How I Actually Use AI to Help Run Tec (And Why I'm Writing About It)

After using AI to help run parts of Tec's business for about a year, Tec President Adam Kilbourne, FSMPS, CPSM, is ready to share his experiences and thoughts on the technology.

I started with ChatGPT, like most people did. Then I found Claude's Cowork function, and I switched almost entirely over to Claude for actual work. I still keep ChatGPT open for search-style questions and for creating graphics, but when I need something done, I go to Claude. ChatGPT has rolled out something similar for real work now too. I haven't tried it, and it's not on my list to.

Most of what I know, I picked up from YouTube. I watch a lot of videos on what's new and what other people are doing with AI, then I look around Tec for a place to try it out. Some ideas work. Some don't. The ones that stick, I keep using and keep refining, and that's what this series is going to be about - what I've actually put to use here, how I set it up, and the real prompts behind it, so you can build off what already works instead of starting from a blank page.

The easiest place to start is document summaries. Upload a PDF or a Word file, tell it how long you want the summary and whether you want bullets, paragraphs, or a mix, and it hands you exactly that. Any AI tool can do this one well. It's the on-ramp, not the destination, but it's the fastest way to see what these tools can actually do.

Where it got useful for me was everything past that. I have Claude organize my receipts for expense reports - it reads each one, pulls the vendor, amount, and date, and files it the way our accounting process expects. I have it write the first draft of my weekly agenda for our project manager board meeting. I have it build a financial report based on where we currently stand, and I run a daily check on our balance sheet the same way. It also runs searches for MEP engineering opportunities we should be tracking, so I'm not the one combing through bid sites every morning. None of these started as complicated prompts, and none of them are complicated now that they're built. I'll walk through the actual setup for each of these in later posts.

A few months back, Claude added a design function, and it's more capable than I expected. It won't create a logo or original artwork - that's still ChatGPT's job in my workflow - but it will lay out a page, a website, a business card, or a piece of branded content around whatever direction you give it. For a firm like ours, where I'm often the one putting together internal materials between projects and our marketing team, that's saved real time.

The biggest project I ran through Claude this year was our annual employee reviews. I uploaded payroll reports, data pulled from Deltek Vantagepoint, and last year's review notes, and had it build a summary document for each employee - general information, last year's review, and this year's performance data, pulled together in one place for the first time. We'd never had that in a usable format before. From there, I built an employee self-assessment form and a reviewer assessment form, and had Claude catalog the responses from both into a summary for each employee and each reviewer. Now reviewers have something to work from throughout the year instead of a form they fill out once in January and forget about until next January.

Those are just the ones that come to mind first. I'll keep adding to this list as I find new places to put AI to work, and each post in this series will cover one of them in enough detail that you could set it up yourself the same afternoon you read it.

If you run a business like mine and you're wondering where to start, my honest answer is: start with a document summary, then look for the task on your desk that you dread doing every week. That's usually where the real time gets saved.