The untapped potential
Despite the recent surge in adoption of artificial intelligence across the globe, learning how to use it can feel challenging. While AI has countless applications at work, school, and in daily life, knowing how to use it effectively isn’t always clear.
Recently, several ITS team members shared how they’ve been using AI in their work to save time, increase productivity, and unlock new insights.
Data analysis made simple: transforming IT Service Desk operations
The challenge: Manual analysis of walk-up interactions at the Tech Bar had become a time-intensive burden for the IT Service Desk team. How could they extract meaningful insights and trends from thousands of touchpoints without spending hours buried in Excel spreadsheets? The solution came through leveraging Claude to analyze Tech Bar traffic data, transforming their approach to understanding help desk operations.
How AI improved it: The results have been transformative. The IT Service Desk team now receives automated insights on IT Service Desk traffic patterns, breaking down activity by hour and date to reveal previously hidden trends. These data-driven analyses provide concrete staffing recommendations that help them optimize support coverage. Dynamic dashboards provide leadership with real-time decision-making capabilities, while seasonal pattern recognition allows the team to make proactive adjustments for semester beginnings and low-traffic periods. What once required hours of manual Excel work now takes just minutes of AI-assisted analysis.
Meeting minutes revamped: from transcripts to action items
The challenge: Converting raw meeting transcripts into comprehensive, structured minutes used to be a tiresome manual process. How can teams effectively capture action items and revisit conversations without spending precious time editing and formatting notes repeatedly?
How AI improved it: AI capabilities have revolutionized how you can document and follow up on meetings. With a Teams Premium license, in Teams meetings, Microsoft Copilot can record and transcribe meetings so that you can focus more on the discussion as it’s happening. The transcription can then be uploaded into Copilot or Claude chat to summarize key discussion points, identify risks and issues that might otherwise be overlooked, and extract action items with clear assignments. Claude can also generate a professional PDF to ensure that documentation maintains a consistent, polished appearance.
The critical element in this transformation has been the human-AI partnership. While AI handles the heavy lifting of organization and formatting, human oversight remains essential for accuracy verification and contextual understanding. Teams Premium License AI notes provide an additional layer of convenience, offering quick meeting recaps that keep everyone aligned on key outcomes.
Executive reporting reimagined: Consistency meets efficiency
The challenge: Creating executive reports used to consume entire days of careful writing and formatting. Producing a properly formatted, detailed report for leadership could take a full day to complete.
How AI solved it: The approach changed dramatically when the team established a Claude Project trained on historical reports. This training process used past reports to establish format and style guidelines, creating a knowledge base that understands the organizational voice and expectations.
Report creation time dropped from a full day to one or two hours for each bi-monthly edition (that’s approximately 150 hours annually, or nearly 4 weeks’ worth of work!), while still maintaining consistent messaging tailored specifically to executive audiences. The iterative improvement capabilities mean each report builds feedback from previous versions, creating a continuously improving system. This Project now also serves as a foundation for thematic analysis of organizational accomplishments, providing deeper insights into the team’s collective progress.
Voice-powered productivity: Claude’s cloud voice feature
The challenge: Creating to-do lists or writing down notes can be tedious, especially when on the go. ITS staff members may be walking across campus to a meeting or in the middle of a commute and an idea pops into their head. There are many situations in which it would be difficult to even jot something down, especially if you have several things you have to remember.
How AI improved it: Claude’s new voice feature allows you to speak into your mobile device to take notes, ask questions, and create task lists, even formulating entire project plans, unlocking on-the-go efficiency. These conversations demonstrate the capabilities of modern AI, making technology feel more intuitive and accessible. For large project planning, voice commands enable the creation of actionable, scheduled task lists that can be developed anywhere, anytime.
Cross-platform access ensures seamless integration between mobile and desktop experiences. Whether you’re heading out to grab lunch or sitting at your desk, the same powerful AI capabilities remain at your fingertips, adapting to your workflow rather than constraining it.
Development acceleration: GitHub Copilot in action
The challenge: Software development can be an incredibly time-consuming, complicated process. Developers spend hours researching different techniques, learning new programming languages, and reviewing their code for errors.
How AI improved it: Software development has been revolutionized through intelligent code assistance. GitHub Copilot provides automatic code description and workflow analysis, helping developers understand complex systems more quickly. The tool’s ability to generate components directly from design images bridges the gap between visual concepts and functional code, accelerating the development process significantly.
Quality assurance has been enhanced through automated unit test generation, ensuring code reliability without the traditional time investment. Code improvement features focus on refactoring for better readability and reduced repetition, while accessibility integration ensures that generated code meets modern standards. These capabilities don’t replace developer expertise but amplify it, allowing teams to focus on higher-level architectural decisions and creative problem-solving.
Bigger picture: AI tools in ITS’ ecosystem
All Northeastern staff and faculty should feel empowered to experiment with AI tools in their daily work. Getting started doesn’t require extensive technical knowledge or dramatic workflow changes. The key is starting out with small experiments, identifying repetitive tasks that could benefit from automation, and gradually implementing relevant AI solutions.
The productivity multiplication effect cannot be overstated. Time savings from AI assistance allow Northeastern ITS teams to focus on higher-value work that requires human creativity, strategic thinking, and relationship building.
Strategic AI adoption provides a competitive advantage that compounds over time. Organizations that embrace these capabilities now will be better positioned for future challenges and opportunities.
The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how quickly can people embrace the possibilities it offers for transforming work and increasing impact.