AI basics for your business
Your first week with AI: a starter plan for business owners
Five days, twenty minutes a day. A practical plan to see for yourself what AI can do for your business.
6 min read
You don't need a big project to find out what AI can do for your business. Twenty minutes a day for five days will give you an honest picture. This plan assumes a single general-purpose assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot.
Day 1: start safely
Create an account and check the settings straight away. On a personal plan, switch off the setting that uses your conversations to improve the model. If you'll be working with business data, consider a business plan. Decide what you won't enter this week: national register numbers, health data, passwords and confidential customer information.
Then ask a simple question about something you know well. You'll get an immediate feel for how the tool responds.
Day 2: your inbox
Pick three emails you still need to answer. Remove or replace names and sensitive details. Ask for a reply in your own tone, short and friendly. Compare it with what you'd have written. What do you keep, what do you change?
Day 3: a long document
Take a document you've been meaning to read: a report, a draft contract, meeting minutes. Ask for a five-point summary and three questions worth asking. Then read the passages that look most important yourself. Does the summary hold up?
Day 4: create something new
Ask for a first draft of something on your list: a quote, a LinkedIn post, a job advert or a work instruction. Give context: who you are, who it's for and what it needs to achieve. After the first draft, ask for two improvements. Notice how the result gets better as you push.
Day 5: review and one shared rule
Look back on the week. What saved time? What needed heavy editing? What didn't feel right? Based on that, choose one task you'll use AI for from now on. Also set one rule for your team, for example: "Customer data never goes into a free AI tool."
Why this works
You learn most from your own work, not from other people's examples. After five days you'll know where AI helps and where it doesn't, and you can make an informed decision for your team. If you want your staff to learn the same things, a short shared course gives everyone the same foundation and the same ground rules.
Tick off your week
Your answers stay only in this browser.
Prompt to copy
I run a [type of business] and I'm trying AI for the first time this week. Here's an email I need to answer: [paste the email without names or sensitive data]. Write a short, friendly reply in the first person. If you need more information, ask me no more than two questions first.
