AI At Work Academy: Prerecorded Lesson

I'm going to do a pre recorded lesson.

I'm going to be going live on LinkedIn, inside my school community on meetup.com and I'm going to also do these pre recorded lessons of what I typically teach to my students across these different platforms.

So without further ado I'm going to jump in.

This will be about a half hour, and we will go from there.

So now.

I'm going to run through this deck.

Normally I do these for about an hour where I'll do a 30 minute Q& A.

So if you're watching the pre recording, definitely come to the live versions.

Because the live versions you can ask questions.

I can learn more about you, your role at your company and give you specific recommendations on how to use AI at work to save time, be more productive and yeah, automate some manual tasks, maybe make your life a little easier, less headaches at work.

so as I go through as well, at any point you're going to see on most of the slides I have a QR code here.

If you take your phone and you scan it, that's going to take you right to my free school community.

And this is essentially if Facebook groups and YouTube had a kid that's school, if you haven't heard of it, where I have a bunch of video tutorials on how to set up your AI agents and use them for work.

So if you do join, which I recommend you do, the community is where you can ask questions where I answer directly or people in my community do.

The classroom is where you can access the video modules.

When you click on them.

I'll have a bunch of prerecorded videos.

For example, if you want to set up ChatGPT or Claude Microsoft cowork, you could watch a bunch of videos on how to use it.

I also go live within the school community.

These are usually more office hour open Q and A and I'll get super in the weeds with my members.

And again all of this is completely free at the time of recording, so definitely join.

as of recording we're at 21 members and growing, which is awesome.

So again that's what the QR code does.

I'm going to go ahead and hit share here.

So really what I'm going to talk about today is turning your AI agents or your AI that you use, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or Google, Gemini or Grok, whatever AI you're using, how to turn it into a useful agent that becomes almost a coworker for you or a digital clone or an entity that lives on your computer that can get work done for you on your behalf.

That by definition is what an AI agent is.

And I'm going to show you how you can say five to 10 hours per week, be more productive, and doing less repetitive tasks.

So again I'm going to jump into a about a 15 minute, 20 minute presentation here, maybe less.

And then I'm going to go into a live demo to show you actually how I set up by agent so you can go and do the same.

a little bit about me.

I've been in business as a business consultant for the better part of 15 years.

I've worked inside over 100 organizations and I've worked with hundreds of business professionals, either as a consultant, running my own business or even as an employee of one.

So I've worked with a ton of salespeople, marketers, engineers, primarily customer facing individuals who get bogged down by meetings and email, client work and more.

So I'm not an engineer and I don't know how to write a single line of code.

So all of this AI, you hear I'm not going to teach you how to like build the apps and code or it's just not technical like this.

This is for everyday knowledge workers.

So again meetings, emails, if you're building slide decks, you're in Excel, you're crunch numbers, you're doing research on the Internet, you're meeting with your boss or you manage a department.

That's the world that I live in that I have a very specific skill set for how to use AI agents to just make the work that you do a lot better.

So running into it, yeah, I'm also a professional public speaker within the Visage community.

And at this point, you know I have AI expert here.

I've been using ChatGPT since it came out in 2022.

Probably logged close to 10,000 hours using this point.

So everything I've learned is I'm here to teach you this essentially for free.

And yeah, that way you don't have to go in and spend 10,000 hours doing it yourself.

And then finally, last thing, if you find anything in this video useful, please either join my community, let your friends, colleagues, coworkers, your boss know to join these free Resources and if your company, you know, needs help implementing an AI agent or multiple AI agents.

It's what I do in my professional career.

So reach out to me if you have questions around that.

So jumping in, what I want you to think about is, you know, first the question I like to ask is why should you use AI at work in the first place?

You might already be using it to draft some emails or you use it like a Google, I mean chat GBT has a billion users at this point, so you've probably used it to like ask medical questions or Google things like who's winning the World cup, things like that.

But I want to make the case for why you should use AI at work.

