ChatGPT for Complete Beginners at Work: 7 Tasks You Can Do Today

Lesson notes and practice

Practise seven beginner workplace uses for ChatGPT: emails, summaries, reports, meeting preparation, workplace English, feedback analysis and action plans. Clear context and careful review matter more than a complicated prompt.

The three parts of a useful prompt

Give the context, explain the task and specify the output format. For example, identify the audience, say what they need to do and request a short email or a table. The lesson also recommends asking for missing information before a report is drafted, so gaps do not become invented facts.

Seven tasks and what to check

For emails, check the request, tone and dates. For summaries, check deadlines, risks and next actions against the source. For reports, separate supplied facts from missing information. For meetings, identify the objective, decisions and action owners. When improving English, preserve the original meaning. For feedback, retain the evidence behind each theme. For action plans, check resources, responsibilities and realistic measures of success.

Try it: turn rough notes into a meeting brief

Fictional notes: an adult-learning team will meet on Monday for 20 minutes to plan a library open day; Sam will bring a room list; Priya will bring an equipment list; the event date and budget have not been agreed. Ask for a three-item agenda and a table with action, owner and due date. Instruct the tool to mark unknown fields as not agreed and to add no new facts.

Review the draft against the evidence

There should be no invented event date, budget or action deadline. Bringing a list does not automatically make someone responsible for booking rooms or buying equipment. Check that the agenda fits 20 minutes and leaves room for decisions. If the output makes assumptions, ask for a corrected version and explain which facts were unsupported.

Keep the practice safe and useful

Use fictional or approved material and a tool your organisation permits. Do not paste personal or confidential records into an unapproved service. Compare the original notes with the final draft, then write down one prompt change that improved the result. The person using the output remains responsible for checking it.

Original practice activities accompany the video. Notes reviewed 8 October 2026.