In short
Seven steps that take you from never having used AI to having built one small thing of your own. Each step has an outcome, a time estimate and three actions you can do today with a free account. Work down the list in order and it takes about five hours in total.
Key points
- Seven steps, roughly five hours, spread over as long as you like.
- Everything here works on a free ChatGPT or Claude account.
- Every step ends with something you did, not something you read.
- Do them in order. Step 4 will not make sense before step 2.
Before you begin
Pick one tool and stay with it for a fortnight. ChatGPT or Claude, either is fine. The free tier of either is enough for everything below. Switching tools while you are still learning makes you compare interfaces instead of building skill.
You do not need to be technical. Nothing here involves code, an API or a credit card.
Step 1 - Understand what it actually is
After this you can explain, in one sentence, why AI makes things up. About 10 minutes.
An AI assistant is not looking anything up. It predicts likely text, one piece at a time, based on patterns learned from an enormous amount of writing. That single fact explains almost everything else: why it sounds confident when it is wrong, why it can be brilliant at rephrasing and unreliable at facts, and why the same question can produce two different answers.
- Ask an assistant: "Explain how you generate an answer, as if I were five."
- Ask the same question twice in two separate chats and compare the wording.
- Ask it something obscure about your own town and check one detail yourself.
Practice: notice, this week, one moment where it stated something confidently that turned out to be wrong. That instinct is the most valuable thing on this page.
Step 2 - Have your first real conversation
After this you have used AI for something that actually mattered. About 15 minutes.
Not a test question. A real task from today.
- Paste in an email you received and ask for a three-line summary.
- Ask it to draft a reply in your own tone, then tell it what is wrong with the draft.
- Ask it to explain something from your job that you have never fully understood.
Practice: do one real task with it every day this week, however small.
Step 3 - Learn to talk to it properly
After this your prompts include context, examples and a role. About 30 minutes.
Most disappointing results are underspecified requests. Treat it like a capable new colleague who knows nothing about your situation. Five things make almost all the difference:
- Identity - who it should act as
- World - the situation, audience and background
- Task - the one outcome you want
- Examples - what a good answer looks like
- Constraints - length, tone, format, and what to avoid
- Take a prompt that disappointed you and rewrite it with all five.
- Add "Before answering, tell me what context you are missing."
- Ask for three versions at different lengths and see which you prefer.
Practice: never accept the first answer. Name one specific gap and ask for one revision.
Step 4 - Put it to work
After this you know the five jobs it is genuinely good at. About an hour.
Summarise, draft, rewrite, extract, explain. That is the honest list. It is excellent at all five and unreliable outside them.
- Summarise a long document you have been avoiding.
- Extract every date, name and action item from a messy set of notes.
- Rewrite something you wrote for a different audience.
Practice: for one week, before starting any writing task, ask whether it is one of the five.
Step 5 - Learn when it is wrong
After this you can verify a claim in two minutes, and you know what never to paste. About 20 minutes.
This is the step that separates people who use AI well from people who get embarrassed by it.
- Ask for five statistics on a topic you know well, then check each one.
- Ask it to argue against something it just told you, and watch how readily it folds.
- Find your tool's data controls and decide, deliberately, what you are comfortable with.
Never paste: customer personal data, anything under NDA, credentials, unreleased financials, or anything you would not want to read back to your client.
Practice: any number, name or quotation you plan to publish gets checked at the source. Always.
Step 6 - Go beyond the chat box
After this you can give it your own documents and save your preferences. About 45 minutes.
- Upload a PDF or spreadsheet and ask questions about it rather than about the world.
- Set your custom instructions so you stop re-explaining who you are in every chat.
- Create a project or a saved space for one recurring piece of work.
Practice: move one recurring task into a saved project this week.
Step 7 - Build one small thing
After this you have made something reusable, and the whole point lands. About two hours.
Pick one task you do most weeks. Build an assistant that does it, with your instructions, your examples and your reference documents. It does not need to be clever. It needs to be yours, and it needs to work twice.
- Write down the task, the inputs and what a good output looks like.
- Build it as a custom assistant or project, with two or three examples.
- Run it on a real task next week. Fix the one thing that annoyed you.
Practice: if you use it three weeks running, it was worth building. If not, that is useful information too, and it cost you an afternoon.
What comes after this
You now know how to use AI. The natural next question, if you have a website or a brand, is the opposite one: how do AI assistants decide what to say about you?
That is the subject of the rest of this course, and Getting found by AI is where it starts.
FAQ
Where should I start with AI? With one tool and one real task, not with research about which tool to use. Open ChatGPT or Claude, paste in something you are actually working on, and ask it for help. Step 2 above takes fifteen minutes and is worth more than a week of reading comparisons.
How long does it take to learn AI? Enough to be useful at work: about five hours across the seven steps above, best spread over two or three weeks so each habit has time to stick. There is no end state, but there is a point about a month in where it stops feeling novel and starts feeling like a tool.
Do I need to pay for AI to learn it? No. Every step on this page works on a free ChatGPT or Claude account. Paid tiers give more usage and faster models, which matters once AI is part of your daily work, not while you are learning.
Which AI tool should a beginner use? ChatGPT or Claude. Either. Pick one and stay with it for a fortnight, because switching while you are still learning means you compare interfaces instead of building skill.
Do I need to be technical? No. Nothing on this page involves code, an API or a credit card. The skill being learned is describing what you want precisely, which is a writing skill rather than a technical one.
What should I do after these seven steps? Learn how AI systems decide what to say about your brand or website. That is the subject of the rest of this course, beginning with Getting found by AI.
- First published.