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Blog: AI at Work Challenge

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Blog: AI at Work Challenge

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From June 13 to July 17, more than a thousand participants joined our AI at Work Challenge to explore the possibilities of generative AI. Today, we are thrilled to announce the winners.

As generative AI gained momentum towards the end of last year, we were captivated by its potential. We closely followed the latest developments, chuckled at the whimsical AI examples, and started contemplating important aspects like security and privacy.

While we initially focused on an AI writing assistant that could generate content, our curiosity led us to ponder a bigger question: what could an AI work assistant truly achieve?

In February, we shared our early vision and invited people to join our alpha waitlist. As we gradually granted access, our alpha testers provided invaluable feedback that shaped our broader vision. We were elated to witness Coda AI making a tangible impact on their work. Teachers began utilizing Coda AI to generate student evaluations, startups started refining their messaging, and enterprises eagerly embraced features like tagging, summarizing, and incorporating product feedback across their organizations. By combining Coda AI with our extensive range of features, such as interconnected tables and integrations with over 600 apps, it became evident that our vision of a work assistant was becoming a reality—one that teams could leverage to generate value in the workplace.

We are excited about the progress made so far and the potential impact of Coda AI. Stay tuned for the announcement of the challenge winners, which will be revealed shortly.

We were so encouraged that we decided to ship a Coda AI Beta, making this new AI work assistant (with its three initial features) available for all Coda workspaces. And on June 13, we also announced the AI at Work Challenge, empowering all makers to build and submit templates showcasing their best examples of Coda AI in the workplace, as determined by top judges:

Ben Relles: Founder at Good to Vote, former Head of Innovation at YouTube Originals.

Casey Winters: Former Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, and Partner at Reforge.

Reid Hoffman: Partner at Greylock, and a Co-founder and Board Member at Inflection AI. Former Executive Chairman and co-Founder at Linkedin.

Shreyas Doshi: Former Product Leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google and Yahoo.

Tamar Yehoshua: Venture Partner at IVP and former Chief Product Officer at Slack.

Sarah Guo: Founder at Conviction, Board Partner at Greylock.

Mamoon Hamid: Partner at Kleiner Perkins, former Co-Founder and General Partner at Social Capital.

The following weeks, over 1000 makers across 75 countries expressed interest in the Challenge, creating over 150 Coda AI enabled docs across five categories:

Personal Productivity

Research & Analysis

Product Development

Marketing & Selling

Business Operations

Our judges faced some very difficult decisions, but today, we’re excited to announce the winners. Scroll down to each winners in each category, and the grand prize.

Research & Analysis winner

Gretchen sought to use Coda AI to tackle a report that is often considered difficult to approach: a 10-K filing. Often, these documents are 100-200 pages long, filled with legal jargon, with information spread across its pages or potentially buried in footnotes.

Using the Microsoft 10-K as an example, Gretchen used Coda AI to help extract key themes, identify risk factors, and summarize trends, and other Coda features like nested pages, tables & charts, and icons to organize the information.

As a result, her example makes it easier to review and absorb key information about Microsoft’s 10-K—as she estimates, in half the time, and with 2x retention.

Whether you are a full-time or casual investor, you can follow Gretchen’s example to make informed decisions, or apply her structure to other complex and lengthy reports.

Product Development winner

Scott’s self-described “one-page wonder” leans in on both simplicity and value—making it easy to interpret customer feedback. Taking raw feedback from a mix of delighted and unhappy users, Scott leverages Coda AI to tag it as positive, negative or neutral, and then summarize trends as well as suggestions for improvement.

This template can fit neatly into other Coda docs where your team has established workflows, and ensure your decisions are keeping the most important stakeholder in mind—your customer.

Marketing & Selling winner

As an avid user of AI-enabled tools, Mahmoud observed that coming up with tailored prompts can require a learning curve. He created a template that can help you craft prompts to unlock a tool’s potential, and that you can start showcasing to other users or in specific communities.

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Business Operations winner

Micah’s template is both a public job board, and an applicant tracking system. Using his experience working at a restaurant chain, Micah was involved with both recruiting and employee retention. Their team of two managed around 30 applications and 8 interviews a day, while also doing operational work, so they needed a way to get up to speed on an applicant fast.

Using Coda AI, they created a way to easily review fit for a role, and craft personalized messages to each candidate. They can review applicant status, background details, and bump them to the next stage in the process—giving a smooth experience to both their team and the candidates.

Personal Productivity winner

As described by Auryan, their AI workout-building tool, nestled within Coda, empowers office workers to prioritize their well-being by seamlessly incorporating exercise into their daily routines. Their template generates customized workout plans tailored to each individual's fitness level, preferences, and time constraints. With just a few clicks, employees can access a wide range of exercise routines, from desk stretches to full-body workouts, ensuring that they stay physically active throughout the workday.

Grand prize winner

While the judges were impressed with so many templates, only one can take home the grand prize, as determined by the top score.

In his entry, Paul explained that, like many others, he runs a business with its own social media account that remains unfilled. He observed that an easy way to create social content is to take existing long-form articles (such as blog posts or press releases) and turn them into bite-sized carousel slides and stories.

4 bonus prizes winners

With this bonus prize, we encouraged participants to share their entries in creative ways across social channels and engage with different audiences. Each doc was created with a pain point in mind, coupled by its AI-enabled solution, ultimately resonating for many who discovered their stories.

Andy’s AI Process Manager & Knowledge Base

Andy created an AI-enabled process and knowledge management tool, based on two observations:

It can be hard for some people to start thinking in terms of process, and a tool that can manage this, frees you up to focus on observing, amending, and adapting it.

There’s always a risk that knowledge will go stale, or that you and others will have to spend time updating their processes to keep knowledge relevant. He believes you should be spending some time thinking about and working with your processes from a second-order perspective—but not all of your time.

Andy decided to ultimately create a doc that helps answers questions like:

Where do I start with a piece of work?

What task is next?

How do I do it?

How do I improve in my role?

Throughout this creation process, Andy documented his steps and thought process on his YouTube channel, so you could follow along, from idea to finalized submission.

Bill French’s Promptology

As an early adopter of AI, Bill observed that writing successful prompts can be difficult, for two reasons:

Prompt Construction - most of us “wing” it when building prompts.

Prompt Repeatability - most of us are inclined to build AI prompts from scratch every time.

He sought to overcome both obstacles with his submission, Promptology, whose value he describes as:

The relevance of Promptology with the AI At Work Challenge parallels the need to scale AI productivity to build many things, not just solve a specific problem with AI. The Promptology Workbench is simply the “thing” that helps you build many other “things”. For this reason, it’s essential to think about the extended productivity this tool can produce.

Mahmoud’s LingAI: the all-in-one writer’s productivity toolkit

As a seasoned writer, Mahmoud wanted to use AI to help with the content generation process, but found the output lacking a personal voice and creativity. He sought to create LingAI, which he describes below:

LingAI is the ultimate tool for writers, designed to make them more productive and creative. It takes inspiration from the very best human writers and infuses it with the power of Coda AI to produce high-quality content that's unique and engaging. With LingAI, writers can forget about generic and lackluster content and focus on what really matters - their creative process.

LingAI can help you create content for any social media platform. Copy Mahmoud’s doc to create your very own writing work station.

Nathan’s “time to Coda”

Nathan’s creation began with a question: “Where did my time go?”

His answer is to create a tool could that conveniently monitor the activities of your day, and using Coda AI, tell you key information like what tasks you should do more or less of, what to delegate or outsource. You can also use his template to journal and reflect, keeping your calendar and your energy levels in check.

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