5 ways AI can create stronger teams

Throughout time, technology has empowered humans to boost their productivity. The wheel, likely invented around 3500 BCE, began as a potter’s tool but soon revolutionized transportation. With rudimentary wheelbarrows, people could haul crops more efficiently, freeing time for other activities — like inventing the earliest writing systems. Today’s tech is light years more sophisticated, but the idea is the same: less input, more output.

AI is the latest disruptive technology sending ripples across industries. Just as the wheel transformed transportation and agriculture, AI is reimagining the way teams work — and AI is becoming more accessible every day. The Economist recently estimated that 80% of organizations in the U.S. and China already rely on AI daily. For companies, the question is no longer whether you adopt AI — it’s how smartly you integrate it into your business processes.

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Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT facilitate faster, better teamwork — 12.2% more tasks completed; 25.1% faster task completion; and 40% higher quality work. At Jotform, we aim to leverage AI to help our teams reallocate their energy to more meaningful collaboration, not just more busywork — to accomplish more tasks that move the needle, rather than just ticking items off a to-do list for the sake of staying busy.

Here are five ways AI can help teams work smarter, collaborate better, and achieve more together.

#1 High impact meetings

Essential for collaboration but potentially hazardous time vacuums, meetings can be a double-edged sword. It’s tricky to pinpoint exactly how much time we spend in meetings, but research suggests that knowledge workers are inundated with them. That’s why we have an explicit policy of scheduling only essential meetings. If another format can accomplish the same goal — whether it’s a phone call or asynchronous communication — we choose that. When we do have meetings, we use AI to maximize utility and efficiency.

Today’s tools go well beyond AI-powered note-taking apps (although we use those, too). AI tools can also coordinate schedules, recommend prime meeting times (based on participants’ typical energy levels), and generate meeting summaries, action items, and roles and responsibilities to be distributed to participants. Copilot on Teams summarizes key discussion points. For its part, Zoom’s “AI companion” can help late arrivals easily get up to speed. It’s clear that teamwork platforms understand the needs of today’s most successful teams and are offering a growing range of AI capabilities to meet and exceed those expectations.

By letting AI handle administrative tasks, from the routine to the redundant, team members can fully focus on the substance of the meeting itself. That’s when we come up with our best, most innovative ideas.

#2 More balanced participation

As CEO for nearly two decades, I’ve grown accustomed to leading our all-hands meetings, sometimes with hundreds of participants spanning 6 continents. But having always been on the more introverted side of the spectrum, I can still recall past roles when speaking up during meetings was not my biggest strength.

As much as they enhance collaboration, meetings have the unfortunate effect of prioritizing the communications of more outspoken participants. This not only puts introverts at a disadvantage (despite recent research suggesting introverts often make better leaders), but it also worsens the quality of your discussions. Simply put, in order to take advantage of the potential creative and intellectual synergy of multiple minds coming together, all voices must be heard. AI tools can help level the playing field.

AI-powered tools like Read AI analyze various aspects of meeting participants’ behavior, like engagement and sentiment, and then can provide feedback on cultivating more balanced and engaged participation. With metrics like speaking time, the tool can offer insight into who contributes the most and who may need more gentle encouragement to share their perspective. If I, as a leader, realize that I’m dominating the discourse, I might make a point to listen more and speak less during the next meeting. These AI tools help foster a diversity of opinions and ensure meetings are both inclusive and productive.

#3 Seamless project management

I remember the days of keeping track of group projects on bulky whiteboards — a hasty eraser swipe could leave the team in a panic. Nowadays, team projects have largely moved to the cloud, where they’re less vulnerable to whiteboard erasers. AI-powered features have only enhanced team project management, automating routine tasks and protecting team members’ peace of mind — no need to worry about essential items slipping through the cracks.

Platforms like Asana and monday.com can enhance productivity by automating administrative items like assigning due dates and sending reminders, and providing insights on project progress. Asana can offer rolling deadline suggestions based on project timelines. For its part, monday.com can analyze workload patterns to make recommendations on how to automate team workflows.

One of the benefits of AI-powered task management is seamlessly keeping everyone aligned and moving toward the same goal. For example, if an AI task management assistant detects that a project is falling behind, it can automatically reallocate resources or adjust timelines to prevent delays. Utilizing these features is like adding an AI member to your team, to manage all of the essential, less visible parts of project execution with minimal human input.

#4 Sharpened creativity

When we think about AI in the context of teamwork, we tend to focus on the administrative benefits. But it can also facilitate more creative thinking, unlocking the key to innovation.

Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch, who pitted humans against ChatGPT to see which group could come up with better product ideas (spoiler alert: AI generated better ideas and faster), put it best: using AI to generate ideas is a no-brainer. Terwiesch explained, “Worst case is you reject all of the ideas and run with your own. But our research speaks strongly to the fact that your idea pool will get better.”

When brainstorming, AI tools like ChatGPT can help your team generate a larger, richer idea pool. Then, they can choose the best idea and have a strong jumping off point. When creating content — be it a blog post, a newsletter, or an engaging social media caption — enlisting ChatGPT’s help can ensure your team doesn’t waste any time getting started. With the right prompt, an LLM can churn out a first draft, leaving your team with more time to fine-tune the details.

In short: there’s no reason not to use AI to supercharge your creativity.

#5 Recruiting top talent

Finally, when building your dream teams, AI can be a powerful asset in the recruiting process, making it more, rather than less, human. Studies have shown that recruiters can save up to 40% of their time by outsourcing routine, repetitive tasks to AI — like searching resumes for keywords or generating compelling job descriptions. Then, hiring teams can spend more time in the actual interviews with candidates, getting to know them and feeling out whether they’re a great fit for the team and the company culture.

Hiring is one of the tasks that I never fully delegate — to humans or AI tools. I like to meet our potential hires and understand their motivations; what they hope to bring to the team, what they hope to achieve, and how that aligns with our business’s needs. I’ve learned certain qualities are impossible to communicate in a resume or a questionnaire, which is why face-to-face conversations (even through a screen) are essential during recruitment. AI tools give me and my team the ability to fully show up for those conversations, and build stronger teams for our company.