📎 This article includes 1 downloadable practice file ↓
In this article
AI tools won’t do your job, but they can take the first draft off your plate for a surprising share of it.
Where AI helps most
| Good at | Examples |
|---|---|
| First drafts | Emails, replies, SOPs, job descriptions |
| Summaries | Long email threads, reports, meeting transcripts |
| Formulas and code | Excel formulas, VBA, Power Query, SQL |
| Cleaning and classifying | Categorising expenses, fixing names, extracting fields |
| Rewriting | Clearer, shorter, more polite, different audience |
Where to be careful
- Exact facts, tax rates, legal points: verify (it can be confidently wrong).
- Decisions about people (hiring, appraisals): human judgement and fairness first.
- Confidential data: only in tools your company approves (Lesson 8).
Which tool
Use what your company provides, often Microsoft 365 Copilot or an enterprise ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude plan, where data isn’t used for training. Free consumer tools are fine for public information and learning.
💡 Treat AI output like a draft from a smart new intern: fast and useful, but you review it before it goes out under your name.
Practice
Do the task-mapping exercise in the worksheet.
📎 Practice files for this article
- 📄Lesson 1 worksheetPrompts and exercises for this lesson.⬇ TXT · 284 B
Free to use for learning. Files with macros (.bas) are plain text — import them with Alt+F11 → File → Import File, and always test on a copy.
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