Three habits, then grow
Pick three habits
Start small: for example, triage your inbox on Monday, turn every meeting into an action list, and tighten any email longer than ten lines before sending. Keep the prompts you use in a note or a Project. After a month, keep what saved time and drop what didn't. Habits beat a library of prompts you never open.
Measure honestly
Time saved drafting can be lost checking and fixing. For two weeks, note roughly how long a task took with AI including the checking, and compare it with doing it yourself. Some jobs will be clearly faster; others won't. Both are useful to know, and the numbers help when your manager asks whether the AI licence is worth it.
Office scams have got better
AI also helps criminals: fluent invoice-change emails, cloned voices of senior staff and fake video calls. In 2024 a worker at the engineering firm Arup in Hong Kong paid out about US$25 million after a video call in which every other participant was a deepfake. Verify payment and bank-detail changes through a known number, every time. Our Spot AI Scams course covers this.
From assistant to agent
The next step is agents: AI that carries out multi-step tasks across your apps, sometimes on a schedule, rather than just answering. ChatGPT Work, Claude Cowork and Copilot's agents are examples. They can save more time and go wrong in bigger ways, so the same rules apply with more force: clear briefs, limited permissions, and checks before anything leaves the building.
Which one task from this course could you try tomorrow morning, and how would you know if it saved time?