Where do you start if you've never used AI?

Use a business account, not a free personal one

A general AI assistant is the easiest first step. It drafts, summarises, rewrites and answers questions, and you type to it like a message. Start on a business or team plan. On a business plan the company owns the account, the terms say what happens to your data, and an administrator you choose can add and remove people.

A free personal account is fine for a first look at something harmless. But it belongs to one person, on ordinary consumer terms, and whatever business information goes in follows that person's settings. Find out whether anyone on your team already uses one, and whose account it is.

Spend a week on your own writing and reading

Give yourself a week on your own tasks before you try anything for the whole business. Use it for the email you have been putting off, a long message or document you need summarised, a job ad, or a rough note you want turned into clear steps. Tell it who the writing is for, what you want and what material to use, and ask it to ask you questions first.

Read everything it gives you before you use it. Notice where it is quick and good, and where it sounds sure but is wrong. That week teaches you how it behaves on your kind of work, which no article can do.

Write a few rules on one page

Never paste passwords or logins into it. Keep private customer information and company secrets out of any tool your business has not approved. Check every number, name and date before you use it, because the tool sounds fluent even when it is wrong. Nothing goes out under your name unread. Rules this short get followed, and you can share them with the team on day one.

Then pick one repeated task

After a week you know what it is good at. Now choose one job in the business that repeats, eats hours and has a clear right answer: the Monday morning inbox, the same reply to the same quote question, the weekly numbers someone assembles by hand. Time it as it is done today, let the tool do the first pass while a person checks every result, and after a few weeks decide whether to keep it, widen it or stop.

What to do this week

Choose a business plan and set up your own account. Use it on one email, one summary and one job ad. Write your rules on one page and share them with the team. Then note the one repeated task you will try next.

If you want help choosing that task, the free Your AI game plan asks six questions about your business and turns the answers into a plan of where to start.