The Operator’s Guide to AI
You run a business, and you’re not sure yet where AI fits in it. These four sessions work that out on your own business, with you.
Each one is a working session you run with ChatGPT or Claude. It asks you questions one at a time, then writes you a short plan out of your answers. Thirty to sixty minutes each, with nothing to install and nothing to buy.
Each one runs on its own
There is no order. Start with whichever topic is live for you right now.
Getting Clear on AI
Where AI actually fits in your business, and what you hand it first. Sorts everything you do into what to hand over, what to do together and what stays yours.
Keeping Your Voice and Judgment
Runs a real decision you are facing through three options, a recommendation and the tradeoff. Then builds a short brief that tells any AI how you actually sound.
Structure Over Willpower
Maps the parts of your business, finds what lives only in your head and writes a real one-page home for one of them before the session ends.
The Long Game
Names what you want the business to give you, audits what you are actually speeding up and hands you one question to run before you automate anything.
It works on your business, not on a template
It looks your business up first. It reads whatever it can reach, then tells you what it found and asks you to correct it. Expect it to get things wrong. Correcting it is the fastest part of the session, and it is what keeps everything after it from being generic.
Then it asks one question at a time and waits for your answer. When there is a real fork you get three options, a recommendation and the tradeoff behind it. Then you pick. It does not pick for you.
At the end it writes a short plan in plain language, built out of what you said, with a first step small enough to actually do. Nothing happens to your business during the session.
A room, and then something to keep
These four sessions are the four topics from a two-hour working session Lane Belone runs for veteran entrepreneurs and small business owners. Most AI classes hand you fifty tools and send you home busier than you came. This one goes the other way.
Any stage works, from first idea to established operation. If you have never opened one of these tools, the sessions start where you are. If you already run three, they go where you are too.
They are free, and they stay free. If they are useful, send the link to whoever came to mind.
Four sessions. Your own business.