Welcome
Before we touch any tools, let's set realistic expectations. AI is extraordinary at some tasks and surprisingly bad at others. Knowing the difference saves you hours of frustration.
The one-sentence rule
If a task would take a smart intern 10 minutes of reading to do, AI can probably do it well. If it requires judgement based on your specific business context, AI needs you to supply that context.
Three things AI is genuinely great at
- Transforming text — summarising, translating, rewriting in a different tone.
- Drafting from structure — emails, proposals, blog outlines when you give it the bullet points.
- Extracting structured data — pulling key facts out of messy documents.
Three things AI is surprisingly bad at
- Current events — models have a knowledge cutoff; they don't know what happened yesterday.
- Arithmetic at scale — calculators are more reliable for anything beyond basic maths.
- Making decisions without context — 'should I hire this person?' isn't a valid AI question on its own.
Never trust AI output on legal, medical, or financial matters without expert review. It sounds confident whether it's right or wrong.