
Dan Patiño
AI Strategy & Innovation at Coderhouse
Artificial Intelligence
How to Use ChatGPT to Be More Productive at Work: A Practical Guide for Non-Techies
Published on
ChatGPT is not just a chatbot for asking questions. For millions of professionals around the world, it's already a daily work tool that saves hours, improves the quality of deliverables, and frees up time for the tasks that really matter. And yet, in LATAM a large part of workers still don't know exactly where to start.
This guide is for you: if you work in marketing, HR, sales, finance, or any non-technical role and want to use ChatGPT to work better, here you'll find the most concrete use cases and how to apply them starting today.
Why use ChatGPT at work?
A study by McKinsey estimated that generative AI can automate between 60% and 70% of knowledge workers' time. It's not about replacing jobs: it's about doing in 20 minutes what previously took 2 hours.
According to OpenAI data, ChatGPT surpassed 300 million weekly active users in 2025, with increasing adoption in corporate teams in Latin America. And according to TechCrunch, that growth was driven mainly by professional use, not recreational. The gap is no longer whether to use it, but who uses it better.
Writing: emails, reports, and documents in minutes
One of the most immediate uses of ChatGPT is professional writing. You can ask it to:
Write a professional email from a draft of yours with loose ideas.
Improve the tone and clarity of a text you already wrote.
Generate an executive summary of a long document you've pasted into the chat.
Create response templates for recurring situations: customer queries, sales follow-ups, internal communications.
Example prompt: "I have to write to a customer who complained about a delay in their order. The tone should be empathetic, professional, and offer a concrete solution. Write the email."
Synthesis of meetings and long documents
If you receive minutes, reports, or long transcripts, ChatGPT can summarize them at a level of detail you define. It's especially useful for:
Summarizing recorded meetings by pasting the transcript into the chat.
Extracting the key points of a contract or technical report without reading it in full.
Generating lists of actions and owners from a meeting's minutes.
Example prompt: "This is the transcript of a team meeting. List the topics discussed, the decisions made, and the next actions with assigned owners."
Data analysis: from spreadsheets to insights in seconds
You don't need to know statistics to analyze data with ChatGPT. You can paste an Excel table, describe what you want to understand, and ask it to identify patterns, detect anomalies, or suggest suitable visualizations.
With the Advanced Data Analysis feature (available in ChatGPT Plus), you can upload files directly and ask it to generate charts, calculate metrics, or clean messy data. For marketing, sales, or finance teams, this is a profound change in the way of reporting results.
Generating reports and presentations
You can use ChatGPT to structure complete reports from scratch. You give it the raw data, the report's objective, and the audience (for example: "executive presentation for the board") and it generates the outline, the titles, and the text of each section.
It also serves to prepare presentations: you can ask it to design the slide structure with the key points. Once you have the script, you use Canva, PowerPoint, or Google Slides to give it visual shape. Speaking of Canva, if you want to combine AI with design without previous experience, see how to do it in the article about Canva with AI to create visual content without being a designer.
Answering queries and customer support
If you're responsible for answering repetitive queries, ChatGPT helps you generate personalized responses from a bank of information that you yourself give it. You can paste your company's FAQ and ask it to respond from there, with the brand's tone and without inventing information.
How to get more out of it: prompting techniques for non-techies
Give it detailed context
The more context you give it, the better it responds. Instead of "Write an email", say: "I'm an account manager at a marketing agency. I'm writing to a customer who has been with us for 6 months to ask them to renew the contract. I want the tone to be warm and oriented toward concrete results."
Ask it to assume a role
You can tell it "Act as a corporate communications specialist" or "Respond as if you were a senior data analyst with experience in retail". This calibrates the level and tone of its responses.
Iterate in the conversation
It's not a single interaction. Ask it to improve, shorten, change the tone, or add concrete examples. ChatGPT remembers the context of the conversation and can keep refining the result until it's exactly the way you need it.
Coderhouse: learn to use AI in your work
If you want to go beyond ChatGPT and understand how to integrate AI into your complete workflow, these Coderhouse courses give you the path:
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Course: to understand how generative AI works, what it can and can't do, and how to make the most of it in real work contexts.
AI Automation Course: to take the use of AI to the next level, automating entire flows with tools like Make and Zapier combined with language models.
Content Creation with AI Course: ideal if you use ChatGPT mainly for writing, content marketing, or professional communication.
Frequently asked questions
Is ChatGPT safe to use with my company's information?
It depends on the version. With free ChatGPT or Plus, OpenAI can use your conversations to improve its models, so it's not advisable to paste confidential or customer data. If you work at a company, consider using ChatGPT Enterprise or a corporate solution with a data privacy agreement.
How much time can you save using ChatGPT at work?
It varies according to the role and frequency of use. In jobs intensive in writing, analysis, or information synthesis, internal company studies report savings of between 2 and 4 hours daily. The key is not the tool but learning to formulate the requests well to get useful responses from the first attempt.
Do you need a paid subscription to use it professionally?
The free version has speed limitations and doesn't include the most advanced features like file analysis or access to the latest models. ChatGPT Plus costs USD 20 monthly and is probably the most accessible productivity investment you can make if you use it regularly in your work.
Can ChatGPT make mistakes?
Yes, and it's important to know it. Language models like ChatGPT can "hallucinate", that is, generate false information with total confidence. That's why any factual data, date, or statistic it generates must be verified before using it in an official document or a client presentation.
Can I use ChatGPT in Spanish for work in LATAM?
Yes, and it works very well. Latin American Spanish is well represented in OpenAI's models. You can ask it to use neutral, Argentine, Mexican, or Colombian vocabulary, and it adapts the tone according to what you need for each audience.

About the author
I'm Dan Patiño, head of AI Strategy & Innovation at Coderhouse. My day-to-day work involves merging the tactical management of e-commerce (CRO, Email Marketing and SEO) with the development of disruptive solutions. I specialize in building internal AI-powered apps to automate tasks and boost innovation within the team. I firmly believe that technology is strategy's best ally. To dive deeper into my professional journey, I'll be waiting for you on my LinkedIn profile.