Day 3 of 28 · AI Challenge

Your First AI-Powered Task

⏱ 6 min 📊 Beginner

You've got your toolkit set up. You understand the mindset. Now it's time to actually do something.

Today you're going to complete a real task using AI — not a demo, not a hypothetical. Something that saves you actual time, today. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a concrete "before and after" that proves what AI can do for your workflow.

Pick your first task

Here are five tasks that take most people 30–60 minutes to do manually. With AI, each one takes under 5 minutes:

Rewrite your professional bio. That LinkedIn summary you've been meaning to update for two years? AI can rewrite it in 60 seconds, tailored to the exact tone you want.

Summarize a meeting. Got notes from a call — messy bullet points, half-finished thoughts, action items buried in rambling? AI turns chaos into a clean summary with next steps.

Create a to-do list from your email inbox. Paste in your last 10 emails and ask AI to extract every action item, deadline, and follow-up.

Draft a follow-up email to a client or lead. That person you've been meaning to follow up with for a week? AI writes the email in 30 seconds.

Research a topic for a presentation. Need to put together 5 slides on a topic by Friday? AI gives you the outline, key stats, and talking points in minutes.

Pick one. Seriously — pick one right now. The one that would save you the most time today.

Knowledge Check

What's the goal of your first AI task?

A

To impress someone with AI-generated content

B

To complete a real task that saves you actual time, creating a concrete before-and-after

C

To learn advanced prompting techniques

D

To test whether AI works

The goal is practical — save real time on a real task. Once you experience the before-and-after difference, you'll never go back. That first "wow, this would have taken me an hour" moment is what makes AI stick.

The before and after

Let's walk through the meeting summary example, because it's the one that makes people's jaws drop.

Here's what messy meeting notes actually look like — the kind you scribble during a call:

"talked about Q2 numbers, sarah said revenue up 12% but costs also up, need to look at the marketing spend, john mentioned the new hire starts monday, also the client presentation got moved to thursday. maria wants to redo the pricing page. oh and we need to decide on the conference booth by end of week."

That's real. That's what most people's notes look like. Turning that into a useful summary used to take 15–20 minutes of re-reading, organizing, and formatting.

Now watch what happens when you give it to AI.

🤖

ChatGPT

online

Here are my raw meeting notes from today's team sync. Please turn them into a clean summary with sections for Key Updates, Action Items (with owners and deadlines), and Decisions Needed. "talked about Q2 numbers, sarah said revenue up 12% but costs also up, need to look at the marketing spend, john mentioned the new hire starts monday, also the client presentation got moved to thursday. maria wants to redo the pricing page. oh and we need to decide on the conference booth by end of week."

**Team Sync — Meeting Summary** **Key Updates:** - Q2 revenue is up 12% (Sarah) - Costs have also increased — marketing spend needs review - New hire starts Monday (John) - Client presentation moved to Thursday **Action Items:** - [ ] Review marketing spend and identify areas to optimize — *Sarah, by end of next week* - [ ] Prepare for new hire onboarding — *John, by Monday* - [ ] Redesign pricing page — *Maria, timeline TBD* - [ ] Finalize conference booth decision — *Team, by Friday* **Decisions Needed:** - Conference booth: book or skip? Decision needed by Friday. - Pricing page redesign: scope and timeline to be determined. Want me to turn this into an email to send to the team?

Yes, make it a brief email I can send to everyone.

**Subject: Team Sync Recap — Action Items Inside** Hi team, Quick recap from today's sync: Q2 revenue is up 12% — nice work. Costs are up too, so Sarah will review marketing spend by end of next week. Reminder: new hire starts Monday (John is handling onboarding), and the client presentation is now Thursday. Two things that need decisions this week: 1. Conference booth — book or skip? Let's decide by Friday. 2. Pricing page redesign — Maria, can you scope this out? Thanks everyone. [Your name]

↻ Replay conversation

Two minutes vs. thirty minutes

Let's count: the AI turned messy notes into a structured summary, extracted action items with owners, identified decisions that need to be made, and then reformatted everything into a ready-to-send email.

Total time: about 2 minutes including typing the prompt.

Doing this manually — re-reading notes, organizing by category, writing the summary, formatting the email — would take 25–30 minutes for most people.

That's not a small improvement. That's a 15x speedup. And this is one of the simplest things AI can do.

Now multiply that across every meeting you have this week. If you have 5 meetings and save 25 minutes on each one, that's over 2 hours saved — from just this one use case.

Knowledge Check

In the meeting notes example, how did the AI improve the raw notes?

A

It organized the messy notes into a structured summary with updates, action items, owners, and deadlines

B

It shortened the notes by removing important details

C

It added information that wasn't in the original notes

D

It just cleaned up the spelling and grammar

The AI didn't add or remove information — it organized it. It recognized that "sarah said revenue up 12%" is a Key Update, "need to look at marketing spend" is an Action Item for Sarah, and "decide on the conference booth by end of week" is a Decision Needed. That organizational intelligence is what saves you time.

The prompt pattern that works

Notice the structure of that prompt. It follows a pattern you'll use hundreds of times:

1. Context: "Here are my raw meeting notes from today's team sync."

2. Task: "Turn them into a clean summary."

3. Format: "With sections for Key Updates, Action Items (with owners and deadlines), and Decisions Needed."

4. Input: The actual notes.

Context, Task, Format, Input. CTFI. That's it. This pattern works for almost everything:

"Here's a client email [context]. Draft a reply [task] that's professional but friendly, under 150 words [format]. The email: ... [input]."

"Here's my resume [context]. Rewrite the summary section [task] to highlight my project management experience, in 3-4 sentences [format]. Current summary: ... [input]."

Knowledge Check

What are the four parts of an effective AI prompt for task completion?

A

Context, Task, Format, Input

B

Open, Ask, Wait, Copy

C

Start, Write, Edit, Publish

D

Question, Answer, Review, Repeat

Context (what is this), Task (what should you do), Format (how should the result look), and Input (the raw material to work with). This pattern gives the AI everything it needs to produce a useful result on the first try.

Your turn — do it now

Don't just read this lesson. Do the task. Open one of your AI tools right now and try one of these:

1. Paste your last meeting notes and get a clean summary

2. Copy your LinkedIn bio and ask AI to rewrite it for your target audience

3. Forward yourself 5 recent emails, paste them in, and ask for a prioritized action item list

4. Write a follow-up email to someone you've been meaning to contact

Time yourself. See how long AI takes vs. how long it would have taken manually. That gap — the time saved — is the beginning of everything you'll build in this challenge.

Final Check

What's the most important thing to do after today's lesson?

A