Back to AI school
The kids are back at school. The holidays are over. And professional services has returned to its traditional September pastime:
“Have a good summer? Go anywhere nice?”
This year, I think there’s a much more interesting question:
“What did you learn about AI over the summer?”
What did you try? What actually worked? Which prompts did you steal? And, crucially, what are you going to do differently as a result?
AI has moved on rather a lot while some of us have been lying next to a swimming pool drinking something with an umbrella in it.
So, pencils sharpened. New shoes polished. Here are three bits of homework for the autumn term.
Enjoy.
#1. Meet your new teaching assistant
Most people are still approaching AI by asking: “What can it do?”
I think the better question is: “What am I still doing that it could help me with?”
Start with the obvious stuff.
Could Copilot help prioritise the carnage that is your post-summer inbox? Could AI research what has happened to your key clients while you’ve been away? Could it look back over last year’s matters and identify people you haven’t spoken to since?
But don’t just think about AI as something that does things for you. Use it as a sounding board.
I use the voice function in ChatGPT a lot for exactly this. If I’m thinking about a new business proposition, campaign or strategy, I’ll talk it through rather than sit staring at a blank document.
I explain what I’m trying to achieve, what I already know, where I’m unsure and some of the half-baked ideas rattling around my head. It questions me, challenges the gaps and helps turn the conversation into something resembling a plan.
For example, talk through your objectives for a key client and get AI to help structure an engagement strategy between now and Christmas.
It’s less “write me a business plan” and more “help me think this through”.
That, for me, is one of AI’s most useful applications. Not replacing the thinking, but giving you someone to bounce it off. Someone who never gets bored, never needs coffee and is annoyingly available at 10pm.
Your homework: Pick one recurring task or thinking exercise this week and try doing it with AI alongside you.
#2. Choose your subjects
Currently there’s waaaaaayyyyyyyyy too much AI noise. Every week there’s another model. Another tool. Another LinkedIn post explaining that everything you learned yesterday is now obsolete.
You cannot keep up. So don’t try.
Instead, pick two or three things that actually matter to your job and get really good at using AI for those.
For BD, perhaps that’s client research, meeting preparation and opportunity identification. For marketing, content development, campaign analysis and repurposing. For partners, client preparation, interrogating documents and developing those half-formed ideas.
And when something works, don’t chuck the prompt into a folder called “Useful AI stuff” that you’ll never open again.
Spend a little extra time turning it into a repeatable workflow:
Input → prompt → output → human review.
That’s when experimenting starts becoming productivity.
Your homework: Choose your three AI subjects for this term. Ignore the rest until you’ve got good at them.
#3. Do some show and tell
Remember show and tell when you were growing up? Someone brought in a fossil. Someone else brought in a hamster. There was always one child whose parents had clearly done 95% of the work.
We need a professional services version for AI.
Instead of asking colleagues where they went on holiday, ask:
“What’s the best thing you learned about AI this summer?”
Not theory. Something useful.
A prompt. A tool. A workflow. A better way of researching a client or preparing for a pitch. Something that saved them 30 minutes doing a job everyone else is still doing manually.
Then steal it.
One of the biggest AI opportunities for firms isn’t necessarily buying more technology. It’s sharing what their people have already discovered.
Someone sitting three desks away may have found a brilliant way of using an approved AI tool that could save the rest of the team hours.
Your homework: At your next team meeting, give everyone two minutes of AI show and tell.
One thing they tried. One thing that worked. One thing everyone else can steal.
Chat to Tina by voice, when you’re between meetings, on the commute to/from work, or heading into something you’d rather avoid.
Final thought
At school, the people who did best weren’t always the cleverest.
They were often the ones who did the homework, practised and shared notes with their mates.
AI isn’t that different.
You don’t need to master every tool or become the office AI guru. Just get into the habit of trying things, keeping what works and learning from the people around you.
Right. Summer’s over. Back to school.
We’re building a team of voice enabled AI assistants to support you with BD activities and allow you to spend more time being human. Interested? We’d love to chat.
