I've been evangelizing AI across our technology team for a while now. Recently, it's started to spill over into the rest of the organization. Colleagues and friends outside of engineering are asking me how they can use AI in their daily work, how they can automate parts of their workflow, and how they can do things faster and better.
Here's the thing. When I get these questions, all I'm doing is feeding them back into Claude to help me generate responses. I don't have deep knowledge of sales, finance, or creative workflows. But Claude does. That's the whole point.
So instead of trying to give you function-specific advice, I'm going to teach you the process. This is a simple step-by-step guide for getting started with AI and figuring out how to leverage it in your job. This is exactly what I would do if I was starting from scratch.
Step 1: Invest in Compute
You need access to a capable AI model. For me, that means Claude from Anthropic. Here's what I'd do:
- Go to claude.ai and create an account
- Download Claude Desktop
Once you have Claude Desktop, set up Connectors. This is critical. Connectors let Claude access, search, and take actions inside the tools you already use for work. Anthropic has a directory of 50+ integrations, including Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Asana, Figma, Canva, and many more. If your workflow lives in Google Suite, Slack, or any common productivity tool, there's likely a connector for it.
This is what makes Claude more than a chatbot. With connectors, it can read your documents, search your messages, pull data from your project management tools, and actually do things inside those tools on your behalf. All without leaving the Claude window.
Step 2: Let Claude Set Itself Up
I'm not going to get into the exact specifics of how to configure everything. You know why? Because you're going to ask Claude how to do it. Not only can you ask Claude how to set things up, you're going to ask Claude to set things up for you.
This is an important habit to build early. Sometimes the AI will give you instructions for doing something manually when it could just do it for you. Ask it to try. It will sometimes say that it can't do something. Ask it to make sure, because it tends to undersell what it's actually capable of. You'd be surprised.
Step 3: Explain Your Job in Extreme Detail
This is the most important step, and most people skip it or rush through it.
You need to long-form explain exactly what you do in your job function. Go into extreme detail. There is no detail too trivial. Try not to make assumptions about what the AI already knows.
Cover everything:
- What tools do you use?
- What does your day-to-day look like?
- What are your recurring tasks?
- Who do you work with?
- What are your inputs and outputs?
- What takes you the most time?
- What's tedious and repetitive?
- What requires the most thought and judgment?
You don't need to know what you want to automate yet. This step is purely about giving the AI a complete picture of your work. Tell it to ask you clarifying questions about anything that's unclear. Keep going until it has a thorough understanding of your role.
I can't emphasize this enough. The quality of everything that follows depends on how well you do this step.
Pro tip: Use a speech-to-text tool for this. I use Wispr Flow. It lets you input three to five times as much information as you could by typing. When you're trying to dump your entire job description and daily workflow into the AI, speaking is dramatically faster.
Step 4: Ask How to Leverage AI
Only once the AI has a solid understanding of your job function do you start asking:
- How can I leverage AI to make my life easier?
- Which of my processes could be automated?
- How can I be more productive?
- How can I increase the quality of my output?
- How can I ship more value in my function?
It will give you ideas. Then you keep iterating and ideating. Ask follow-up questions. Go deeper on the ideas that interest you. There's nothing you can't at least try getting the AI to do.
When you're set up with Claude Desktop and the connectors you've configured, the AI has access to your file system, can search the internet, and can work directly inside your tools. It can do an incredible amount of work for you. It can figure out how to automate your workflows and how you can best leverage it.
Tools I Recommend
Claude for the AI itself. It's the best model available right now.
Wispr Flow for speech-to-text. Speaking is the fastest way to get large amounts of context into the AI.
Obsidian for note-taking. It stores everything in Markdown format, which is easy for you to read and, more importantly, easy for the AI to search and read as well. If you're going to be working with AI regularly, keeping your notes in a format the AI can consume is a force multiplier.
Software Engineers Are the Canary in the Coal Mine
I want to be direct about something.
Software engineers are the early adopters of AI. We've been leveraging these tools the most because AI development has been focused on automating software development first. It's highly technical, and we're the ones using AI to build AI. We've had a head start.
But here's the reality. If you have a desk job and you think your job is safe from AI, you're wrong. Your job is likely less technical than software engineering. Once AI gets specifically targeted at your function, it can be automated faster than you think. I'm not trying to be provocative. That's just the truth.
Matt Shumer's recent essay "Something Big Is Happening" puts it plainly: "If your job happens on a screen, AI is coming for significant parts of it." He compares this moment to early February 2020, when most people dismissed warnings about COVID. The people paying attention acted early. The rest were caught off guard.
In order to stay ahead, you need to figure out how to increase your productivity and ship more value, better and faster. The steps above are how you start.
Resources
- Something Big Is Happening by Matt Shumer. The viral essay on why AI is about to change everything for knowledge workers.
- Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3, and the Post-Benchmark Era by Nathan Lambert. A technical comparison of the latest models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Claude Desktop. Download and get started.
- Wispr Flow. Speech-to-text that actually works.
- Obsidian. Markdown-based note-taking.