And I want you to think about the time suckers, right?

Like what are the time suckers that you have for knowledge work?

So I really want you to think about that.

I'll go first with some of mine.

Email, I'm bogged down by email all the time.

I have multiple clients I'm juggling.

I do sales for my business as well.

So I'll usually start the day and I'll have like dozens of emails to reply to or I'll be in meetings all day and then I come back at the end of the and I have a ton of emails to read and think and type it and send it.

and that also brings up meetings.

I have a very meeting heavy schedule.

So having to hop on meetings, the prep work for a meeting and the admin work after the meeting can at least it used to really bog me down.

So as you're thinking about the things that bog you down, here are a couple that I hear all the time from my clients.

Meetings, note taking, retrieving notes or data.

So if your company, Data lives in SharePoint or OneDrive or Google Drive and you have you have multiple softwares you have to log into like a CRM.

It takes time to log in and retrieve data and analyze it.

writing emails, writing teams or Slack messages to people, checking email, copy and paste work, you know, travel time, because when you're traveling and if you don't have access to the Internet, you miss meetings and your to do list piles up.

So these are things that I hear all the time.

Now again, if you're watching this, you're on a scale of 1 through 10.

I want you to think about where you're at with AI, a 1 is I've never heard of AI, which at this point you're watching this probably are not a one, but a three or a four is like I use chat, GPT or Claude.

I have it draft some emails, I have it research some stuff.

I have it crunch some numbers.

I'd say that's a three or four or a ten is.

Hey, Michael, sit down.

I'm going to run this presentation and you're going to learn something from me.

And if you're a 10, by the way, I would love to Collab.

so 10 is because we are now at a place where agents can connect to all of your favorite tools.

And the best way that I can explain to you again why you should be using AI for work, as well as why, this is going to be a game changer for you, your company, your colleagues, and just, your career as well.

So another point too is if you're a business professional, being AI native is going to make you much more marketable, which means you're going to get promotions faster.

You're going to get much larger pay raises and quicker pay raises because you are doing the work of five of your colleagues.

say your competitor has five people with your job title who aren't using AI.

If you use AI half as much as how I'm going to teach you in this lesson, you're way more marketable than all of them, and I'm going to show you why in a second.

Now, I don't know, you know, the, the age of people watching this.

But for those of you who are around when the first iPhone came out in 20 in 2006, I was, the iPhone was not a smartphone.

It was a giant dumb phone with a big touchscreen.

That was it.

Do you guys remember why the iPhone became a smartphone?

Well, it's because the App Store came out, and then Google Android came out and the Google Play Store came out.

And that allowed us to take our phones and connect to all these different apps.

All of a sudden I can check my email, I can log into my bank account, I can, search the Internet.

I can.

You know, there's millions and gazillion apps on the App Store for all your use cases, my journaling, my note takers, everything, right?

games you play.

So all of a sudden, this device became the most important device in history.

And AI is having their moment here.

So if we look here, you can now connect your AI agent To your email, to your messages, to your, call recording software, to your sales intelligence or CRM, and so many more.

There's hundreds and hundreds of apps coming out every day.

And the powerful thing, because remember, an AI agent by definition is a system that can get work done for you on your behalf.

Imagine if it can access your email and do things for you, right?

help you save time, start projects.

And there's just so much that it could do, which I'll show you in a, in a little bit.

Now, one of the other, amazing things with AI agents that I love is you can teach them skills the same way that humans can learn skills.

I don't know if you remember when you first learned how to ride a bike.

I'm assuming you can ride a bike.

If you can't, sorry, but this is the process.

You basically get on a bike, you have training wheels, and you learn to pedal and steer with your hands.

You eventually take those training wheels off, and the first time that happens, you're probably going to topple over.

But then you try it again and again and again.

And after a certain amount of times, all of a sudden you were able to ride a bike.

And it's not really a skill you forget, right?

Like, I know I haven't been on a bike in like a decade and I'm pretty sure I can get on a bike and maybe I'd stumble a bit, but I I would pick it up quicker than I did before.

