AI should not replace the human parts of your business. It should remove friction
from the mechanical parts — so you have more capacity for judgment,
creativity, relationships, and service.
Build One Thing This Week
Don't try to transform your entire business today. Pick one useful project and build it.
Appetizers
15–30 minutes
Create a Project for your business
Write a one-page business context document
Try the Mastermind Council pattern
Entrées
1–3 hours
Build a meeting-preparation workflow
Create an email-triage process
Organize a small business knowledge base
Chef's Table
5–20 hours
Build a COMPASS-style knowledge system
Connect files + email + calendar + tasks
Build an internal tool with Claude Code
Free download · no email required
The Small Business AI Capability Map
474 practical skills and implementation ideas across 25 domains — from
prompting and context engineering through meetings, marketing, operations,
agents, security, and organizational adoption. Every domain is broken into
the same three levels as above, so you can find your next useful thing to
build at whatever depth you have time for.
It is a map of capabilities to learn, build, and connect — not a list of
products to buy.
The pattern underneath every useful AI system I've built or seen work.
1
Start With the Problem, Not the AI
Start by asking where you are spending time, attention, or money that you shouldn't be.
2
Context Is the Most Important Ingredient
AI becomes far more useful when it understands your company, customers, goals, history, examples, and constraints.
3
Build Memory, Not a Pile of Chats
Turn meetings, decisions, processes, and documents into reusable future context.
4
Give AI Access to Tools and Systems
Files, email, calendar, tasks, CRM, web access, and code turn an isolated chatbot into something much closer to an assistant.
5
Turn Prompts Into Repeatable Processes
The goal is not one clever prompt. Build repeatable recipes that include context, constraints, examples, verification, and iteration.
6
Taste Before You Serve
Protect credentials, control permissions, verify important work, and keep humans at consequential decision points.
7
Become the Self-Improving System
Continuously improve your context, instructions, processes, tools, organization, and judgment.
Prompts You Can Use Today
Copy these, paste them into whichever assistant you use, and replace the
bracketed placeholders. No signup required.
Meeting Preparation
Turn AI into a research assistant before an important conversation.
I am meeting with [PERSON] about [PURPOSE].
Help me prepare.
Using everything you know or can access about this person, our previous interactions, their organization, and the purpose of the meeting:
1. Give me a concise briefing.
2. Identify relevant history and prior conversations.
3. Identify likely priorities, interests, or concerns.
4. Find useful areas of common ground.
5. Suggest five questions I should consider asking.
6. Identify anything I should avoid overlooking.
7. Give me a one-page meeting brief I can review immediately before the meeting.
Separate verified facts from assumptions or suggestions.
Meeting Digestion
Turn the conversation into actions and organizational memory.
Here is the transcript or notes from a meeting.
Help me digest it.
Identify:
1. Key decisions
2. Important insights
3. Commitments I made
4. Commitments others made
5. Open questions
6. Follow-up items
7. Tasks, including suggested owners and due dates where possible
8. Information worth preserving as long-term context
Then draft a concise follow-up email.
Finally, tell me what this meeting should change about my understanding of the person, project, or business.
Mastermind Council
Create an AI advisory board with competing perspectives instead of asking for one generic answer.
Create a council around [TOPIC].
The council should have at least five primary members, each representing a distinct area of expertise relevant to the topic.
Treat the council like a real advisory board.
Members should not automatically agree. When perspectives differ, have them explain and debate those differences.
When I bring a question or decision to the council:
1. Identify the important dimensions of the problem.
2. Let each relevant member analyze it from their area of expertise.
3. Surface meaningful disagreements and tradeoffs.
4. Ask for additional information when it would materially change the analysis.
5. Synthesize the discussion into clear options, risks, and recommendations.
The council may bring in additional specialist advisors when the question falls outside the expertise of the primary members.
Make Every Meeting Improve the Next One
The goal isn't better meeting notes. The goal is accumulated organizational memory.
Prepare
Meet
Capture
Digest
Act
Remember
Remember feeds the next Prepare
Every meeting, decision, document, and process should become useful future context.
A Few Tools Worth Exploring
Not a directory. Just the ones that came up.
General AI
ChatGPT
Claude
Gemini
Research & Learning
Deep Research
NotebookLM
Building
Claude Code
Knowledge & Automation
Projects
Files
Connectors
Agents
OpenClaw
Don't try to adopt everything. Pick an ecosystem, learn it deeply, and expand
when a real problem requires another tool.
Give Yourself 20 Deliberate Hours
Not 20 hours reading AI news.
Not 20 hours watching videos about what other people built.
Spend 20 hours:
Building
Connecting
Organizing
Testing
Improving
0
5
10
15
20
Hours
Twenty deliberate hours of practice will change your understanding of what these
systems can do.
That's a challenge and an opinion from experience — not a research finding.
Ryan Grissinger
Founder, Polaris Pixels
I help small businesses build technology systems that reduce friction, organize
knowledge, and create more capacity for the work that matters.
