Your first 30 days

Everything in this course points at one plain outcome: pick a tool, on sensible grounds, and actually use it. Here’s the 30-day version of that, broken into four weeks you can follow without overthinking any single day of it.

Week 1: choose

Go back to lesson one’s three questions: what will you actually use it for, what will it cost against the hours it saves, and will it fit where you already work. Pick one general assistant, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, using lesson two as your guide if you’re still torn. Sign up for the free trial or free tier this week, not “sometime soon”. A roofer we spoke to put off choosing for two months waiting for the “right” one to become obvious. It never did. He picked on the Friday he finally sat down and gave it his real jobs for a fortnight, and the jobs told him everything the comparison articles couldn’t.

Week 2: trial on real work

Run your actual tasks through it, not test examples. Draft the emails you’d normally write by hand. Summarise the document you’d normally read slowly with a coffee. Ask it to help price a job the way you already scope one. This is where lesson three’s fast-and-cheap versus slow-and-smart choice starts to matter in practice: notice which setting you reach for on which task, and let that guide you rather than guessing.

Week 3: check it against the four questions

Pull up lesson six’s four questions. What one job does it remove from your week? How many hours a month is that worth? Will you still be using it in three months? Does it fit what you already run? Answer honestly, based on the two weeks you’ve actually had, not how you felt on day one. If it clears the bar, move to week four. If it doesn’t, that’s a useful answer too, not a failure, and it’s worth trying a second tool from lesson two before you write off AI altogether.

Week 4: commit and build the habit

Pay for the tier that gives you the best model, if you haven’t already, and make it part of your actual routine rather than something you remember to open occasionally. Pick one slot from lesson five’s stack, most owners start with the general assistant, and let that be the only thing you commit to for now. Everything else in the stack can wait until this one is a genuine daily habit.

Where to go from here

If you’d rather answer a few quick questions and be handed a starting point instead of working through this alone, our Which AI model should I use? picker does exactly that. And if you want a quick, honest steer on which tool actually suits you before you commit a month to trialling, try our AI tool quiz.

The fastest way to see all of this done properly, on real business tasks rather than slides, is to come and watch it happen. That’s exactly what our regular AI Automation Masterclass in Manchester is for: laptops open, real jobs, plain English, no jargon. Tickets are normally £20. This one’s free, a limited-time offer to launch the series.