Grappling with relentless KPIs and working overtime to the brink of exhaustion, this is the daily grind for many overworked professionals.

In recent years, the harsh work environment has left many professionals struggling, with overtime becoming the norm and lives overwhelmed by work. However, mere hard work alone is scarcely sufficient to secure a promising future.

Fortunately, by 2025, AI has arrived in the workplace. Following Doubao and Kimi, this Spring Festival, DeepSeek has stunned both China and the international community, with its formidable capabilities continuously reshaping people's perceptions.

AI is redefining the way we work, becoming a "cheat code" for professionals to escape the rat race. Whether it's eliminating redundant tasks, enhancing core competencies, or facilitating cross-boundary transformation, leveraging these AI tools can help professionals achieve a significant turnaround by 2025.

| Enhance Core Competencies with AI |

As a media professional, copywriting is Li Xiaoyan's primary task. When the wave of generative AI first emerged, Li Xiaoyan began exploring ways to use AI to alleviate her workload.

Li Xiaoyan has been searching for her "perfect match" in AI. Over the past year, after comparing iFLYTEK Spark, ERNIE Bot, Kimi, Doubao, and other applications, Li Xiaoyan found that Doubao suits her best.

Firstly, the text generated by Doubao is natural and vivid. Sometimes, after generating an article on a topic, minimal changes are needed before it can be used directly, significantly enhancing work efficiency.

Secondly, Doubao is highly perceptive. Unlike other AI applications that randomly provide answers to trending events online, Doubao seems to genuinely be "thinking" about them.

For some sensitive events, Doubao will also euphemistically avoid taking the blame, indirectly reminding users.

To some extent, Doubao has become Li Xiaoyan's best work partner. However, that was before DeepSeek's rise to fame. This Spring Festival, DeepSeek suddenly surged in popularity, and Li Xiaoyan was immediately drawn to it.

Li Xiaoyan promptly downloaded DeepSeek. To her surprise, DeepSeek brought her immense delight. "At first, I thought DeepSeek's popularity was due to its excellent marketing, but after trying it, I found that DeepSeek really has something special to offer."

Li Xiaoyan admitted that compared to Doubao, DeepSeek's thinking is more in-depth, and its text is more delicate and natural, providing numerous ideas and directions. "Sometimes, it even feels better than what I write myself."

However, Li Xiaoyan also discovered that while the text is exquisite, DeepSeek lacks timely updates on trending topics and internet connectivity features. In this regard, she may still have to rely on her "old friend" Doubao.

AI is not only prevalent among writers but also among programmers, who use AI to write code and improve work efficiency.

Xu Ze, who works in the software development department of a bank, also learned to use Doubao to assist in daily coding last year. Around him, colleagues also use intelligent tools like Tongyi Lingma, ChatGPT, and Codeium, a coding tool specifically for developers, to boost their work efficiency.

For development engineers like Xu Ze, daily work is replete with complex logical problems. Since delegating some tasks to AI, he has been pleasantly surprised to find that it not only significantly shortens processing time but also enhances work efficiency.

▲ Image / Codeium Coding

Xu Ze admitted that while AI-generated code can solve some minor issues easily overlooked, the code it produces can also contain errors, requiring further adjustment and optimization. However, using AI to assist in coding is still much faster than working alone.

Xu Ze has also begun to delve deeper into thinking and studying how to better perform his primary job.

| Eliminate Redundant Tasks and Save Time with AI |

For Xu Ze, who has a science background, writing tasks have always been a headache. Working in the rigorous and busy environment of a bank, routine tasks like daily, weekly, and monthly reports are unavoidable.

With the "enthusiastic guidance" of colleagues, Xu Ze discovered that AI can not only efficiently complete primary tasks but also effortlessly handle these redundant tasks that give him headaches.

It can be said that the emergence of AI has "saved" Xu Ze, who lacks literary talent. He only needs to briefly describe his day's or week's work content to AI, and AI can quickly integrate and polish this information into a well-structured and content-rich work summary.

Xu Ze stated that last year's annual work summary was generated by AI. It was not only well-structured and fluent but also extremely fast, with quality surpassing his own efforts.

Although the generated summary was overly official and formal, Xu Ze didn't mind at all. Compared to the embarrassment of struggling to write a few words after pondering for half a day, AI's "official tone" saved him a lot of trouble and time. More importantly, what's not great about using the time saved by AI for other tasks?

Gradually, besides AI software from major companies like Doubao and ERNIE Bot, Xu Ze also discovered many specialized AI weekly report generators. These tools are easy to operate and powerful, completely freeing Xu Ze from the troubles of daily and weekly reports.

Like Xu Ze, Chen Zhen, a state-owned enterprise employee, has also benefited from AI. Weekly meetings used to be Chen Zhen's nightmare because she needed to spend most of her day after each meeting organizing meeting minutes, leaving her unable to do other work.

However, with the development of AI, weekly meetings have become Chen Zhen's most relaxed moments.

