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5 AI Tips September 2026
Ray Poynter (The Future Place)
The second in a series of three webinars where Ray Poynter shares practical tips to help you use AI better in research and insights.
The theme for September is the shift from prompting to delegating: moving from steering AI one question at a time to defining a piece of work, giving AI the sources, rules and checks it needs, and asking it to stop where human judgement is required.
The five tips:
- Let AI find the context: point AI at your emails, files and notes, and let it gather the background, reporting its sources and any gaps.
- Move from schedules to triggers: set up prompts that run when something happens, such as a new brief, transcript or client email arriving.
- Do the storyfinding first: ask “what is going on here?” and get the evidence on the table before asking AI to write the report.
- Use AI as a hostile reviewer: ask AI to find unsupported claims, inconsistent numbers and likely client objections, rather than simply polishing your draft.
- Spend intelligence where it matters: match the model and effort level to the risk of the task.
Plus “Tip Zero”: use AI to make you brighter, by asking it how to improve your work as well as asking it to do the work.
Each tip is illustrated with worked examples from real research tasks, including brief triage, survey storyfinding and a sceptical review of a difficult email thread.
The slides are available to download using the links above and below the video.
