Practical AI Guides for Business Owners
Choose the decision you need to make next. Each guide turns a recent teaching into something you can write, test or use with your team.
Build one useful system
These guides expand on my recent Cebu talks and Conversation AI workshops. You can use them independently or work through them in order: define the job, prepare its knowledge, check its output and decide how to package the work.
Write the agent's job description
Define who it serves, what it may do and when a person takes over. Includes a one-page operating brief.
Choose a home for the knowledge
Use your team's working habits to choose a home, then organize the current facts and operating instructions.
Check the work after automation
Review research, usefulness, voice and final actions separately. Find the part of the workflow that needs repair.
Choose one service to sell
Connect a customer problem to a bounded deliverable, acceptance checks and a working relationship.
Work through a customer conversation
If your first project is a customer-facing agent, use the conversation planning guide. It covers the trigger, the customer's desired next step, the agent's role and the handoff to a person.
For guided learning, the program comparison explains the different scope of The Bootstrap MBA and the Conversation AI Challenge.
The talks behind the guides
- Future of Agencies, Cebu: business knowledge, tool connections and a repeatable method.
- Cebu meetup: choosing a customer, defining an offer and delivering a focused service.
The worksheets develop those lessons into practical steps. Where an example is hypothetical, it is labeled as such. Start with a small test in your own business and judge the result before expanding the system.
How do you choose your first AI workflow?
Start with a repeated job whose inputs, responsible person and next step you can describe. If the responsibility is unclear, write the agent brief. If answers depend on scattered or outdated documents, work on the knowledge base. If the automation runs but the result disappoints you, use the quality checks.
For more event context, read my HighLevel LIVE Manila recap for nontechnical founders.
Source notes
Guides developed from Cris Vinson’s October 2026 Cebu talks and September 2026 Conversation AI workshops. Worksheets and labeled examples extend the teaching into practical exercises.
Start with one job
The operating brief gives you a concrete first step, even if you have not chosen an AI platform.