AI workflows and tools we genuinely use every day at Upsource

How much are you using AI in your business? 

Now how much are you talking about using AI in your business? And how much pressure do you feel to use it? 

AI is contentious – is it safe? Should we be using valuable environmental resources on it? Are women getting left behind?

And amongst all this, I’m sure you’re hearing the stories of founders making seven figures because they have an army of AI agents running their business whilst they meditate and write smug LinkedIn posts. But as we know, the reality doesn’t quite reflect that (or are we just doing it wrong?!)

We are using AI every day at Upsource, internally, with clients, in our recruitment, operations and admin; we use it to support workflows, not replace people. So we thought it might be helpful to share some real life examples of how we use it, and the tools we’re using for some AI inspiration.

Listen to Upsource founder, Caroline Marshall’s conversation with Lucy Wheeler, founder of Lucy Legal for more insight into real use cases for AI, and where businesses need to be wary of its legal implications.

But first: AI v automation

You’ve probably been using AI for years, under a different guise – automation. If you’re using some of our favourite tools like Notion, ClickUp, Vimcal or even Google Workspace, and you’re using the automations within them, that’s a form of AI. Albeit perhaps a more socially acceptable version of it. Reminders, meeting notes, smart scheduling and integrations are all based on AI in some way.

Where AI really becomes “AI” is when it starts “thinking” – writing, making decisions, suggesting strategy. Here, we’re talking about both. It’s just a matter of visibility and framing.

The AI tools we actually use

Here are some of the tools and workflows we genuinely use internally and with clients to save time, reduce repetitive admin work and free ourselves up for work that requires human strategy, creativity and nuance.

Notion

We’ve already mentioned Notion; Upsource uses it as our foundational tool internally for onboarding, SOPs, project management, recruitment workflows…we could go on.

Notion has its own AI agents for which (whom?) we have written processes to define workflows and outputs to help speed us up, as well as more simple tasks like formatting, summarising notes and surfacing information quickly.

ClickUp

Internally, we use Notion, but many of Upsource’s clients use ClickUp. Similarly its AI features are most helpful when they support already existing, human built, systems like task summaries, workflow prompts etc.

Superhuman

Superhuman is one of our favourite examples of AI being genuinely useful without feeling intrusive. It helps us speed up inbox management and response time, reduce repetition and find those important conversations.

If you’re in the mood, it can even write responses for you, using your tone of voice. Jury is still out on this feature for us, we all know the “off” feeling one gets when an email hasn’t been written by a human. 

Gemini

Upsource uses Google workspace (no judgement MicroSoft fans!) and we use Gemini daily. In Google Drive to retrieve files, ask questions about documents and reference past meetings. We’ll let you in on a couple of workflows below.

AI workflows we’re using internally

Action points from chaotic inboxes

Inboxes can get pretty crazy, we know. Rather than trawl through all your emails to create a To-Do list, you can ask Gemini to pull all action points, even within a specific date range, or from a particular project.

You can also ask Gemini to summarise long email chains and pull your priorities for the day from your inbox – what genuinely needs your attention, and how to structure your day around it. 

Faster decisions from supplier quotes

Comparing supplier quotes often means a long process of jumping between emails, attachments and spreadsheets to find the information that matters. AI can do the heavy lifting by extracting the key details from multiple quotes and pulling them into one tidy comparison table.

Supplier, price, delivery times, terms and conditions are all laid out side by side, so you can make a quick and confident decision.

Proposal creation

If you receive a sales proposal from Upsource these days, AI will have had a helping hand in it. 

The process looks something like this:

1. Meeting notes are captured
2. AI helps structure the proposal
3. Existing templates and formatting are applied
4. A human(Caroline!) reviews, edits and personalises it

We’re a people-first agency, so that final step, the human review matters hugely. Relationships, tone, context and nuance are so important, especially as a partnership is just beginning. 

Recruitment 

Whilst we never use AI to grade recruitment tasks from prospective Virtual Assistants, we do use it to identify the right trial task for candidates and helps to speed up our process and communication. We will never use AI to make hiring decisions, but we do also encourage VAs to use it in their trials where appropriate. Using it correctly is a skill we all need.

Meeting summaries and note-taking

We’ve already covered this, but AI note takers save huge amounts of time by producing call summaries, action points and searchable notes. But a word of caution! Sometimes we’ve noticed that important nuance is lost, tone is misinterpreted and conclusions are reached incorrectly. It’s always worth checking the transcript! 

Where your Virtual Assistant becomes even more valuable

Obviously almost every industry is under warning that AI is going to replace its people. We disagree. We firmly believe that adaptable, tech-confident, strategically-minded VAs are more important than ever.

Your team doesn’t have time to play around with 5 different AI tools to work out which is the most appropriate for their workflows and business styles, let alone build the automations and QA test them. Your VA not only has experience in a breadth of AI tools, and can recommend what you’ll actually use (and use well) but they can identify inefficiency in your existing workflows to build better, sense check outputs and protect not only your clients experience, but that of your team too.

We’re optimistic…but realistically so

We’re on board with AI, it’s already here and we’re to adopt tech that makes us more efficient. But we’re also realistic about AIs current performance, security and ethical shortcomings.

We have a strict AI policy that the team adheres to, to protect Upsource and our clients’ IP, data and ultimately brand. We are proudly a people first agency and will continue to be so.

We have tech and AI champions on the Upsource teams – experts in specific tech tools, what they can do and how to maximise them. If you’d like advice on a tool, or help making sure you’re using it to its full potential, get in touch.