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The Four Cs of Useful AI

Use context, connections, capability and cadence to work out what your AI knows, can access, can do and how often it runs.

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In one line

Context gives AI information about you and your business.

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2 min

Focus

AI

If you want to use AI effectively, learn the four Cs: context, connections, capability and cadence. They give you a practical way to describe what you want your AI to work with and do.

Start with context. This is everything the AI understands about you and your business: your way of writing, your personality, and the things that matter to you and your organization. For writing articles or handling communication, that understanding gives it something to work from. Your writing style and business priorities are part of the job.

Connections are the tools you plug into your AI. Email, your customer relationship management system (CRM), and your task tracker are the examples I use. What can the AI access? That determines which of those tools it can help you with.

Then there is capability: the things the AI can perform for you, encoded as skills it can use repeatedly. Keep access and capability distinct when you describe the work. An email connection names a system the AI can reach; organizing email names work you want it to do.

The fourth C is cadence. How often should that work happen? If the AI is organizing your email, how often should it check your inbox? If you want it to post to social media, what is the schedule? Frequency is part of describing the work, too.

For an email-organizing task, write down the context it needs, the inbox connection, the skill it should perform and how often it should check. Use those four questions to make the task specific before you expect it to run on a schedule.

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