Let me tell you about a particular Tuesday afternoon.
I was in a team meeting. Someone from IT was explaining what Microsoft Copilot could do for us. People around the table were nodding — the kind of nodding that signals either genuine understanding or a very practised bluff. I was nodding too.
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
That evening I googled it. The results were either written for IT departments, or for twenty-five-year-olds who apparently find all of this completely obvious. I closed the laptop and made a cup of tea instead.
This went on for roughly six months.
The Moment I Stopped Pretending
I don’t remember exactly what changed. I think I got tired of feeling quietly left behind in rooms where I’d spent twenty-five years being competent. That’s an uncomfortable feeling and I don’t recommend sitting with it longer than you have to.
So I started from the beginning. Not the IT department’s beginning. My beginning. One tool. One task. No jargon. Just: what does this actually do, and can I make it useful today?
The answer, it turned out, was yes. Embarrassingly quickly.
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me on Day One
AI tools — Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, the lot — are not magic. They’re also not complicated. They’re closer to a very fast, very patient colleague who will help you draft things, summarise things, and think things through, without ever sighing or checking their phone.
You talk to them like you’d talk to a person. You say what you need. They give you a starting point. You adjust it. That’s the whole thing.
The bit that took me longest to accept: you don’t need to understand how they work. You didn’t understand how your dishwasher worked either. You just learned which buttons to press.
The First Thing I Used It For
Email. Specifically, a long and knotty email to a stakeholder who had a habit of finding fault with whatever I sent. I’d written three drafts and deleted all of them.
I opened Copilot, explained the situation, and typed:
What came back wasn’t perfect. But it was better than my third draft and it took thirty seconds. I adjusted a few sentences, hit send, and got a perfectly civil reply the next morning.
I won’t pretend I didn’t feel slightly smug about it.
What This Is Not
It’s not a replacement for your judgment. It’s not always right. It occasionally produces something so generic it’s almost impressive. And it cannot read your mind — which means the quality of what you get back depends entirely on the quality of what you put in.
That last part is actually the interesting bit. Learning to give it better instructions is a skill. A small one, but a real one. And it’s learnable in an afternoon.
Where to Start If You’re Where I Was
One tool. One task. Today.
If your company uses Microsoft 365, open Outlook, find the Copilot icon — it looks like a small sparkle, usually top right — click it, and ask it to summarise a long email thread. That’s it. That’s your first five minutes with AI.
If it works — and it will — you’ll know where to go next.
If you want somewhere to go next, that’s what Silver Prompt is for.
— Anna