AI With Tom
Why your AI gives you generic answers, in four parts. The map before the tutorial.
15 MINUTES TO READ · START HERE · NOTHING TO INSTALL
You've been using AI for a while now. It's fine. It writes an email, it summarises a document, it answers a question.
But it never feels like it knows anything about your business. Every answer comes back confident and slightly generic, like advice from someone who's never met you. So you assume that's just what AI is, and you go back to using it as a better search box.
That's not what's happening. What's happening is you hired someone and never told them anything.
Think about what would happen if a new starter walked into your business on Monday and you said nothing. No handover. No access to the shared drive. No explanation of who your customers are or how you like things done. Then you asked them for their opinion on your pricing.
They'd give you something confident and slightly generic. Because that's all anyone could give you.
That's your AI right now. Not broken — just never inducted.
Every properly set-up AI has four things. Most people have the first one and none of the rest, which is exactly why it feels underwhelming.
And a fourth that only matters once the first three are done — the training: the jobs you've taught them to do the same way every time.
Try this first
Open whatever AI you already use. Ask it: "What do you know about my business?"
Whatever comes back — nothing, or a polite guess — that's the gap this document is about. It'll take two minutes and it makes the rest of this land properly.
This is the part you already have. You opened ChatGPT or Claude, and there it is — something that can read, write, reason and hold a conversation.
Here's the thing people get wrong. They judge this employee on the first day, with no induction, and conclude they're not very good. Then they never revisit it.
A capable person who knows nothing about your business will always underperform a mediocre one who knows everything about it. That gap is not intelligence. It's context.
This is a document. That's genuinely all it is — one page telling your AI who you are, what your business does, who your customers are, and how you like things done.
You paste it in at the start of a conversation, or save it so it loads automatically. From then on, every answer starts from what's true about your business instead of what's true in general.
This is the single highest-leverage thing on this page, and it takes about twenty minutes.
What to put in it: what your business does in one line. Who your customers are and what they're actually worried about. What you sell and what it costs. How you talk — formal or plain, British or American spelling. What you want it to never do.
The bit people fudge: the "how you talk" section. They write "professional but friendly", which means nothing. Write down two sentences you'd actually say to a customer, and two you never would. That's worth more than a paragraph of adjectives.
Do this one properly
I've written the full version of this as its own guide — every section, what goes in it, and a worked example filled in from one of my own businesses.
The Business Brain → It's the natural next step from here.
An employee with no phone and no logins can talk to you, and that's it. They can't check the calendar, read the enquiry that came in this morning, or look at the spreadsheet. They can only ever advise.
Connections are that employee's phone. They're the apps you install on it — your email, your calendar, your files, your documents. Each one turns a thing they could only talk about into a thing they can actually do.
Different AI tools call these different names. Claude calls them connectors. ChatGPT has connectors too. The name doesn't matter; the concept is identical — you are handing over a set of keys, one at a time.
Start with one. Not all of them. Connect the single thing you look at most — for most business owners that's email or the calendar — and use it for a week before adding another. You'll learn more from one connection you actually use than five you switched on and forgot.
The trap: people turn connections on and assume everything can now see everything. It doesn't work like that. Access is granted per app, and sometimes per place you're using the AI from. If it says it can't see something, that's usually the answer — not a fault.
Once the first three are in place, you'll notice you keep asking for the same handful of jobs. Write this kind of reply. Check this document against that one. Summarise this the way I like it.
Training is writing those down once, properly, so they run the same way every time instead of being re-explained from memory.
At the simple end this is a saved note you paste in. At the serious end it's a named job your AI can run on command. Either way the principle is the same: if you've explained it three times, write it down.
The job
Replying to an enquiry from a golf club asking about social media management.
With none of the four parts
"Write a reply to a customer enquiry about social media." → a generic email that could be from any agency, quoting no price, mentioning nothing specific.
With the induction (part 2)
It knows what I actually sell, what it costs, who I'm talking to and how I write. The reply sounds like me and quotes the right number.
With the phone as well (part 3)
It reads the actual enquiry, notices they mentioned a summer membership push, and references it. I stop re-typing context that already exists in my inbox.
With training on top (part 4)
It's not a request any more. It's a job I've named. Same structure every time, no re-explaining.
What makes this good
Nothing here made the AI cleverer. Each step just removed something it was having to guess.
You don't need all four. Most business owners get the majority of the value from part two alone, and never touch three or four — that's genuinely fine, and I'd rather you did one properly than four badly.
So the honest next step is the induction document. It's twenty minutes, it works in whatever AI you already pay for, and everything else on this site assumes you've done it.
Start with The Business Brain →
If you get stuck, message me on Instagram — @ai_with_tom_. Tell me which of the four you're on and I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth the effort.