Overview
Most people have tried ChatGPT or Claude, gotten one mediocre answer, and quietly gone back to doing everything the old way. The gap between "I tried it once" and "it saves me hours every week" is real skill: knowing what these assistants are good at, how to brief them properly, and how to check their work. That skill is learnable in two days, and it pays back immediately.
This is a hands-on, foundation course. It assumes no technical background and deliberately focuses on a small set of skills that compound rather than touring every feature of every product. The gradient starts with an accurate mental model of what these assistants are, moves to the core skill of asking well, then applies that skill to writing, analysis, and everyday workflows, and finishes with the habits that keep your use safe and consistent. Every module includes a hands-on lab and builds on the one before, and you will work on tasks from your own job throughout.
Who Should Attend
- Knowledge workers in any role who want real productivity gains from AI assistants
- Managers and individual contributors whose work is heavy on writing, email, and documents
- Teams standardizing on ChatGPT or Claude and wanting a shared baseline of skill
Attendees whose organization runs on Microsoft 365 Copilot may prefer Getting Value from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Prerequisites
- None. No technical background is assumed
- Access to ChatGPT or Claude (a free account is fine) and a few real work tasks to practice on
What You Will Learn
- Explain what ChatGPT and Claude can and cannot do, and why they sometimes get things wrong
- Write clear, well-briefed prompts and refine answers through conversation
- Draft, rewrite, and polish emails and documents with an AI assistant
- Use an assistant to summarize, compare, and analyze documents, and verify what it tells you
- Build repeatable AI-assisted workflows for your recurring tasks
- Judge what is safe to share with an AI assistant and follow good usage habits
Course Outline
Day one: the fundamentals of working with an assistant
- Meet Your AI Assistant
- What ChatGPT and Claude actually are, in plain language
- Strengths, limits, and hallucination: why confident answers can still be wrong
- Lab: run the same real work task through ChatGPT and Claude and compare the results
- Asking Well: The Core Skill
- The briefing mindset: goal, context, and the format you want back
- Treating the chat as a working conversation, not a search box
- Lab: take three weak prompts from real tasks and rewrite them until the answers are genuinely useful
- Writing and Editing
- Drafting emails and documents from rough notes
- Rewriting for tone, audience, and length; editing and proofreading
- Lab: take a real document from rough notes to a polished draft with your assistant
Day two: analysis, workflows, and working safely
- Analysis and Working with Documents
- Summarizing long documents and extracting what matters
- First-pass analysis: comparing options, finding themes, spotting gaps
- The verification habit: checking claims before you rely on them
- Lab: analyze a set of documents with your assistant, then verify its key claims
- Everyday Workflows
- Brainstorming, meeting preparation, research first drafts, and learning new topics fast
- Turning one-off wins into repeatable personal workflows
- Lab: build a reusable AI workflow for three recurring tasks from your own job
- Working Safely and Well
- What you should and should not paste into an assistant
- Company policy, confidentiality, and common-sense guardrails
- Lab: judge a set of realistic scenarios as safe or unsafe, then finalize your personal usage habits
Extended Version
The three-day version keeps the same gradient and adds depth and practice:
- Deeper tool features: projects, custom instructions, file uploads, and data analysis
- A role-based workshop day applying the skills to each attendee's specific job
- Writing prompts that hold up over time, connecting to Prompt Writing for Business Users
- A capstone in which each attendee builds, documents, and demonstrates a complete personal AI workflow