I used an AI chatbot to brainstorm an idea once. No instructions. No memory. Not my instance of Claude or Copilot, but it was running on a Claude model.

Every thought I had was brilliant. Every direction I considered was the right one. By the end of the conversation something felt off. I did not actually believe I was that amazing.

Then I took the entire conversation into my Claude.

Claude read through it and told me the other tool had been a cheerleader. That it had agreed with everything, built on everything, added enthusiasm to everything, and had not once pushed back on whether any of it was actually a good idea.

Then it gave me a reality check. I am not the next Steve Jobs. The idea needed work.

This is what happens when you skip the setup. AI defaults to agreeable. It fills in what it does not know with confident-sounding language. It tells you what you want to hear because it has no direction to do otherwise. If you want to know how to set up AI at work so it actually helps you instead of just validating you, the answer is not in the chat window. It is in the settings.

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How to Set Up AI at Work Before You Start

There are four things to do before you start asking AI to help with your work.

Get trained first.

Anthropic has free training courses on their website. If you are using Claude, Copilot, or both, start there. The training covers the difference between chat, projects, cowork, and skills. What each one is for. When to use which.

Do not skip this. Most people pick up an AI tool and start typing without understanding what they are actually using. You do not want to be six months in and realize you have been using the wrong feature for everything.

Turn memory on.

Whatever tool you are using, find the memory settings and turn them on.

Memory means the AI starts learning from your conversations. What you push back on. How you like things formatted. What you actually want versus what you said you wanted. Over time, your AI becomes yours.

Here is where I find things get interesting. My AI is not the same as your AI, and most people do not realize that. I have been using Claude with memory and instructions long enough that it knows how I want output delivered, what I do not want, and when to push back on me. If you take a prompt I use and run it yourself, you will get something directionally similar. You will not get the same thing. That is not the prompt failing. That is your AI not knowing you yet.

The sooner you turn memory on, the sooner it starts building that understanding. Do it before your first real conversation, not after six months of chats you cannot get back.

Write your instructions.

This is what stops the cheerleader problem.

Connect what needs connecting.

In both Claude and Copilot, your admin sets up the connectors. You enable what is available to you. Check either way. If the system you need is not connected, your AI cannot reach it.

If you are using Claude Cowork specifically, run the setup skill that is built in. It walks you through configuration based on your role and surfaces what to set up. You do not have to figure it out from scratch.

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Now You Are Ready

None of this is the actual work yet. This is the foundation.

Get the training. Turn the memory on. Write the instructions. Connect your systems. Run the setup skill if you are using Cowork.

Then you are ready to have the conversation about what to actually hand off to AI, and how to do it in a way that gets you useful output instead of a very confident first draft of something you never asked for.

That is next.

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Next up: Getting started is just a conversation. How to describe your manual work in plain language, why telling AI to ask you questions changes everything, and how to choose between Claude and Copilot based on where your work actually lives.