AI in 60 Minutes — Your First Real Workflow · Lesson 1 of 6
Lesson 1 — What AI actually does for your business
10 minutes. Read it, then we move.
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Here's the trick most AI marketing skips: AI is not a feature. It's a different kind of employee.
Specifically — AI is the employee who can:
- Read. A document, an email, a transcript, a screenshot, a PDF. Quickly.
- Write. A draft email, a follow-up, a summary, a policy, a list, a report.
- Sort. Customer emails by topic. Tickets by urgency. Resumes by fit.
- Compare. Two contracts. Three vendors. Your invoice history this month vs. last.
- Explain. What this jargon-y document is actually saying. In plain English.
- Translate. Across languages. Or across audiences — turning a technical doc into a customer-friendly one.
That's the list. Everything else is a combination of those six things.
What AI is not good at (yet, in a one-hour-of-your-time way):
- Doing things in your other software for you. It can write the email but doesn't send it. It can analyze the invoice but doesn't post it. (Those are agents — that's a different course.)
- Knowing what you don't tell it. AI doesn't know your customer list. Doesn't know your prices. Doesn't know what you said last Tuesday. You have to put the context in.
- Promising it's correct. AI can be confidently wrong. Anything customer-facing or legally-binding needs a human eyeball before send.
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When you think about putting AI to work in your business, ask one question:
> "What's a piece of reading, writing, sorting, comparing, explaining, or translating that I do over and over?"
Not "should I use AI for accounting?" That's too big.
Try: "What's a piece of reading I do every Monday morning?" → Maybe you read every email that came in over the weekend, sort it by priority, and reply to the urgent ones.
That's the workflow. AI can read every email, sort it by priority, and draft replies. You review and send. You just saved Monday morning.
Or: "What's a piece of writing I do over and over?" → Maybe you write a quote response email every time someone fills out the form on your website. Same shape, different details every time.
That's the workflow. AI can take the form data and draft the quote response in your voice. You review and send. You just made every quote response take 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.
In Lesson 4 you'll build one workflow exactly like this. We'll pick something small — small enough that it fits in fifteen minutes — and you'll have it running by the end of the hour.
But first, in Lesson 2: pick your tool. Three good options. We'll move fast.
→ Lesson 2 — Pick your tool