Articles
How to Use AI to Run an Ecommerce Store
19.3% of US online sales came back in 2025. Using AI to sort return reasons into causes with different owners, extract structured product attributes without inventing values, and write a policy that reassures buyers while closing loopholes.
How to Use AI to Manage Your Money
Chatbots recommend the mathematically optimal debt plan, but research on real payoff data found closing small accounts predicts success better. Making the trade-off explicit, catching stale figures, and checking the arithmetic in five seconds.
How to Use AI for Creative Writing
A Science Advances study found AI-assisted stories were rated more creative — and were measurably more similar to each other. The division of labour that follows: use it for structure, continuity and diagnosis, and write the sentences yourself.
How to Use AI for Lesson Planning
Teachers using AI weekly report saving 5.9 hours a week. Where those hours really are — differentiation, rubrics, item generation — why you should start from objectives rather than activities, and what a model can never know about your class.
How to Use AI to Study
A PNAS field experiment found students given an unrestricted GPT-4 scored 17% worse than students who never had AI at all. The one instruction that reversed the effect, and why a study session that felt smooth is the warning sign.
How to Use AI to Prepare for a Fundraise
One rule governs everything: the model never touches your numbers. Within that, the highest-return use is adversarial — having it play a sceptical partner and find the question you can't answer while the cost of fumbling is still zero.
How to Use AI to Plan Your Week
Models are trained on aspirational plans, so they produce eleven hours of work in an eight-hour day. Give it real capacity, forbid compression, and make it tell you what doesn't fit. Plus the truth about the 23-minute interruption statistic.
How to Use AI for Customer Support
Support is where an over-eager draft becomes a written commitment with a timestamp. The three-part structure that beats any tone instruction, the guardrail against invented policy and premature all-clears, and why triage beats reply-drafting.
How to Use AI for Research Without Fabricated Sources
A model cannot verify anything — it can only tell you what to check. Two real misattributions we caught in our own work, why "only cite real sources" fails, and the method that keeps synthesis useful without letting invented citations reach print.
How to Use AI to Write Work Emails
The largest study of ChatGPT use found two-thirds of writing requests are edits, not drafts — so stop starting from a blank page. Tone dials that beat "professional", and the guardrail that stops a model committing you to things you never agreed.