you already use AI every day. now use it well.
Everything from training day, in one place you can come back to. Not theory. The moves, the guardrails, and the prompts you'll open Monday. We don't do inspirational. We do useful.
↓ start hereyou were already in the top 1%.
We surveyed all 23 of you before training. The headline: you don't need convincing to use AI. You're already daily users. What you needed was to understand what you're actually using, so you can trust it where it earns trust and catch it where it doesn't. That's what this guide is for.
it's predicting. it isn't searching.
In the survey, 65% of you described AI as "searching the internet." It's a reasonable guess. It's also the single most expensive misunderstanding in the room, so we fix it first.
Tools like Claude and ChatGPT are prediction engines. They learned patterns from an enormous pile of text, and when you ask a question, they predict the most likely next words, one after another. There's no library it walks into and pulls the right book. That's why it's fast, fluent, and sometimes confidently, completely wrong.
Why you care: if you think it's looking things up, you trust it like Google, and you forward its answer to a client without checking. It isn't Google. Treat every answer like a sharp intern's first draft - fast, useful, and in need of a human read before it leaves the building.
great at this. quietly bad at that.
Half of you marked at least one thing AI is quietly terrible at as a strength. No shame - it hides it well. Knowing the line is the whole game.
- First drafts you'll rework anyway
- Summarizing long, boring documents and call notes
- Options when you're stuck: 20 headlines in 20 seconds
- Matching a voice, if you show it real examples
- Explaining something complicated in plain English
- Math you can't verify yourself
- Citing real sources - it will invent them, cleanly
- Remembering past chats perfectly (it doesn't)
- Today's facts without searching - it has a cutoff
- Telling you it's wrong - it won't flinch
Confident isn't correct. The dangerous answer isn't the obviously crazy one. It's the plausible one you don't think to check.
the 30-second safety check.
"What's safe to put in" was the number one thing you asked to learn. Two of you wrote, word for word, "honestly, I'm not sure what's safe here." So here's the whole thing. Before you paste anything in, run these three questions.
Would you hand it to a stranger on the street?
If no, strip the sensitive bits or skip AI for this one.
Does it have a client's name, data, or IP?
If yes, anonymize first. "Client A," "$X," "[name]." Same output, none of the exposure.
Is it approved for the tool you're using?
If unsure, use a paid or company-approved tool only.
Not all tools treat your data the same. This is the part most people skip. Here's what actually happens to what you type:
Free tools
Free ChatGPT and friends may use what you type to train future models. Treat it like posting on a public forum.
Paid plans
ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and similar don't train on your inputs (per policy). Still stored, so still check your org's rules.
Company-approved
Enterprise Copilot and approved org tools keep data inside your walls. The default for anything confidential.
Not sure it's okay? Ask your manager or check the AI policy first. Thirty seconds now beats a very long conversation later. When in doubt: don't paste. Rewrite it first.
own the thinking. delegate the typing.
Several of you worried, rightly, about AI flattening the work. The answer isn't to avoid it. It's to draw a line on purpose. The rule of thumb: if a wrong answer costs the brand or the relationship, you own it. If it's volume or format, hand it off.
- The strategy and positioning
- The core creative idea
- The hard client conversations
- The final "is this on-brand and true?" call
- First drafts and 20 headline variations
- Summarizing research decks and call notes
- Resizing one asset into ten
- SEO, alt text, and formatting
say it like this.
A weak prompt gets a weak answer. The fix is four parts: tell it who to be, give it the context, make a clear ask, and show an example of good. And if you're staring at a blank box, don't. Use meta-prompting - ask AI to write the prompt for you. Tap any card to copy it.
I need to [describe your task in plain English]. Write me a detailed, reusable prompt for this. Ask me any questions you need first, then give me the final prompt.
Act as a calm, confident account lead at a marketing agency. Write a follow-up email to [name], who was interested but went quiet after [stage]. Tone: warm, low-pressure, not salesy. Under 120 words, end with one clear ask. Match this voice - here are two emails I actually liked: [paste two].
Act as a senior strategist. Here is the client brief and our past work: [paste]. Give me three on-strategy campaign directions, each with a one-line hook and why it fits. Then flag anything missing from the brief I should ask the client before we start.
Summarize this for a busy exec who has 60 seconds: [paste]. Give me the one thing that matters, three takeaways, and any risk or red flag I should not miss. Plain language. No filler.
Here are 5 things I wrote that sound like me: [paste]. Describe my voice as a few rules - sentence length, tone, words I use and avoid. From now on, write everything in this project that way unless I say otherwise.
which tool, when.
You don't need all of them. Most days you need two. Here's the job each one is best at, and the one tip that makes it click.
Claude
Long documents, nuanced writing in your real voice, careful reasoning. The one for actual work, not party tricks.
Cowork
Give it a task and your actual files. It reads them, builds the report or the deck, and doesn't send anything until you say so.
ChatGPT
Fast everyday help, images, quick answers. The easiest first stop. Reach for Claude when it's a long doc or your voice matters.
Superwhisper
Tap a key, talk, and the text lands at your cursor in any app. You speak about three times faster than you type.
Otter.ai
Auto-joins your calls, transcribes, and hands you the recap and action items. No more frantic note-taking on a client call.
Lindy
Build AI agents in plain English that handle repetitive work across your apps - drafting, follow-ups, triage. No code.
let it mess up your day. not your life.
Five of you asked for agentic AI in your workflows, so here's the honest version. An agent doesn't just answer - it acts. It reads, decides, and takes steps across your apps on your behalf. That's the power, and the catch.
The catch: an agent reads your instructions and random text it finds on the web the same way. So a hidden instruction on a page can hijack what it does next - that's prompt injection. You don't fix it by trusting the agent more. You fix it by shrinking what it's allowed to touch.
- Summarize meetings and transcripts
- Draft replies and copy (you still hit send)
- Research and competitor scans
- Sort and tag your inbox
- Emailing clients on its own
- Spending money or making purchases
- Posting online as you
- Touching client files or live systems
Give it its own limited login, make it ask before anything risky, and start where the worst case is a wasted hour, not a lost client. You stay the boss.
the words, without the jargon.
You knew the vocabulary in the survey. Here are the definitions you can actually explain to a coworker.
LLM
Large Language Model. The engine behind Claude and ChatGPT. It learned patterns from a huge pile of text and uses them to predict words. There's no database it looks things up in.
Prompt
What you type in. The clearer and more specific, the better the output. Vague question, vague answer. Garbage in, garbage out - it's just polite about it.
Hallucination
When AI states something false with total confidence. Not a switch you can turn off - a side effect of how prediction works. Assume it can happen and check what matters.
Training data
The text it learned from, up to a cutoff date. So it doesn't know last week unless it searches, and it can be wrong or out of date, because the internet is.
Context window
How much it can hold in its head at once - your files, the chat, your instructions. Big, not infinite. Long messy chats make it lose the plot. Start a fresh one.
Agent
AI that doesn't just answer, it does. It takes steps for you across your apps. The most useful, and the one to keep on the shortest leash.
your monday.
This is where most training dies - everyone feels inspired and changes nothing. So don't try to do all of it. Pick one thing, run it for two weeks, and if it works, add a second. Check the box when it's done.
A few of you asked it: do we tell each other when we've used AI? Decide that as a team. A simple "AI-assisted, reviewed by me" goes a long way.