Journey · Small business owner · 1 day
What you get out of the day
You arrive with one chore that comes back every week: answering the same customer questions, writing quotes, sorting invoices, drafting posts. You leave with a routine that does most of it, checked on five of your own past examples, and a note an employee could follow. Next Monday you run it on real work and count the minutes you save.
Think of someone who runs a bakery and spends three hours a week answering catering requests. By the end of the day she has a saved prompt that drafts each reply from her price list, a checklist for what she must check before sending, and a number to test next week: how long the chore takes now.
Who this is for
You run a small business: a shop, a practice, a trade, an agency or a café. You have used a chatbot. You don't need to know anything about technology, and you won't open a terminal.
You bring:
- One weekly chore that takes at least an hour and follows roughly the same steps each time.
- Five past examples of it, such as five customer requests with the replies you sent, or five quotes. Remove names and addresses before the course, or bring them on paper and we'll clean them together.
- The documents the chore depends on, such as your price list, opening hours, terms or product sheet.
One day, one trip round the four quadrants
The day follows the four quadrants from T01-L01 · From Idea to Working Result: The Four-Quadrant Method. Each block of the day is one quadrant.
| The problem | The solution | |
|---|---|---|
| Define | Structure it | Choose tools |
| Explore and test | Understand it | Build it |
| Time | Quadrant | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–10:30 | Structure it | Say exactly what the chore is and what may go into an AI tool. |
| 10:45–12:15 | Understand it | Look at your five examples: how you do it today, how long it takes, what goes wrong. |
| 13:15–15:15 | Choose tools | Try the simplest options on your examples, and pick one you can afford. |
| 15:30–17:00 | Build it | Build the routine (a saved prompt or a project), check every result, and write the note for your staff. |
Breaks: 15 minutes mid-morning, an hour for lunch and 15 minutes mid-afternoon. You work in pairs, each on your own chore. Your partner checks your results, and you check theirs. The course runs with up to 12 people per trainer.
09:00 Structure it: what exactly is the chore?
| What you do | Read |
|---|---|
| Write the chore as one sentence: what comes in, what goes out, and what "done" looks like. For example: "A catering request comes in by email; a reply with a price and two dates goes out; done means I only check and send." | T01-L01 · From Idea to Working Result: The Four-Quadrant Method |
| Sort everything the chore touches into three colours (see below). | T12-L01 · Decide What You May Paste Into AI at Work |
The three colours:
- Green: already public, like your website, opening hours or published prices. Any tool.
- Yellow: internal but not sensitive, like a reply template or an internal checklist. Only on a business account that comes with a data-protection agreement, for example ChatGPT Business, or Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat signed in with your work account.
- Red: anything about a person, such as customers' names, addresses, orders or health details, plus bank details, contracts and your own cost prices. No online AI tool, unless someone who may decide has cleared this exact use in writing.
Most chores touch red data somewhere. The way around it: the AI works on the text with the names taken out, and you put the names back in yourself at the end.
10:45 Understand it: how do you do it today?
| What you do | Read |
|---|---|
| Lay out your five examples. For each, note how long it took and where it went wrong, such as a wrong price, a forgotten question or a late reply. | — |
| Clean each example: replace names, addresses and order numbers with placeholders like [CUSTOMER]. | T12-L02 · Clean the Copy, Label the Result, Spot the Trap |
| If the chore involves a list or table, check what's in it the way an AI will read it. | T10-L01 · Ask a Spreadsheet a Question and Check Which Rows It Used |
| Rewrite your sentence from 09:00 with what you learned. | — |
The four facts about AI assistants you need before you hand them anything:
- It writes what sounds right.
- It starts every chat from zero.
- It sounds just as sure when it's wrong.
- What you type goes to the provider.
What goes wrong here: you discover the chore is really two chores, for example quick questions and real quotes. Pick the one that costs you more time. That's a good result: a smaller chore is easier to hand over.
13:15 Choose tools: the simplest thing that works
Start at the top of the list and only move down when the step above can't do the job:
- Something you already have. A reply template, a checklist or a spreadsheet formula often does half the chore.
- A saved prompt in a chat assistant. You paste the cleaned request, and it drafts the reply in your style. Read T02-L01 · Get Answers You Can Use from a Chatbot and T03-L01 · Write a Prompt You Can Reuse.
- A project with your documents. The assistant answers from your price list and terms, not from the internet, and shows where each answer comes from. Read T04-L01 · Ask Your Own Documents and Check Every Citation and T02-L02 · Set Up Projects a Colleague Can Pick Up.
- An automation that runs by itself. Only for chores that come in often, always look the same and contain no personal data, and only if you know how to switch it off. Today the trainer shows one; you build yours later with T05-L01 · Your First Automation: Build It, Break It, Switch It Off.
Today you build option 1, 2 or 3. They fit in an afternoon.
| What you do | Read |
|---|---|
| Try your two best options on the same two examples. Keep the one that gets closest with the least effort. | T16-L01 · Pick the Right Tool for One Task by Trying It |
| Work out what it costs per month, and whether you need a business plan for yellow data. | T16-L02 · Choose Tools Your Team Can Use, and Afford |
Tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot or Langdock as the assistant, Gemini notebooks for answers from your documents, and n8n for the automation demo. DeepL handles customers who write in other languages.
15:30 Build it: a routine you can run on Monday
| Time | What you do | Read |
|---|---|---|
| 15:30–16:30 | Build the routine: the saved prompt or the project. Run it on all five examples. | Your tool's book above |
| 15:30–16:30 | Check every result against what you actually sent: prices, dates, promises, tone. Mark each as fine, fixed or wrong. Your partner checks two of them too. | T01-L02 · Check AI Output Before Your Team Relies on It |
| 16:30–17:00 | Write the note an employee needs to run it without you: where the routine lives, what to paste, what to check before sending. | T02-L02 · Set Up Projects a Colleague Can Pick Up |
| 16:30–17:00 | Time yourself on one example, from request to finished reply. Then write the exit check. | — |
What goes wrong here: four results are fine, and one quotes a price that isn't on your list. That's why a person checks every result before it reaches a customer. Put the price check on your note.
The five-line exit check closes the day:
- Problem: your final Structure it sentence.
- What exploring changed: what the five examples taught you, and how the chore changed.
- Choice: the tool you picked, and why it's the simplest that works.
- Result: how many of the five results were fine, and how long one example takes now.
- Next step: what you'll change after running it on real work next week.
How you pass
There are no points. You pass when all five of these are true:
- The routine runs on all five of your past examples.
- Every result was checked, by you and two by your partner.
- You know the time it takes now, and the monthly cost.
- An employee could run it from your note.
- No red data went into an online AI tool.
What you take home: the routine, your note for staff, your checked examples, the time and cost, and your exit check.
After the day
- Next Monday: run the routine on real work for one week. Count the minutes, and note every result you had to fix.
- When staff use it too: write a one-page rule for them with T13-L03 · Write a One-Page AI Rule Your Team Can Use Without Asking You.
Before the day
- Pick your chore and gather five examples. Clean them if you can; otherwise bring them and we'll clean them together in the morning.
- An account for a chat assistant. A free one is fine for green material. For yellow material you need a business plan, and the course provides trial accounts.
- A laptop. No installation needed.
What this day leaves out
- Chores that need decisions about people, such as hiring or credit.
- Bookkeeping and tax.
- Websites and online shops.
Further reading and tools
All the books in this journey are listed below the course, in the order you meet them.
Rule to remember: hand AI the chore, not the customer's name, and check every result before it leaves the building.