How Mark Cuban, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates Are Using AI to Be Massively More Productive

Generally it’s pretty hard for the average entrepreneur or professional to emulate the productivity habits of the likes of Tim Cook, Mark Cuban, and Bill Gates. Billionaire CEOs have a small army of assistants to manage their days and plan their schedules down to the minute, after all. But there’s only productivity-booking trick of theirs absolutely anyone can steal and benefit from—time-saving artificial intelligence hacks. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have only been available for public use for two years, but according to a series of recent interviews, they’re already changing how some of the most successful CEOs in the world manage their days. Former Shark and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Apple boss Tim Cook, and Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates all recently shared how they’re using AI tools. And handily for everyday workers, all the tools and techniques they mentioned are freely available for anyone to experiment with. Tim Cook uses AI to summarize his emails Take Tim Cook’s love of Apple Intelligence’s email summaries feature, for example. If you think your email overload is bad, spare a thought for the Apple CEO who gets upwards of 800 emails a day. Being a conscientious guy, he tried to read them all, he recently told the Wall Street Journal. That was a huge time suck until he started using Apple’s AI tool to summarize the deluge in his inbox every morning. “If I can save time here and there, it adds up to something significant across a day, a week, a month,” Cook told the WSJ. “It’s changed my life. It really has.” This could seem like just another CEO touting his company’s offerings (and there is no doubt some element of that going on here), but there are a host of AI email summary tools available for both Mac users and Microsoft fans. If you’re skeptical of Cook’s rave review of Apple’s products, try any of these tools to see if they can change your working life too. Mark Cuban’s favorite AI hack When it comes to Mark Cuban’s recommendation, there is no such conflict of interest. Cuban’s email problem is even worse than Cook’s. He receives thousands of often repetitive emails a day, he recently told CNBC. His solution? Using Gemini, Google’s generative AI assistant, to help him power through his replies in much less time. “It’s reduced the need for me to write out routine replies,” he told CNBC. “I can spend 30 seconds evaluating its response and hit ‘send’ versus typing it all out myself.” Cuban called outsourcing much of his email writing to AI the “ultimate time-savings hack.” Other CEOs can certainly experiment with AI tools to see if they could similarly streamline their inbox wrangling. Bill Gates is a big fan of AI meeting notes Not every iconic business leader is most excited about using AI to process emails. Bill Gates explained in a recent interview with The Verge that his favorite way to use new AI tools is for taking and searching through meeting notes. Gates has long been known as extremely detail oriented and a dedicated note taker. But he used to be a big believer in the old fashioned pen and paper approach. “You won’t catch me in a meeting without a legal pad and pen in hand—and I take tons of notes in the margins while I read. I’ve always believed that handwriting notes helps you process information better,” Gates once wrote on LinkedIn. But AI has convinced him to update his note-taking approach, he told The Verge. Now he also has AI sit in on and transcribe meetings so he can reference those records later. “I’d say the feature I use the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated into [Microsoft] Teams, which I use a lot,” he explained. “The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic.” There’s no shortage of AI tools to experiment with Much like Tim Cook’s Apple-boosting reply, Gates is clearly plumping for Microsoft products here. But again, those looking to experiment with using AI for meeting notes aren’t limited to using Microsoft tools. There are tons of competing products to play around with. The main point here isn’t to try to sell you on any particular tool. It’s to highlight that some of the smartest and most tech-savvy leaders around are already finding massive value in integrating AI into their daily routines. If you’re not experimenting with AI tools for similar uses, you’re probably missing an opportunity to save yourself time and hassle. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN @ENTRYLEVELREBEL