shows you how to apply it. This way, you gain the knowledge while still performing the steps yourself in your Excel file. A great way for learning something new!
Prefer not to do the work yourself? Then let GenAI handle everything for you! Ask the tool to perform the operations in Excel, and you'll receive an Excel output file, without having to apply any formulas yourself. The result is ready to use - after a critical quality check, of course.
You can use GenAI not only for Excel, but for all programming languages and tools. Whether you need code or formulas for html, css, Java, Python… GenAI guides you step by step. And with Canva's AI tools, you can even generate presentation slides.
For this purpose, Copilot is ideal thanks to its integration with Office tools like Excel.
Prompt idea
"I have an Excel file with duplicate rows. Create a cleaned-up Excel file with only unique rows. Tell me how many duplicate rows were identified."
Create a formula library
Have your favorite GenAI tool build a formula library tailored to your dataset. That way, you'll always have the right functions at your fingertips.
AI as a personal assistant
Plan smarter
Got a busy day ahead and no idea where to start? GenAI can help you bring order to the chaos. Give it an overview of your tasks, deadlines, or meetings, and the GenAI tool will create a realistic daily or weekly schedule - including time estimates and priorities.
You can also have existing schedules adapted: think of tasks like "Restructure this list based on urgency" or "Suggest ways to group these tasks more efficiently." This saves you time and helps you work more purposefully.
Prompt idea
"I have 7 tasks for today, each with a different deadline and level of difficulty. Create a realistic schedule with time blocks and short breaks. Also suggest if something would be better planned for tomorrow."
Improve your daily schedule
Let GenAI also suggest ways to optimise your daily schedule based on your energy peaks, preferences, or available time. For example: "Plan writing tasks in the morning and meetings in the afternoon."
Smart AI use = responsible AI use
Although GenAI is incredibly powerful, critical thinking remains essential. Keep these principles in mind when using GenAI in your daily tasks:
- Prompting matters: the clearer your prompt (meaning: the clearer your instructions, context, and expectations entered in the tool), the better the output. Practise and refine.
Also read: Prompt engineering: how to get the best result out of ChatGPT, Copilot or LeChat - Stay critical: GenAI tools make mistakes. Always check the output and adjust where needed.
Also read: The risks and drawbacks of artificial intelligence - Respect privacy and think about data security: with every prompt, you're sharing information with an external platform. Remove personal or sensitive data from your prompts.
Also read: What is the AI Act? - Watch out for bias: GenAI is trained on historical data with blind spots. Stay alert for biases.
Also read: How to make AI reliable and transparent
Start making your admin smarter today!
Pick one task from your to-do list today and give GenAI the chance to make it easier for you. Testing just one hack is enough to get started. Experience for yourself how working with GenAI can make you more efficient.
Experiment with these tools
- ChatGPT: writing, rewriting, summarising. Offers useful extras like Data Analyst, "Thinking" to follow the reasoning, Sora for image generation...
- Microsoft Copilot: integrates directly with familiar Office tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook. If you have a work account, enterprise data protection applies.
- Claude: great for summarising texts and drafting reports in natural language.
- Le Chat: summarising and generating reports in natural language. European, so compliant with EU regulations!
- Gemini: excellent for data analysis.
- Notebook LM: combines and summarises reports and converts them into accessible text or podcasts.
- DeepSeek Chat: a popular Chinese chatbot developed on a small budget, raising many ethical questions.
Learn more
Eva Blondeel
Eva Blondeel is a postdoctoral researcher within the Accounting Education Research Group at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Ghent University. She obtained a Master in Business Economics with specialization in Accountancy and a PhD in Applied Economics at the same university. Prior to her academic career, Eva worked as a Junior Auditor at Deloitte.
Eva's research focuses on improving accounting education by encouraging students to use active learning methods to reduce procrastination. Recently, her research expanded further into the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) within accounting education and finance. She teaches courses such as Financial Accounting and Accounting in Practice and regularly conducts workshops and keynotes on GenAI applications for students, education professionals and academic colleagues. Her scholarly work has been published in multiple international journals such as Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, The British Accounting Review, Studies in Higher Education, Issues in Accounting Education and Accounting in Europe.Expertise:
- GenAI in finance, accounting, and accounting education
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