Practical AI for Managers

This course is for anyone with direct reports who is being asked, from above and from below, what the team should be doing about AI. You do not need to be the expert on your team. You need to set the frame, model the habit, and keep the judgment calls where they belong.

What it is

Six short lessons, each built around a job you already do: sorting your week, preparing for one-on-ones, writing things that land, setting norms, holding a routine. Every lesson has real prompt text you can copy, a worked example you can follow line by line, and a fifteen-to-twenty-minute exercise on your own team and your own calendar that ends with a result you can check.

What it is not

It is not a tour of products or a case for replacing anyone. It is not a policy document you forward and forget. The whole point is to hand the machine the parts of managing that were never the managing, so more of you is left for the parts that are: the conversations, the decisions, the standing up for people.

What you need

• One AI assistant you are allowed to use. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot — whichever your organisation permits. A free tier is enough for everything here. Lesson 2 helps you choose; do not open four of them.
• An answer on what your organisation allows. Which tools are approved and what may never be pasted into them. If nobody has told you, ask your manager and your IT or security contact today — it usually takes a day to come back, and you need it before lesson 2.
• Last week's calendar and sent mail. Lesson 1 sorts your actual week, not a remembered one.
• A private notes file, and one file per direct report. Somewhere you control. The course builds a small kit across these files; without them each lesson evaporates on contact with a busy Tuesday.
• Three real pieces of work you owe someone — an update, a decision nobody wrote down, a message you have been avoiding. Lessons 2 and 4 use them as the exercise.
• About three and a half hours in total, in blocks of thirty to forty minutes, plus one hour with your whole team for lesson 5. Book that hour now; it is the only part that needs other people's calendars.

How to work through it

In order, one lesson a day if you can, and not more than two in a sitting. The lessons compound: lesson 1 produces the sorted list that lesson 2 runs through your context block, lesson 2 produces the context block that every later prompt assumes, lesson 3 produces the per-person notes files, lesson 5 produces the agreement, and lesson 6 puts all of it in a calendar. Skipping lesson 2 breaks the four that follow.

Keep three things open while you work: the lesson, your chosen assistant, and your private notes file. Every lesson ends with a Do this now exercise of fifteen to twenty minutes on your own material, and a line beginning You are done when that names what should exist in one of those files before you move on. If it does not exist, do not move on — reading the next lesson instead is how this becomes six articles you once read.

Keep your prompts in the notes file, not in your chat history. Chat histories are unsearchable within a fortnight and disappear when you change tools; a plain file of prompts you have actually tuned is the asset you keep. Paste each prompt in before you run it, and edit it in the file afterwards when you find the sentence that fixes it.

The toolkit page is the after. It holds every prompt from the course in finished form, the templates whole rather than described, and the routine compressed to something you can read before a meeting. Do not start there — the lessons explain which prompt is for which job, and the most common failure is a good prompt used for the wrong one. Once you have finished, the toolkit is the only page you need to keep.