From grading papers to modernizing the Brawny paper towel man, workers are turning to artificial intelligence to take on tasks that once consumed hours of their week. In interviews with the Associated Press, professionals across multiple industries described how tools like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are freeing up time for higher-value work—and in some cases, raising concerns about the erosion of critical thinking.

Kristin Moore, a technical product manager at digital marketing platform PERQ, uses AI to make sense of jargon-laden engineering discussions. “It picks up on all of that terminology that I don’t understand, and it can simplify it into something that I can consume,” Moore said. She also feeds the tool emails, support tickets, and recorded meetings to surface what clients want her company to build. “It’s definitely freed up hours and hours of my week.”

For elementary school teacher Kyle Weimar, AI handles a chore that once ate into evenings and weekends: grading papers. By uploading a scanning guide and a batch of student work to an AI agent, he said he can return graded assignments with feedback in half an hour. “I can do that in 30 minutes, whereas it would have taken me a week before,” Weimar said.

Marketing professionals are using AI to understand their audiences. Ashley Smith, head of marketing at staffing firm HireQuest, built a dashboard with Claude to analyze web traffic and social media trends. Before a recent trade show, her team uploaded screenshots of target companies and asked AI to predict each firm’s staffing needs over the next 18 to 24 months based on press releases and stock reports. Elsewhere, Natalie Blythe, marketing director at SumnerOne, turned to ChatGPT to build demographic profiles of potential university clients and draft email campaigns. “The efficiencies gained out of it have been tremendous,” Blythe said.

Designers are even enlisting AI for rapid visual brainstorming. Andrew Markle, a design leader at Georgia Pacific, said his team asked AI to imagine how the iconic Brawny man would look with a longer or shorter beard as part of a brand modernization exercise. The tool offered quick iterations, but final creative decisions stayed with the human illustrator.

For all the time saved, some adopters urge caution. Ravi Pendse, the University of Michigan’s chief information officer, uses AI to prepare for meetings by predicting questions he might face, but he worries about what the technology means for learning. “We all should be thinking about how we ensure that AI does not erode our critical thinking skills, especially those of our children,” Pendse said. “As we grew up, we learned from our mistakes. We wrote bad papers, and we got better.” Bob Jones, the university’s assistant vice president of emerging technology, uses AI to ensure his emails on sensitive topics remain neutral and thoughtful—tapping the tool as a communication coach, not a replacement for judgment.