AI agents can also learn skills.

So let's say that you're in sales and you have to put together custom scopes of work to present your product and services to a prospect.

You can teach your agent the skill of how to put together an sow that makes perfect sense for you and your company.

And it, writes in your style that way.

You say, access this skill, write the sow, and then draft the email that I'm going to send to a client.

you might be in, in marketing and I need you to create on brand material.

You can give it a skill of your, your brand assets.

you might be an engineer who has to analyze a bunch of data and schematics within, spreadsheets and PowerPoints.

And the AI can analyze a lot of that data for you, give you insights, so it can work with you as a colleague.

So regardless of your role, skills are another amazing, powerful, feature of these AI agents that have really, at the time of recording, we're in early July 2026.

This has only really Been a thing for a couple of months at this point.

So if you're watching this, you're right at the forefront of this, technology.

And yeah, what I love about AI is it can give you your time back.

So some of my clients are saving around 10 hours per week.

I'm at about 15 hours per week on manual tasks.

And to, really help you conceptualize this, I'll just use myself as an example.

My work is very meeting heavy.

Like I get on anywhere from 30 to 50 meetings a week and it can be a lot.

It used to take me, I don't know, five, ten minutes to prep for each meeting.

I would take notes on the meeting and then after the meeting I would have to log my notes in a, CRM or in Google Drive or I'd have to open up my to do list or take notes.

And that was another five, 10 minutes multiplied by 50 meetings.

That's hours and hours and hours of work.

AI has streamlined and automated that entire process for me.

you might be bogged down in email.

Maybe you're a customer success manager or an account manager and you're getting 300, 400 emails a day.

Well, AI can read all of your emails on a scheduled cadence.

It could draft a reply in your style and voice because you could teach it a skill of how to write like you.

And that right there can save you hours.

And there's all these different ways that I see my clients using AI which just blow my mind every day.

so a couple of first workflows that I want you to think about and I'm going to run a demo on one of these.

There are morning briefings.

So any unread emails or meetings or you know, if your company's in Slack or Microsoft Teams, you message your colleagues all the time, unread messages and drafting, putting a draft together of them.

That could be a morning briefing.

There can be an end of day reports that you send yourself.

Think of an executive assistant.

They will help a worker do their work and then send them an end of day report.

Here's everything that I got done.

Here's what you got done.

Here's your, your meetings for tomorrow.

so there's a lot that you could do there.

you can organize a to do list.

You can prep for every single one of your meetings.

I personally love this one.

You could build knowledge work if you're still building PowerPoints and slide decks and Word docs and Google Docs all on your own.

AI can, I'd say do 80, 90% of it and I, you know, don't have it do 100% of it.

But 80% is going to save you a lot of time and make you more productive.

And at this point AI built way better slide decks than I do, or research brief.

So these are a couple of workflows.

So I'm going to run through a live demo now and just show you my setup.

So I'm going to come over here and this right here is ChatGPT Codex probably looks familiar.

If you've used ChatGPT, this is just Codex, which is the AI agent version of ChatGPT.

If any of that confuses you, again, if you join my free school community, I have an entire video series on how to set this up.

Now what I'm going to do is show you how I'm able to have this little iPhone moment with my agents.

On the left hand side you have really this sidebar that I can minimize and maximize.

You have this chat area in the middle and if I type anything and hit enter, there's like another pan on the right.

That's just how the UI or user interface is.

But the first thing I like to do is go to plugins.

Plugins are the third party apps that allow your AI agent to connect to.

So I want you to you know, if you have codecs, I want you to think about what you use for your everyday work.

are you a Microsoft 365 person or company?

Because if so you're going to want to connect your Outlook calendar, your Outlook mail, email and your calendar.

Right?

if you're in sales connect the sales one.

if you do all your messaging in Microsoft Teams, use that.

If you're in Slack, use Slack.

So start to look up all the different plugins.

