Courses

AI Principles for the Back Office

  • Beginner
  • About 5 hours
  • 15 lessons
  • Free for members

This course is for the people who keep a company running: ops managers, controllers, office managers and owners at companies of 20 to 200 people. You don’t need to be technical. You need to know what these tools are good for, where they fail, and how to use them on real paperwork to save hours without creating expensive new problems.

You’ll learn how AI models actually produce their answers and why they’re sometimes confidently wrong. You’ll learn how to write prompts that give the same, checkable output every time, how to pull data out of invoices, timesheets and certificates, how to build small spreadsheet helpers with an AI coding assistant, and how to automate paperwork with a person approving every step that moves money or reaches a customer. Every lesson ends with an exercise you can do at your desk with a normal chat assistant and sample data, and each one leaves you with something to keep: a prompt, a checklist, or a one-page policy.

The course is 15 lessons of about 20 minutes each, roughly five hours in total. Do one a day or all of them in a week. The goal is modest on purpose: do what you already do, a little faster, and know how many hours that gives back.

Free for individuals, or $1,200 per company per year for a team license that covers up to 25 staff, with progress tracking and completion certificates.

How AI works, and where it breaks

What these tools actually are, why they’re confidently wrong sometimes, and cloud versus running it yourself.

Lessons

What a large language model actually does Why it’s confidently wrong, and how to catch it Cloud assistants, private options, and what not to paste

Prompting that holds up

Your documents and your data

Pulling information out of invoices, timesheets and certificates, and grounding answers in your own SOPs.

Lessons

Getting data out of documents Answers grounded in your own SOPs Keeping sensitive documents in-house

Small tools without being a programmer

Using an AI coding assistant to build spreadsheet helpers and small scripts, and knowing when to stop.

Lessons

Spreadsheet formulas and cleanup, with an assistant Your first small script When two systems need to talk

Automating the paperwork, safely

Agents with a human approving, connecting systems, and rolling it out without surprises.

Lessons

Agents, in plain words: tools plus a person approving Connecting AI to the systems you already use Rolling it out without surprises