Set Up Your First Working AI Assistant
A two-week guided build on Google Meet: Wednesday, October 21 and Wednesday, October 28, both 1 to 3 PM ET. One ticket covers the whole build.
Most people using AI are stuck in the chat window. You paste a question in, you copy an answer out, and you still do the actual work yourself.
An assistant is different. It reads your files, uses your tools, and brings back the finished thing.
Over the two weeks, you'll build one. Yours, for your business, running by the time we're done. We meet twice, live, with a week of real homework between.
Week one, live: We build the brain.
The knowledge base. Plain documents that teach the assistant what you do, who your clients are, and how you sound, including the words it's never allowed to use. This is what makes an assistant write like you instead of like a robot.
The week between: You feed it your business.
Real pieces of your work go in, and you start asking it questions. This is the homework, and it's where it clicks for most people.
Week two, live: We give it hands.
One skill. A repeatable task it runs against everything it now knows: a client email, a document summary, a job you do every week. Plus the review habits that keep you in charge of what actually goes out the door.
A few things worth knowing:
Capped at 6 people, so we work on your real business the whole time, not a generic example
We work in Claude Desktop, which is free to start. There's no other software to buy
Everything we build lives in plain documents and folders. It's yours to keep, and it moves with you, even to a different tool later
No coding. If you can write a document, you can do this
What to bring: Claude Desktop installed (I'll send a link when you register), and a few real pieces of your business: your pricing, a couple of emails in your own voice, a document you'd normally summarize. The workshop runs on your actual work. That's the point.
Who's teaching: I'm Dan Bates. I run a web studio in Staunton, Virginia, and I rebuilt how it operates around these tools. Everything in this workshop is something I use to run my own business every week.
Who this is for: owners who run the business themselves and are tired of hearing what AI can supposedly do. Bring one real, repetitive task you'd rather never do by hand again.
Founding rate: $150. Full refund up to 48 hours before week one.