Alright, so we’ve looked at the desktop app, we’ve looked at Word and PowerPoint and Excel. I want to talk a little bit now about how I use these tools. And there’s really three main ways that I use these tools day to day. The first one is research and exploration. So I might get a question in from a client about a particular piece of software or a particular setting that they want to investigate.

And I might not have any insight into it. You know, Claude’s moving at a million miles an hour. They’re releasing new settings all the time. And so I might need to do some research on these things. And so I’ll use Claude as a great, you know, get me a lot of things up to speed researcher. So to do that I would come into Claude, I click the little plus button and turn on research.

This is going to add that little icon here to say it’s going to do research. This essentially tells Claude go away and really do the deep dive, find a ton of sources about this, take the time, I don’t need this answer right now. Come back when you’re good and ready. These things can run 30 or 40 minutes before it comes back with what is a genuine report about a topic.

And so I’ll ask it something like, I’ve had questions in about how Gemini works, give me a comparison between the way that you know the Claude works against Gemini particularly within the context of accounting firms or something like that and have it just go away. Now I won’t sit here and wait for that to complete. I will move on with my day. It’ll give me an alert at some point to say hey it’s ready or or if it needs a clarifying question, it’ll come back to me.

It’ll prompt me for that. But at the end of the day, when I’m good and ready, I can come back to a completed report and I can view it at that stage. And I do mean a genuine report, like it could be five to 10 pages long. And so this is how you can use that. You can use Claude to go and do that kind Another way that I tend to use these tools is, like I mentioned in prior videos, pulling in from multiple sources.

So I’ve had multiple conversations about an upcoming marketing event. I know I’ve got some emails, I know I’ve got some stuff in Teams, we’ve got some files in SharePoint that we’ve got you know, around some of the content we’re going to talk about. And so I want to, you know, combine all of that stuff to generate a report or a summary of what’s happening for, let’s say, Rob or for Andrew.

I could go and spend the time to go and claw that information together because they want an update. But ultimately, they just want to know They want to get a sense of what’s happening. And I can have Claude go and do that, you know, data collection and collation so that I can then review it, strip out whatever doesn’t need to be there and then send that on to them.

Now we, you know, here at Lanter, we have a good sense for, you know, what we expect people to use AI for and how involved they need to be. And this is one of those times where I don’t want to have to do the legwork, but I’ll absolutely spend time on that email at the end to make sure that it’s right. And so that kind of workflow, it’s my bread and butter with these tools.

And so that genuinely is just another chat, right? So we’re in Claude, I’ll drop off research there. And I would just say something like, you know, I’ve had multiple meetings about the upcoming client event, gather all my emails, Teams chats, and any files in the, you know, I’ll just call it like the, you know, I’ll give it the name of the file to be more, more specific.

Then October SharePoint files. I need a summary so again telling it what I need of what has happened and any key decisions. Keep it brief. Let’s say 500 words. I want it as an email. Giving it plenty of context, exactly what I need, go. And it will go and do that. Now, I might go back and forth with it to include specific details about other things. You know, there might be a reference to a particular client that’s going to speak at this event.

And I might say something like, go and get some more information about exactly who they are and what I’ve talked to them about recently and why they’re relevant to this networking event. But that’s one thing that I’ll absolutely have a go and do that just like go and gather me all that stuff so I can do something useful with it. The last thing that I do a lot is what I kind of refer to as pull push.

So I’ve received an email. I need to push it into a task somewhere in our system. Or I’ve received a message on Teams. I need to draft an email out to someone to get more information. That is.. super useful because it basically removes all friction. I can be on my phone on the Metro or on the train. I see the email come in, I get called, voice to text on Claude.

Hey, I just got an email from Rob, create an item in ClickUp and assign it to Joe. Bang, it just does it. It’s going to strip out information about from the email that what Rob I could also tell like set the due date, things like that. And it’ll go and take that action for me. The manual way of doing that would be open up the email on my phone, try and copy paste a bunch of stuff, go into the ClickUp app, find the board, new item, paste it, figure out what it is, picks up whatever formatting, it’s just clunky.

And ultimately I’m probably just gonna say, I’ll have to when we get back to my desk, but I don’t need to anymore. And so that is super useful. There is a slight extension to that, that’s worth considering. So in that scenario, you know, Rob’s asked me for something, I know I’m gonna have to send it on to Joe, but I actually, I’ve had some conversations about it.

So I might say go and get that email from Rob, go and get any other detail from my email relevant to that topic to fill out this ticket because my goal here is to create an item in ClickUp for Joe explaining what we need to do but also how we got to that point. It’ll go through So it’ll pull that email in from Rob, it’ll do a bunch of that enrichment work and then go and create the item in our task, um, task system and assign Joe and set the deadlines and whatever else.

