Free courses / AI for Small Business / Lesson 1
Where AI helps, and where it costs you
Drafts and summaries, yes. Prices, promises and legal wording, carefully.
It is best at the writing you already do every week. First drafts of replies. Summaries of long emails. Rough plans. Plain-English versions of your own documents. It saves time where the cost of a mistake is small and you will read the result anyway.
It is at its worst where a wrong word costs money: quoted prices, delivery promises, refund policy, anything a customer could hold you to. It does not know your prices or your stock, and it will happily invent both.
So the rule is simple. Let it draft; you decide the facts.
- Drafts and summaries are the safe zone.
- Prices, promises and policy are yours to state.
- Read everything before it reaches a customer.
BEEP / THE MYTH-BUSTER
I will cheerfully draft you forty things before lunch. What I will not do is stand in front of a customer afterwards and explain any of them. That part stays with you.
Try it
List the five messages you write over and over. Mark which are safe to hand over, and which contain a price or a promise somebody could hold you to.
Here are five messages I write over and over: [list them]. For each, say whether handing it over would save real time or just move the work, and what you would need from me.
Then paste it into whichever assistant you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Not sure which? Meet them all.
Progress is saved on this device.
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