Breakfast Club
Spartanburg AI Day
March 12, 2026
Kyser Thompson · AI for the Rest of Us
The Four Principles
These came up throughout the day. They’re the foundation for how you work with AI going forward.
Stop Googling, Start Talking.
AI isn’t a search engine. Talk to it like a smart colleague who happens to know a lot. When you type a Google-style query into Claude, you get a Google-style answer — generic and surface-level. But when you give it context about who you are, what your business does, and what you actually need, the output changes completely. Give it context. Ask follow-ups. Push back on answers you don’t like. The conversation is the product.
Talk Back.
Never accept the first answer. The first answer is a first draft. Always. Think of it as a loop: you describe what you want, you look at what you get, you sharpen your description, you go again. “Make it shorter” is fine, but “cut the first two paragraphs and make the conclusion more action-oriented” is way better. Claude gets better the more specific your feedback is. Every round gets you closer to what you actually want.
Don’t Outsource Your Voice.
AI writes like AI unless you teach it YOUR voice. Generic. Polished. Soulless. Your sales emails sound different from your competitor’s. Your customer communications have a tone that’s uniquely yours. That’s what Skills are for — you teach Claude your voice, your format, your standards. Without a Skill, you get generic AI output. With a Skill, you get output that sounds like you. Night and day.
Tool, Not Crutch.
Use AI to do things you couldn’t do before. Don’t use it to avoid learning things you should know. Analyze 500 customer reviews. Build a dashboard from a spreadsheet. Organize 300 files. Those are things AI makes possible that weren’t practical before. But don’t use it to avoid thinking, to skip learning, or to replace the judgment that makes your business yours. The goal is to make you better at what you do — not to do it for you.
Talking to AI
Three Levels of Asking
How you ask determines what you get.
WHO / WHAT / WHAT Framework
- WHO you are — your role, background, industry
- WHAT you do — your business context, daily work
- WHAT you need — the specific output or deliverable
That simple structure gets you 80% of the way to a great response. Most people skip all three and wonder why the answer is generic.
Six Ways to Level Up Your Prompts
Your prompting cheat sheet. You don’t need all six every time — even one or two will make a real difference.
| # | Technique | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Context | Give background about you and the situation. “I run a 16-location oil change business in the Upstate SC market.” |
| 2 | Examples | Show what good looks like. “Here are 3 emails I’ve sent. Write the next one like this.” |
| 3 | Constraints | Set boundaries on length, format, and tone. “Keep it under 200 words. No bullet points.” |
| 4 | Step-by-step | Ask it to walk through its reasoning before giving a conclusion. “Walk me through this decision step by step.” |
| 5 | Think first | Ask it to figure out what it needs before answering. “Before you answer, think about what info you’d need.” |
| 6 | Tone/role | Give it a persona. “You are a commercial estimator with 20 years of experience in SC.” |
Model Choice & Reasoning
Claude has multiple models — think of it like choosing the right tool for the job. Haiku is fast and light, good for simple tasks. Sonnet is the default — balanced speed and quality, good for 90% of what you do. Opus is the most powerful — slower, uses more of your daily quota, but save it for complex analysis or when quality really matters.
Extended Thinking: When you turn this on, Claude thinks step-by-step before answering. You can see its reasoning. Use it for complex math, multi-step analysis, or anything where you want to verify HOW it got to its answer. Don’t use it for “write me a quick email.”
Why Claude
We spent the day on Claude because it goes from chatbot to agent in one place.
The Suite of Products
- Chat — the conversation interface you already know.
- Projects — your workspace with custom instructions and uploaded files.
- Artifacts — Claude can build dashboards, documents, and interactive tools.
- Connectors — plug in your Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Notion.
- Skills — reusable instruction packages that encode your voice and process.
- Plugins — browse and install new capabilities, like browser extensions for Claude.
- Cowork — AI that works on tasks while you do other things.
- Claude Code — describe what you need, Claude writes the code.
Most platforms do one or two of these. Claude does all of them.
Claude in Excel & PowerPoint
Excel: Claude reads your entire workbook — formulas, dependencies, multiple tabs. Ask questions and it answers with cell-level citations.
PowerPoint: Reads your slide master, fonts, and colors. Generates and edits slides that match your brand. Available on all paid plans.
What AI Can Do Right Now
As of March 2026
Build Software
Generate working apps, dashboards, and tools.
Write & Edit
Drafts, emails, proposals, content at your level.