Chen Zhen has gotten used to using Feishu to convert meeting recordings into text and then summarizing and refining them with AI tools like Kimi or Doubao. These AI tools can not only quickly and accurately extract meeting points but also intelligently optimize them based on context, making meeting minutes more concise and accurate.

▲ Image / Feishu Text Conversion

Chen Zhen usually chooses the better of the two meeting minutes generated by the AI tools or combines them with simple modifications to easily complete a high-quality meeting summary.

With the "winning combination" of Kimi, Doubao, and Feishu, Chen Zhen's meeting minutes work has become effortless and smooth. Moreover, these three tools are free to use, eliminating her worries about "working for free".

Now, Chen Zhen has fallen in love with this efficient and convenient way of working. She laughed and said, "Now I don't have to worry about wasting time on these redundant tasks anymore!"

| Cross-Boundary Transformation: Delegate Unfamiliar Tasks to AI |

In addition to copywriting, in the past year, Lin Mu, an employee in the marketing department of an internet giant, has quietly taken on some PPT design work.

On the one hand, it's due to the company's reality of cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, as well as staffing reductions. On the other hand, Lin Mu thought that if he could do it himself, he wouldn't need to ask colleagues in the design department for help. After all, cross-departmental communication costs in the company are quite high.

Initially, Lin Mu was unfamiliar with the field of PPT design. Although it falls under the category of expression like writing, it also has its unique professionalism and skills. It can be challenging for ordinary people to handle professional scenarios like marketing activities.

Therefore, Lin Mu also delegated this unfamiliar part of his work to AI and began using AI to assist him in making PPTs.

Currently, many products like Kimi, WPS, and Baidu Wenku have PPT generation capabilities. After comparison, each has its strengths. However, among the many AI tools, Lin Mu ultimately chose Baidu Wenku as his right-hand assistant.

By simply inputting a topic, Baidu Wenku can quickly generate a well-structured and complete outline, which then automatically generates a PPT. This feature greatly saves Lin Mu's time and energy, allowing him to focus more on refining and optimizing content.

▲ Image / Baidu Wenku PPT Outline Generation

Furthermore, the PPTs generated by Baidu Wenku support free editing, polishing, and beautification, undoubtedly providing Lin Mu with more creative space and possibilities.

▲ Image / Baidu Wenku PPT Generation

The fact that PPTs generated by Baidu Wenku can be freely edited, polished, and beautified is no wonder it attracted Lin Mu.

As a media professional, Li Xiaoyan's situation is somewhat similar to Lin Mu's, with her daily work mainly involving writing tweets and planning events. Before the Spring Festival, the company temporarily needed to produce a promotional poster for the Spring Festival, but the design department was too busy to attend to this request.

Li Xiaoyan remembered Doubao's drawing function and tried using it to generate a poster. She input elements like "Happy New Year, Chinese Dragon, Fireworks, Lanterns," and to her surprise, Doubao quickly produced a beautifully designed image filled with a festive atmosphere.

▲ Image / Doubao Poster Generation

Although this poster was not eventually published, it was enough for Li Xiaoyan to realize that she could cross over to take on some simple graphic design work.

Xu Ze, who works in a bank, also wants to expand his business scope beyond daily coding. This Spring Festival, he discovered that DeepSeek is strong in mathematical reasoning and code generation.

Therefore, he also began trying to optimize a complex data analysis project for the company, even though it's not Xu Ze's primary job. After inputting the data and requirements into DeepSeek, DeepSeek not only quickly provided analysis results but also generated optimized code.

After repeated debugging of DeepSeek during the Spring Festival, Xu Ze feels more confident about taking on more cross-boundary work in the new year.

| Conclusion |

As AI increasingly integrates into the daily lives of professionals, many people's fears and anxieties about AI have not diminished but increased.

Take the popularity of DeepSeek during the Spring Festival as an example. The emergence of a more powerful AI application has rendered many people's previously established AI collaboration experience obsolete. And with the evolution of AI, such "obsolescence" moments may recur.

However, in the face of such anxiety, professionals cannot retreat. Because the real winners are not those who race against AI but those who know how to harness AI.

At the same time, professionals should understand that humans possess capabilities that AI cannot easily replace in complex decision-making, resource integration, empathetic communication, and other areas.

Using AI to expand one's capabilities while deeply cultivating one's unique core competitiveness is the ultimate strategy for professionals to navigate the AI era.

Furthermore, professionals should prioritize using AI to address the pain points of their current positions and then extend outward, using the time saved by AI to build business insights.

By leveraging AI tools to enhance efficiency, expand capability boundaries, and cultivate the ability to transfer skills across industries, professionals can become "composite players" who are "60 points in using AI + 40 points in industry insights," enabling them to advance further in their careers.

(At the request of the interviewees, the names Li Xiaoyan, Xu Ze, Chen Zhen, and Lin Mu in the article are pseudonyms.)

The lead image is from Doubao and will be removed if infringement is confirmed.