Duration: 1 Day
Time: 8:30am-4:00pm

A Practical One-Day Introduction to Working with AI

Understand the tools, use them with judgement, and know exactly where the risks lie

Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to everyday business tool, but most teams are using it inconsistently. Some staff quietly rely on it for everything, others avoid it entirely, and few are confident about what is safe to put into it. The result is uneven quality, wasted time, and unnecessary risk.

This practical one-day course gives your entire team a shared, working foundation: what AI actually is, what it can and cannot be trusted to do, how to get consistently useful results from it, and how to protect confidential information while doing so. Delegates work hands-on throughout the day on real tasks from their own roles, and leave with practical skills, sound judgement, and an agreed team standard for how AI will be used in your organisation.

Because AI now touches every function, this course delivers the greatest value when the full team attends together (management, administration, finance, sales, and operations) so that everyone leaves working to the same standards and expectations.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Business owners, managers, and supervisors
• Administration, finance, and operations staff
• Sales, marketing, and customer service teams
• Entire departments or teams adopting AI together
• Anyone with little or no previous experience of AI tools - no technical background is required

HOW YOU WILL BENEFIT

• Understand in plain language what AI is, how it works, and why it sometimes gets things wrong
• Write clear instructions that produce accurate, useful, on-brand results the first time
• Apply AI confidently to everyday work: emails, reports, summaries, research, and analysis
• Recognise confidentiality, privacy, and reputational risks before they become incidents
• Verify and correct AI output instead of trusting it at face value
• Identify the tasks in your own role where AI genuinely saves time - and those where it does not
• Agree a practical, shared team standard for responsible AI use
• Leave with a personal 30-day action plan for applying AI to your own work

WHAT WILL BE COVERED

Understanding AI: what it is and how it actually works

• Cutting through the hype: generative AI explained in plain business language
• How AI tools produce their answers, and why they can sound confident but be wrong
• The main tools available and what each one is best suited to
• Recognising the AI features already built into the software your team uses daily

Getting useful results: the fundamentals of prompting

• Structuring an instruction: role, task, context, format, and tone
• Giving the tool your own documents and information to work from
• Refining, correcting, and improving output through follow-up instructions
• Building reusable prompts for the tasks your team repeats every week
• Common mistakes that produce vague, generic, or unusable results

Applying AI to everyday business tasks

• Drafting and improving emails, letters, reports, proposals, and presentations
• Summarising long documents, meeting notes, and email threads into clear actions
• Researching, comparing options, and preparing for meetings and client discussions
• Working with data: analysis, spreadsheet formulas, and simple reporting
• Adapting tone and content for different audiences, including customers and senior leaders

Accuracy, judgement, and verification

• Why AI invents facts, figures, references, and quotes - and how to spot it
• Practical checking routines to apply before AI output leaves your desk
• Understanding bias, outdated information, and the limits of the tool
• Deciding which decisions require human judgement and must never be delegated to AI

Confidentiality, privacy, and responsible use

• What actually happens to the information you enter into a public AI tool
• Protecting client data, employee information, and commercially sensitive material
• Meeting your obligations under POPIA and your own company policies
• Ownership, copyright, and when AI use should be disclosed
• Aligning AI use with company values and professional standards

Building a shared team approach

• Agreeing what your team will and will not use AI for
• Setting simple ground rules that everyone can follow and defend
• Identifying the highest-value opportunities within each function
• Addressing team concerns openly, including job security and over-reliance

Practical work throughout the day

• Hands-on exercises using delegates’ own real work tasks and documents
• Group comparison of instructions and results to see what works and why
• Guided practice in checking, challenging, and correcting AI output
• A closing team session to agree usage standards and individual action plans

 WHAT DELEGATES SHOULD BRING

• Two or three real, routine work tasks they would like to complete faster
• Any templates, reports, or documents they regularly produce