Your first hour with AI

Step 1: Open it up (5 minutes)

Go to chatgpt.com or claude.ai and sign in (a Google account will do). A box appears and you type into it. It is free. That is all there is to it - no installing, no setup.

Step 2: Five tasks that help right away

Copy these lines, fill in the square brackets with your own, and send:

• Email: "Write a polite reply to this email: [paste email]."
• Summary: "Summarise this text into five bullet points: [paste text or attachment]."
• Ideas: "Come up with 10 Instagram post ideas for my [industry] business in [city]."
• Translation: "Translate and tidy this text into proper English: [paste text]."
• Explanation: "Explain [difficult topic] to me as if I were hearing about it for the first time."

Step 3: Do not settle for the first answer

This is half the battle. The answer is not a final version, it is a draft. Feel free to type "shorter", "more formal", "add a concrete example", "this sounds too much like an advert" and the AI redoes it on the spot. Enjoy the back and forth, like talking to a colleague.

What you just proved to yourself

In one hour you wrote an email, summarised a document, came up with a month of content and translated a text. That is easily half a day's work off your plate.

The fastest way to learn AI is not reading about it. It is opening the box and typing. The first hour will teach you more than ten articles.