Analyze Data
Patterns, summaries, and insights from your files.
Research
Deep dives, comparisons, market analysis.
Organize
Sort files, extract info, build spreadsheets.
Automate
Recurring tasks, scheduled reports, workflows.
The Bridge
Three things you need to know before going from chatbot to agent.
Everything is a text file
Skills, custom instructions, configuration — all plain text you can read and edit. No databases, no code, no black boxes.
Markdown is the new Word doc
Simple formatting with # for headings, ** for bold, - for bullets. Every AI tool speaks it natively.
Folder structure matters
An organized folder gets better results than a junk drawer. Think filing cabinet, not desktop pile.
These Tools Have Quirks
- They forget context. In a long conversation, Claude can lose track of things you said 30 messages ago. Remind it. Or put it in your Project’s custom instructions so it never forgets.
- They hallucinate. Claude will sometimes state things with total confidence that are completely wrong. Verify anything that matters.
- They change every week. Anthropic ships updates constantly. A feature that didn’t exist last Tuesday might be live today. Stay curious, stay flexible.
The mindset that works: treat it like a brilliant new hire in their first week. Incredibly capable, occasionally confused, gets better every day.
Working with Agents
You went from worker to manager. Here’s how to manage well.
Agent Playbook
Sandwich your tasks — Start a task, do something else while it works. Come back to the results.
Scope the sandbox — Only give access to the folder it needs. Never your whole system.
Check the plan — Read what Cowork proposes before it executes. This is your management moment.
Log what worked — Save your best task descriptions. Over time, these become Skills.
What Skills Are
Reusable instruction packages. Teach Claude once, use it forever.
Brand Voice
Write like you, every time. No more generic AI output.
Report Format
Standard templates for proposals, weekly updates, invoices.
Analysis Framework
Consistent methodology for reviewing bids, costs, data.
Go to Customize → Skills → Create with Claude, and Claude will interview you and build the skill. No files to write by hand. If you find yourself explaining the same thing repeatedly, that’s a skill waiting to be built.
Projects vs. Skills vs. Custom Instructions
Projects store knowledge
Reference materials, context docs, past work. They give Claude background.
Skills teach how to work
Steps, methodology, voice, process. Your standards, encoded.
Custom Instructions = identity
What Claude always knows about you. Carries forward across every conversation.
The three work together: Projects give context, Skills give procedure, Custom Instructions give identity.
The Five Key Concepts
The mental models that make everything else click.
Message in a Bottle
Every prompt is a message to someone you can’t see. The better the message, the better the result.
When you write a prompt, there’s no body language, no tone of voice, no shared context. Just your words. This isn’t about magic words or secret formulas — it’s about clear communication. And that’s a skill everyone in this room already has. You communicate with clients, employees, and vendors every day. Same skill, new medium.
Hallucinations Are Real
AI will confidently tell you things that are completely wrong. Verify everything.
This is the honest truth that a lot of AI hype skips over. AI will cite studies that don’t exist. It’ll invent statistics. It’ll give you a contract clause that sounds legitimate but isn’t. This isn’t a bug they’re going to fix next month — it’s how the technology works. Start with low-stakes tasks where mistakes don’t matter much. Build trust over time. And never send a client something Claude wrote without reading it first.
Everyone Becomes a Manager
AI doesn’t eliminate your job. It makes you the manager of AI workers.
You still need to know what good output looks like. You still set the standards. You still review the work. Think about how you onboard an employee — you give them instructions, you spell out the job, you define what “good” looks like and what to avoid. That’s exactly what you do with Claude. The better the instructions, the better the output.
Talkers vs. Doers
Chatbots give you info and you act. Agents research, write, execute, and you review.
This is the big shift. Chatbots are conversations — you ask, it answers, you do the work. Agents are task runners — you describe what you need, AI does the research, the writing, the building, and you review the output. The gap between “I use AI sometimes” and “AI is part of how my business runs” lives right here.
Taste Is the Scarce Resource
Generation is free. Judgment is what matters.
Now that anyone can produce text, code, images, and dashboards, what becomes scarce? Knowing what’s good. Knowing what serves your customer. Knowing what fits your brand. AI handles volume. You handle quality. You set the standard, Claude does the production. Your taste — your knowledge of your business, your customers, your standards — that’s something AI can’t replace.
Kyser Thompson
AI for the Rest of Us · Breakfast Club Spartanburg AI Day, March 12, 2026