Practical guides to using AI at work.
Practical guides and articles from Clerq, the practice behind AI at Work - direct answers on using AI in an ordinary office job, plus operational guides to the systems we build inside UK businesses.
Using AI in an ordinary office job
The everyday guides: prompts, email, meetings, spreadsheets, tools, safety and what any of it means for your job. If you read one thing here, make it the start-here guide below - it holds the whole method in a single article, and everything else goes deeper on one part of it.
How to use AI at work: a practical starting point.
One task, a decent brief and the habit of checking the output - the whole method in one article. Read this one first; the rest of this page expands on it.
AI prompts for work that actually hold up.
Seven briefs that cover most of an office week, and how to adapt each one to your job.
Using AI for work emails without sounding like a robot.
Keep your own voice, handle the four difficult emails, and know which ones AI should never write.
AI for meetings: notes, minutes and actions.
Transcript or scrawl into minutes in a minute, plus the three checks before anything circulates.
AI for spreadsheets: formulas, cleaning and analysis.
Three jobs AI does well, the prompts for each, and the checking habit that keeps numbers honest.
Choosing AI tools for ordinary office work.
The three kinds of tool, why the one you already have usually wins, and four questions before paying.
Will AI take my job? An honest working answer.
What is actually happening to office jobs, which tasks are moving, and the moves that protect you.
AI agents, explained for people with actual jobs.
A chatbot answers, an agent acts - what that means in practice, minus the keynote hype.
Where AI genuinely saves time in a working week.
The five places the minutes actually come from, and the four ways AI quietly costs time instead.
Using AI safely at work: what never goes in the chat box.
The never list, the anonymising technique, and what to do when something has already gone in.
Is AI a fad? Why it's becoming the operating model.
The Sequoia "sell work, not software" thesis, the agentic adoption gap, and what it changes about the job you do.
Business operations, in more depth
Operational guides for UK businesses, from the team that builds these systems inside customer businesses: month-end, cash flow, payables, credit control, returns, suppliers, governance and adoption. Several of the systems these guides describe are already running in production inside customer businesses - if you would rather have one built than build it, each article ends with a way to enquire.
UK SME AI adoption: what the data actually says.
A sourced statistics roundup with denominators, caveats and a plain reading of each number.
Accounts payable automation with control of every payment.
Capture, coding, matching and payment runs with approvals, segregation and an audit trail.
Credit control that chases consistently.
A chase ladder that protects relationships, and the collections work that should stay human.
AI for Xero, QuickBooks and Sage: what actually works.
AI workflows around the ledger, not instead of it, with least-privilege access and human sign-off.
AI governance sized for a business, not a bank.
A minimum viable AI policy, the UK regulatory reality and supplier questions that matter.
A practical month-end close checklist.
A controlled sequence for evidence, reconciliations, exceptions, review and sign-off.
How to build a 13-week cash-flow forecast.
Build the weekly view, govern assumptions and turn variance into decisions.
A controlled returns reconciliation process.
Match order, carrier, warehouse, refund, inventory and finance records.
A customer service triage framework.
Classify, enrich and route enquiries with meaningful human escalation.
Build a marketing dashboard people can trust.
Start with decisions, govern KPI definitions and expose data quality.
A supplier contract renewal checklist.
Track dates, evidence, decisions and human review without pretending to provide legal advice.
Where to start with AI in your business.
Why AI projects stall before they produce anything useful, and how to choose a first workflow that finishes.
How much does AI implementation cost in the UK.
The seat-licence floor, what a first workflow actually costs, and why a single number is always a guess.
AI ROI for UK SMEs: model payback without false precision.
A practical way to calculate workflow payback without treating estimates as evidence.
Hiring vs automation: the real cost comparison.
Should the next hire be a person or a workflow? The cost inputs, the controls and the work that stays human-led.
Agentic AI in finance operations: where it actually works.
The workflows in UK finance and operations where agentic AI is actually working in production in 2026, plus the ones still firmly people work.
What 90 days of AI implementation actually delivers.
A straight answer on what a controlled 90-day implementation should establish, measure and hand over.
Expense management that captures every receipt and still checks the spend.
Receipt capture, policy rules, approval routing and card matching, with duplicate detection across both channels.
Take the method with you.
These articles show the thinking. AI at Work turns it into a practical, hype-free guide for your own working week - PDF and EPUB, from £17.