Um, and so it can do that enrichment in the middle. It’s not just pull push. I haven’t found a good term for it, but it’s like pull, enrich, push. And so, And so that is quite useful. And you can do that with things like, you know, Teams, Outlook, you know, whether you’re sending it onto Slack. And so that is incredibly, incredibly useful. And so those three are really the main ones that I use, the main ways that I use these tools.

Now, keep in mind that everything that you send, to produce, you are still accountable for it, right? Nothing in the system says this was done by Claude, blame Claude if it’s wrong. And so even in those scenarios, I’m always really cautious about what are people’s expectations of me? If I send something out that’s completely automated, maybe that’s okay based on the task, right? might have a sense here there’s some form we always have to fill in no one ever reads it but we have to do it for order purposes I’ll absolutely use AI to do the bulk of that work I’ll QA very quickly but I’ll use AI to do a bulk of that work but if someone’s asked me for an opinion on something even if I use Claude to pull in some extra information collate some stuff you know, give me some background on something.

I will always spend serious time reviewing that draft, potentially even just write it myself, having that information presented to me and just go off and write it myself. Partly because it’ll always sound like me, partly because I don’t want it to be overly verbose, like it will create a long email to answer a simple question if you let it. And so I don’t want that. But also I just want to make sure that when people ask me something and they get a response, they trust that I’ve taken a, you know, the relevant amount or the reasonable amount of time to answer their question.

And I’ve given it the respect that it kind of deserves because the last thing you want, and you’ll probably start to spot this a little bit more now as you get more familiar with the tools, you’ll ask someone a question and you might get back a really generic, but really quite long response. And you’re like, man, why’d they go through this effort? I actually was like, yes, and this is why, or no.

And hey, go and look at this doc. But instead they’re giving me warm pace here. That’s because they’ve probably just gone to AI and said, “Hey, draft an email back to Kane and just send it. Like I don’t care. Send it.” It can be a little frustrating when people do that. I often, I think about it like, if you ask me a question, I typed it into Google, took a screenshot of what Google said and then send it back to you, your response will be like, well, thanks, Cain, but I could have asked Google myself.

I wanted your thoughts. I wanted your opinions. And so, yeah, I’m always really cautious of that. So that’s just something to keep in mind, like you and your team and the way you work, you guys will have to figure that out because each team is different and the kinds of tasks you have will be different and give each other a little bit of leeway right if you guys are just getting onto these tools don’t don’t you know immediately get offended when someone does something like that have a think about how you would address like you would address anything else if you ask me a question and I came back with a really curt email maybe I’m just really sure maybe that’s just the way I talk and that’s okay but if I came back and are super aggressive, well then how would you handle that?

You know, would you fire back an email saying like, “Hey Cain, like don’t be like that.” Or would you talk to, you know, their manager, or would you talk to your manager, talk to HR? You know, we need to treat these interactions like any other interaction we’ve had, because this isn’t the first time we will have had some, you know, some teething issues in the workplace, right?

And so give each other a little bit of leeway. Don’t be offended straight off the bat, but, you know, do keep an eye out for it, right? This is a tool in the hands of people, and the idea is that, you know, you should continue to act as the person in the driver’s seat, right? And so I think it’s reasonable to expect that from others. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a sense of how I use the tools.

If you have any questions about Claude, ask Claude. Like that should be your first, your first board of call, right? Not because I don’t want you to reach out to me, but because it’s, it’s incredibly knowledgeable. It’ll go and do the web searches. If it has, if there’s been stuff that’s been updated, right? The button moves something disappears you know as a real example this chat and co-work option which we haven’t talked about that’s actually going to disappear soon they’re going to merge those into one you won’t know about it and so at some point that disappears you might go like oh hang on a minute like where’s where’s that button ask lord how you used to be able to click co-work what what’s the go where’s it gone it’ll Now, if you don’t get a decent response, feel free to reach out to me.

But you can rely on it to give you some of that information because, like I said, it’s incredibly knowledgeable. You’ve got questions about Excel, you’ve got questions about how you see something weird, just ask it. What’s the worst that can happen? Come back and say, “Hey, I’m not quite sure. I searched the web, couldn’t find it.” anything and so it is a good tool to use. So yeah, I hope that your experience with Claude is a positive one.

I am a genuine fan of the product. I think it is quite good. It does have some shortcomings. It’s got some rough edges and you’ll find those no doubt. You know, otherwise, I think just get on. Like, give it a crack. Be open-minded to it. Yeah. Anyway, I’ll catch you later.