Getting your team started

Four weeks, in order. The order is the part that matters — most businesses do this backwards and then wonder why nothing stuck.

By Nauman Hashmi

Week one: decide the account, not the strategy

Pick one tool and one tier, and pay for it. Nearly every problem in this area starts with staff on personal free accounts, and no policy survives contact with a team that has to buy its own tools.

Which tool depends on the shape of your work — the mapping is here. Which tier depends on what you hold, which is the more important question.

Week two: write one page

Which tools are approved, what never goes in, what gets checked before it leaves, what must be disclosed, who to ask. One page, in your words, at the reading level of your newest casual.

There are templates here. The work is in the never list, because that part has to be specific to your business to mean anything.

Week three: pick three jobs

Not a strategy. Three documents you produce constantly that nobody enjoys writing: the client update, the quote, the report, the chasing email. Boring is correct here — frequency is what makes the return.

Week four: teach the method, then build the setups

Briefing properly, judging output, rejecting the first draft, verifying against the source. Then build the three setups so the method has somewhere to live, with real examples in them.

What failure looks like

An enthusiastic afternoon, a shared document of prompts, and nothing in use three weeks later. The two things that prevent it are a funded account and setups that exist rather than being planned.

What to do about what's already happening

Assume some of your team are already using these tools, because they almost certainly are. Asking without consequence attached produces honest answers and a much better starting point than a ban you can't enforce.

The order that holds a room

Where information goes, then one real job start to finish, then the tool decision, then the setups the team keeps. Prompt technique is somewhere in the middle and it is not the opener — a session that starts there loses half the room in twenty minutes.

The reasoning for each block, and what to leave out entirely, is in the first ninety minutes.

How to tell three weeks later whether it worked

Not with a feedback form, which measures whether people enjoyed themselves. Ask one question instead: which job is now being done differently, and by whom?

One named job, done differently by more than one person, is a successful session. Enthusiasm with no named job is a pleasant afternoon that changed nothing — and it's the most common outcome of AI training generally.

If you'd rather not run it yourself, a half-day workshop is this sequence on your own work.

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See what this looks like for your business. Nine questions, about four minutes, and a plan ordered for your own work. No account, and the full plan is shown before any email is asked for. Build your plan.