The Friday Thing #865

Friday. Seattle. Rain.

The Friday Thing 865 may leave you believing that this weekly note has become an AI newsletter - because there aren't enough of those already, right? :)

This week, my team and I launched a new experiment to get past some of the friction of AI adoption I have talked about recently. We have a ton of people using AI of course, but in keeping with my recent editions, I have been looking for ways to get back to prompting a bit and create an easy on ramp. That led us to launch "The Daily Prompt" on Tuesday with an aim to issue one prompt per day for the next month that provides our team with single click, instant gratification - and will evolve from somewhat simple productivity prompts to much more sophisticated prompts. We then plan to build the most popular and useful ones into a prompt tool that we're calling Comms Copilot. More on that in a later edition.

The motif of The Daily Prompt is an advent calendar - those delightful things you see around this time a year. Instead of opening a door each day and getting a small chocolate, you get a valuable prompt. Here is how the first one looked on Tuesday.

Here's the prompt in full if you want to cut and paste and try out yourself. It works great in Copilot, but you can try with other tools too.

Create a to-do list based on the contents of my inbox, prioritizing tasks by urgency, relevance to current projects, and any actions required from my top collaborators? place them in a bulleted list

And if you're a Microsoftie, you should be able to click the tile above and this prompt will prepopulate for you in Copilot. If you want to be added to The Daily Prompt, drop me a note.

Based on initial feedback from our team, we seem to be on to something here. I am now planning to package all of this up at the end of the month and share the prompt list (which is in Excel), the email template and some tips on how to execute this campaign yourself. Feel free to drop a note in the comments below on LinkedIn if you'd like to receive it.

These types of projects are some of my favourite things to work on because they tap into the behavioural science element of communications and marketing that I love so much and that I think is wildly underestimated.

That's all for this week. I'll be in London next week, talking AI, Copilot and much more.

Music for this week is Policy Of Truth by Depeche Mode.

Happy Friday

-Steve