Practical AI for the Small Business
Published 9/2026
Created by Tania Driskill
MP4 | Video: h264, 1920x1080 | Audio: AAC, 44.1 KHz, 2 Ch
Level: Beginner | Genre: eLearning | Language: English | Duration: 28 Lectures ( 1h 21m ) | Size: 808.9 MB
Prompting, document workflows, verification habits and AI governance for real small-business work.
What you'll learn
⚡ Explain in plain words how a large language model produces text, and why it sometimes produces confident nonsense
⚡ Choose the right type of AI tool for a task, and ask the five questions that matter before trusting any new one
⚡ Write effective prompts using role, context, task, format and constraints, and improve weak answers through iteration
⚡ Use an AI assistant to summarize, extract from and compare business documents, with a verification habit that catches errors
⚡ Draft emails, proposals, marketing copy and other business texts with AI support while keeping full human ownership of the result
⚡ Apply AI assistants to day-to-day operations and to risk- or safety-sensitive decisions in ways that respect the limits of the technology
⚡ Protect confidential, personal and proprietary information when working with AI tools, and verify AI output systematically
⚡ Describe the essentials of the EU AI Act and typical company AI policies as they apply to everyday small-business users
Requirements
❗ No coding or technical background required - just access to any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot), free or paid
❗ A willingness to try prompts on your own real or practice business documents while you follow along
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have become everyday tools for small business owners and their teams - but most people use maybe 10% of what they can actually do, and nobody has shown them the other 90%.
This hands-on course teaches the skills that survive every product update: how these tools actually work (and where they confidently get things wrong), how to write a prompt that gets a usable answer the first time, how to summarize, extract from and compare business documents, how to draft client communication you can stand behind, and how to know when a task belongs to AI and when it belongs to a qualified human.
You'll work through eleven lessons built around a single running example - a small consulting firm handling real contracts, client letters and quarterly reviews - plus a dedicated lesson walking the same skills through a clinic, a manufacturing shop and a retail business, so you can see your own work reflected in the material. Every lesson ends with a knowledge check, and a ten-question final assessment covers the whole course.
By the end, you'll have a personal 90-day practice plan, a starter library of reusable prompt templates, and the guardrails - confidentiality, verification, human oversight - that make using AI at work sustainable instead of risky.
Who this course is for
⭐ Small business owners, managers and staff who use or want to use AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot at work Anyone who wants a structured, no-hype introduction to using AI safely and effectively in day-to-day business tasks Teams that need to document AI-literacy training, including for the EU AI Act's Article 4 literacy duty
⭐ Not for developers looking to build or fine-tune AI models - this is a practical-use course, not a technical one
Practical AI for the Small Business