There are a ton of them and if you use any of these, connect it.

I personally record all my calls with Zoom, so being able to have the transcript and AI notes is really powerful.

So those are some plugins that you want to make sure that you're attached to.

Now you can see on the left hand side here I have these pinned threads and threads are essentially chats like this.

I have a morning report and an end of day report.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to build a new morning report and I'm going to show you how I do it.

You might Think, Michael's going to have this, you know, complicated or convoluted prompt.

But no, I actually just yap at AI and it's smart enough to pick up on what I'm saying the same way a human is, it can understand context and nuance.

So let me show you what I mean by that.

I'm going to hit new chat.

I'm going to come into here and I'm going to Please build me a morning report.

By the way, I use a voice to text because it is much quicker than typing.

I use a software called Whisper Flow for that.

it's as a free tier and a paid tier, but if you don't want to use that, you could actually click to dictate to hold, which is already built into Codex.

So that's if you, if you're wondering, why I'm talking and it's the text is just appearing here.

So please build me a morning report.

I want the morning report to scan my email so it finds any unread emails that came in over the last day.

I want it to summarize each email.

I want it to draft a response in my tone.

So make sure you reference my humanizer skill.

I then want you to check my calendar and let me know all the meetings I have coming up for the day.

Give, like a, maybe a bullet point or two just to help me prepare for that meeting.

I want you to scan Microsoft Teams, see if I have any threads from colleagues, co workers or clients.

Anything unread in there.

If there's nothing unread, just say there's nothing unread.

And then also check my to do list.

and let me know if I have any outstanding to do list items that I should get started on and when I should start on them today based on my schedule.

And I want you to send this to me every single day at 7am and I also want you to check at noon and again at 4:30pm for any unread, emails.

So I'm going to hit go.

Okay, so I know I just said a lot there and feel free to rewind or pause or go back and listen to that again.

But what this essentially going to do, if I were to hit enter here, it would get to work and build me a scheduled automation and a morning report.

because it would, it would basically send to me at 7am every day.

If I wanted to email this to myself, I could also email it to myself as well.

I'm Personally in Codex every day.

So I know that my morning report and end of day report gets updated every single day.

But this is my morning brief.

every single day it gives me high level read.

It tells me what calls I have on the calendar, it tells me an agenda, emails, and the draft client work, what to check at the end of day.

And this is just a really important part of my day now.

It used to take me like a half hour every morning I'd be on my phone email and calendar and Microsoft Teams.

And this is just super helpful.

I have one at the beginning of the day and one at the end of the day.

So that is one example.

again when I do these live, this is usually where I'll go into more of the Q and A, answer questions or just get more in the weeds based on your use case.

But that is one use case that I use.

I also have a ton of projects over here which are essentially folders.

I've got client folders, I've got project folders and within each folder I've got a bunch of chats that look like this.

And each project has memory and context of each of my clients.

Because what each of these projects does is it points to a folder on my computer in my documents.

you know, say one of these projects, I have all of this context.

I have instructions on how to read certain files, references, source maps, I've got outputs so it can scan all the different work I've put together.

I've got my brand kit in here so there's so much you can do.

And I'm not going to get too much into the weeds because I don't want to overwhelm you.

But that's essentially a kind of a sneak peek into how I use AI agents and how you should be setting step two.

Now you might be asking, you know, before I wrap this up let me actually go here to the last slide again.

Scan the QR code.

I highly recommend joining my school community because the main questions that I hear every day are compiled in the Start Here section.

So after how to navigate the community.

Like why you should learn AI at work, what's actually possible?

Data security, safety and compliance.

So if you work for maybe a larger firm who has, you know, firewalls and an IT department, and it's like, is this even safe to use?

I answer all of that here.

How much will this cost?

Which AI models should I pick?

So I answer all the most common questions you might be thinking right now here in the community.

So hope to see you inside.

Hope you found this helpful.

And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.

QR code is everywhere.

inside.

Thanks.