5 Things to Do This Week to Get Ahead With AI 📚

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report is 423 pages of data on where AI actually stands right now. The stat that stops people in their tracks: generative AI has reached 53% of the global population in three years. The internet took over a decade. Smartphones took longer. Personal computers took longer. Nothing in modern history has ever been adopted this fast.

Every major tech shift creates two groups. The people who figured out social media in 2010 built businesses and audiences that changed their financial futures. The people who waited until 2016 entered a crowded, pay-to-play landscape. We’re in that exact moment right now with AI — except it’s moving three times faster.

The question isn’t whether AI will affect your career. Stanford just confirmed it already has. The question is whether you’re doing something about it this week or waiting until you have no choice. Here are the 5 things that put you in the first group.

90% of people open a blank Claude chat every single time. They give it zero context, get generic output, and conclude AI isn’t that useful. The top 10% do something different: they build a Project.

A Project in Claude is a persistent workspace that remembers everything you put in it. It’s like giving your AI a filing cabinet full of everything it needs to know about you and your work. Once it’s set up, every conversation inside that Project starts with Claude already knowing your context.

Do this right now: Go to Claude → Projects (left sidebar) → create a new Project called “My Work.” Then upload or paste in:

• A paragraph about your role — your title, what your team does, what you’re responsible for, your company’s industry and size

• Your writing style — paste 2–3 real emails or documents you’ve written so Claude can match your voice

• Your current priorities — what projects you’re working on this quarter, what your goals are

• How you like to work — “I prefer bullet points over paragraphs,” “never use the word ‘synergy,’” “keep things under 200 words unless I ask for more”

Now every conversation you start inside that Project sounds like it’s coming from a colleague who’s been working with you for months — not a stranger.

Think about your week. There’s at least one task you do on a regular cycle that follows roughly the same pattern every time. A Monday morning status update. A weekly client check-in email. A Friday report. A meeting prep routine. A team standup summary.

You can make Claude do that for you automatically.

Claude has two features most people don’t know about: Skills and Dispatch. A Skill is a reusable instruction set — you write it once, and Claude runs it every time you need it. Dispatch is a scheduler — you tell Claude to run that Skill automatically on a specific day and time, and it does.

Do this right now: Pick your most repetitive weekly task. Write a detailed description of exactly what that task involves — who it’s for, what it should include, what tone to use, what format, any details that stay the same every time. Paste that into Claude and say: “Turn this into a Skill I can trigger with one sentence.” Claude will format it for you. Then go to Settings → Dispatch → Scheduled Tasks and schedule it to run automatically.

Monday morning, your status update is already written. Friday afternoon, your weekly summary is already done. You didn’t touch it.

This sounds small. It’s not. The way you find information shapes every decision you make, and most people are still using a system designed in 2004.

Perplexity is an AI search engine. You ask a question in plain language and it searches the web, reads the results for you, synthesizes them, and gives you a clear answer with sources. No ads. No scrolling through 10 blue links trying to find the one that actually answers your question. No clicking into a blog post that makes you read 800 words of filler before getting to the point.

Do this tomorrow: Every time you reach for Google, go to perplexity.ai instead. Try these:

• Research a competitor: “What is [Company X]’s pricing model and how does it compare to [Company Y]?”

• Compare tools: “Notion vs. Monday.com vs. Asana — which is best for a 10-person marketing team?”

• Understand a topic: “Explain the new DOL overtime rule changes for 2026 and how they affect salaried employees”

• Make a decision: “Is it better to max out my 401k or pay off my student loans first? I make $85k and owe $40k at 5.5%”

By the end of the day, you won’t want to go back.

Here’s the thing that separates the top 10% of AI users from everyone else: they don’t use AI to write things. They use AI to think through things.

Most people use Claude to draft emails and summarize documents. That’s fine. But the real power is using it as a thinking partner — someone who can analyze a problem from angles you didn’t consider, stress-test a plan before you commit to it, or find patterns in data you’d never spot on your own.

Try these this week:

• Stress-test a decision: Paste in a business decision you’re about to make and ask Claude to argue both sides. “Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. Give me the 5 strongest reasons to do it and the 5 strongest reasons not to.”

• Analyze a competitor: Paste in a competitor’s website, product page, or marketing copy and ask Claude for a SWOT analysis. “Based on this, what are they doing better than us and where are they vulnerable?”

• Find patterns in data: Drop a spreadsheet into Claude and ask it what patterns it sees. “Here are 6 months of sales data. What trends do you notice that I should be paying attention to?”

• Prepare for a hard conversation: “I need to tell my team that we’re cutting a project they care about. Help me think through the best way to frame this, anticipate their objections, and prepare responses.”

• Second-opinion anything: Paste in a contract, a proposal, a performance review, a job offer — and ask Claude to tell you what you should be paying attention to that you might be missing.

Most people don’t know this: Claude can build you actual, working tools. Not just text. Real interactive dashboards, trackers, calculators, and planners you can use immediately.

The feature is called Artifacts. When you ask Claude to create something visual or interactive, it builds it right there in the conversation — a live, working tool you can click through, interact with, and download. It generates real code behind the scenes, but you don’t need to know anything about code. You just describe what you want.

Try one of these right now:

• “Build me a monthly budget tracker where I input my income and expenses by category and it shows me where my money is going with a visual breakdown.”

• “Build me a project status dashboard where I can list my active projects, their deadlines, their status, and see which ones are at risk.”

• “Build me a weekly meal planner where I can drag meals between days, add grocery items, and generate a shopping list.”

• “Build me a client pipeline tracker with stages (lead, proposal, negotiation, closed) where I can move clients between stages and see my total pipeline value.”

• “Build me a savings goal calculator where I enter my target amount, my current savings, and my monthly contribution — and it shows me exactly when I’ll hit my goal with a countdown.”

Claude builds it in seconds. You can interact with it immediately. If something isn’t right, just say “change the colors” or “add a column for notes” and it updates live.