the tool, and what is safe

• Press Say it simpler or Go further when you want more on a term.
• This deck is not a fixed handout. We update it during the training from your questions.
• Expect changes. Use the live site, not a printout from this morning.
• Download as PDF is at the top right if you want a snapshot.

Download it now, while I run through the agenda — then you have it when we need it.

• Everything we try today runs on this one short meeting note — mine and yours.
• It is invented: no real client, no real project, no real person. Safe to paste anywhere.
• Bring your own file later if you like — anonymised.

Download the meeting note (Word)

Geoffrey Hinton — Turing Award · 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics · called the godfather of AI.

• Unlike ordinary software, it can give different answers to the same instruction.
• If the people who built it cannot fully explain it, you do not trust it — you check it.

• It picks the next word, over and over, from what is likely.
• Brilliant: in August it produced new results on ten open maths problems, some untouched for decades — for under $2,000.
• Believed only because every proof was machine-checked.
• Wrong: a run goes bad, and every reply after it inherits the bad start.
• Do not negotiate with a bad chat. Start a new one.

More of your day moves from doing to deciding.

• You plan the work · you control the work · the typing moves.

Step	Before	After
Decide it is needed	H	H
Gather the source	H	H
Write the first draft	H	AI
Check it against the source	H	H
Send it	H	H

• Ask it on any step: if AI is wrong here, who catches it before it leaves the building?

• Copilot is approved for work. Use it on your real tasks.
• Sensitive data has its own rules — client, candidate, employee, contract, financial. It goes only in a tool approved for that data, and the approved-tools SharePoint site says which tool covers what. Link in the chat.
• A free chatbot or a personal account is not an approved tool.
• Today only: on a shared screen we use the invented meeting note. The session is recorded.

• Here is the menu, in the real product. Open it yourself if you can.
• Auto decides for you. The other two let you decide.
• The names change between releases. What each one is for does not.
• Before I tell you: which of these would you use to fix a typo — and which to compare three options?

which one for which job

Five jobs. Quick response, Think deeper, or let Auto decide? Put your picks in the chat.

1. Fix the typos in a two-line message.
2. Turn a page of meeting notes into a table.
3. Compare three suppliers and recommend one.
4. Shorten this paragraph by half.
5. Find where two documents contradict each other.

• Quick response — you know what you want: tidy it, shorten it, tabulate it.
• Think deeper — you want it to weigh something you must defend.
• Auto — it chooses. Fine for the small things.

1 and 4 Quick response · 3 and 5 Think deeper · 2 depends on the notes.

Paste the first one, then paste any sloppy sentence of your own after it. Ten seconds.

Anything about the menu, the modes, or which to use when — in the chat.

you name a task, it shows you

Name a task you do often, and drop it in the chat. Everything after this runs on it.

- Copy the prompt, put your task where it says [task], and paste it into the Copilot you just opened. - Answer its three questions. **The ideas get better because you were asked, not because you asked better.** - Keep what it suggests. We come back to it in a few minutes.

the move that changes everything

• The circle is everything it knows, and every direction it could go.
• Your prompt is the wedge. Everything you add makes it thinner.
• You are not teaching it. You are narrowing it.

One task everybody has: turn a set of meeting notes into a status update.

Nothing added:

Write a status update.

Naming the source:

Using only the attached meeting notes, write a status update.

In the chat: what would you add to make it about your work?

Adding the shape it should come back in:

Using only the attached meeting notes, write a status update as a table: Decision | Owner | Date | Open question.

Adding the fences, a cap and a way out:

Using only the attached meeting notes, write a status update as a table: Decision | Owner | Date | Open question. Maximum half a page. Do not invent owners or dates. If something is not in the notes, write "Not stated."

four limits, four countermeasures

• It has read an enormous amount. None of it is your work.
• This is not the same problem as narrowing. Narrowing picks from what it already knows — this is material it has never seen.
• The symptom: confident, fluent, and about a project that does not exist.

First with nothing attached. Then attach the meeting note and run the second.

Download the meeting note

• The model is read-only. It does not keep your Tuesday.
• You adapt it with the context: the prompt, the files, the limits. That is the role.
• Next chat: new script. Same actor.

• A chat can only hold so much at once. As it grows, the earliest parts drop out of view.
• Between chats it is total: a new chat starts from zero.
• You have seen this: it contradicts what you agreed twenty messages ago, or re-asks what you already answered.

• Save the progress out of the chat — into a document, into the folder. The chat is not where your work lives.
• Remind it of what you agreed — re-attach the file, re-paste the rules.
• Refresh it — say what you decided earlier instead of assuming it remembers.

• Keep this line. You will use it more than any other prompt in this deck.

Everyone has hit this one. What happened? Put it in the chat.

• It is built to be helpful. Helpful, by default, looks like agreeing.
• It is not lying to you. It is agreeing with you.
• Those look identical on screen, and only one of them is your fault.

Attach the meeting note, then run both with me. It names four people — no more.

• First I ask a leading question. Then the same thing, neutrally. Live, on the same file.
• Watch for: whether it produces six names, and whether the second version says how many are actually there.

• It reports success, and only rarely says “I could not open that file.”
• The reply looks finished either way — built on half a document, or on none of it.

Attach the meeting note and paste the first one.

what stays yours

• You sign it, not the model. Read it before you use it — facts, tone, confidentiality, bias.
• It never makes the final call. The policy names where that matters most: recruitment, HR, contracts, legal, finance, compliance, and anything a client sees.
• Never to screen, rank or evaluate people — not unless that exact use has been approved in advance.
• Something goes wrong — a leak, a harmful answer? Tell your manager or Group IT. That is the whole procedure.

Last question window. Anything from the last hour — in the chat.

a prompt you keep

Run it on the task you named at the start. Let it interview you — one question at a time.

• What comes back is a brief for that one task: the source, the shape, the limits.
• Save it. If we have time, that brief becomes an agent in a moment.

that prompt becomes an agent

• The brief you just wrote is the agent. Set it up once and you never write it again.
• If we have the time, we set one up now. If not, this is the first thing your team workshop does.

where we go from here

• From here the sessions are theme-specific — your own work, your own examples, your own week.
• Up next: Recruitment.
• Questions you did not get to ask? Write them down. I open the next session with them.

Whatever it suggested for your task is one of these shapes. Read them on your own time — each one is a different way of asking.

• meeting notes → status update
• long thread → decision + owner
• document pile → query list
• a CV → the same shape as your other profiles
• vague brief → clarification questions
• draft mail → three tones
• spreadsheet → the three numbers that moved
• policy document → the four rules that apply to me

• If a question did not get answered in the session, put it here on the day and it gets picked up in the team workshops.

1. Create it and give it the contract.
2. Test it with no sources attached — see what it does on its own.
3. Add the sources.
4. Run the identical prompt again.
5. Compare the two. That difference is what the folder bought you.

• The source lock · the re-grounding line · Instruct · Partner · the escape clause · the evidence check · the meta-prompt.
• They are all on the slides above, each with a copy button.
• Download as PDF at the top right gives you the whole set on paper.