This interview is with Manasvini Krishna, Founder at Boss as a Service.

Manasvini Krishna, Founder, Boss as a Service

Can you introduce yourself and share your background in leveraging AI for productivity enhancement?

I’m a lawyer by education and a coder and entrepreneur by passion. I’ve built a number of tools and platforms that help people get productive—most are centered around accountability. With AI coming into the fore, I guess you can say I’ve been really intrigued by how my clients can leverage it to make their lives more productive.

What sparked your interest in AI-driven productivity, and how has your journey in this field evolved over time?

Being in tech, I’m obviously curious when new technologies come into the market and try to explore how my businesses can use them. With AI, we looked into integrating it into our workflow and client management, but it was hindering our USP—the human touch. So we let go of that idea for now. But after working with clients, we found that AI can actually be a good supplement to the work we do in improving accountability and productivity by giving clients different options to achieve what they want.

Based on your experience, what’s the most surprising way you’ve seen AI boost productivity in a workplace?

Maybe not the most surprising, but one of the most efficient ways AI has helped is by tracking time and productive work. Tools like MakerTime AI (whose creator is a client of Boss as a Service) don’t just track your work hours but show precisely how much time was spent productively, down to the second. These give a lot of insights into the organization and people’s time management.

Can you share a specific instance where implementing an AI tool significantly improved your personal or team’s productivity?

We work with a lot of clients who sometimes need advice for unconventional problems. We’re not experts in all domains, so sometimes a specific problem may stump us as well. AI has helped find a lot of answers that we can then tweak to apply to our clients.

What’s one common misconception about AI and productivity that you’ve encountered, and how do you address it?

I think the most common misconception about AI is that it will make people redundant by taking over jobs. The fact is, if used correctly and resourcefully, AI can help people develop new skills and build on their career paths in stronger ways.

How do you approach the balance between AI integration and maintaining human creativity and problem-solving skills in your work?

I think it’s important for me and my team to remember that AI is a supplement to productivity and accountability techniques, and so we should only rely on it for as much as we need. AI can tell our clients how to organize their schedule, for example, but it cannot keep an eye on them and make sure they’re following the schedule properly. We cannot allow ourselves to delegate all the work to AI and forget why our clients signed up in the first place—because they need the human touch.

What advice would you give to professionals who are hesitant about incorporating AI into their productivity workflows?

Like with everything else, start small. AI has a lot of applications, but that does not mean you have to integrate all of them at the same time. Try using the technology for one small aspect, see if it works for you, then ramp it up. And if you decide it’s not for you yet, that’s okay. Keep yourselves apprised of the different AI innovations and models that come up, and you may soon find one that is applicable.

Looking ahead, what emerging AI trend do you believe will have the biggest impact on workplace productivity in the next five years?

There is now a tendency to outsource entire departments to AI, especially customer service and client management. Of course, this will affect jobs. But more so, it may make client retention a challenge, because people are not always satisfied with what AI tells them.