🧳🤖 Day 3: The Jet-Lag-Free Assistant – AI Support That Travels Well

Extra Learning Materials for the keen beans.

Hello again!

Now that you’ve seen how well-crafted prompts bring AI to life in a chatbot, today we’re expanding on that by looking at AI as your assistant or co‑pilot—a smarter, more proactive collaborator that supports your day-to-day tasks and decision-making. ☕🧠

Unlike chatbots that respond to questions, AI assistants are designed to work with you—drafting, analysing, and suggesting in real time. These custom AI assistants are easy to create using all major AI platforms:

🧩 Custom AI Assistants – Built In Everywhere

  • ChatGPT → Custom GPTs
  • Gemini → Custom Gems
  • Claude → Projects
  • Poe → PoeBots

✅ Whatever platform you use, the same core principles apply for effective setup and collaboration:

🎯 The Co‑Pilot Advantage

Goal: Collaborate with AI to complete strategic and creative tasks more efficiently.

Context: Perfect for repetitive processes, personalised content creation, or data-supported insights.

Source: Internal materials, reports, email templates, or strategic documents.

Expectations: Useful first drafts, thoughtful recommendations, and decision-making support.

🛠️ How to Set Up and Use a Custom AI Assistant

📝 Define the Role: Example: “You are a university assistant helping draft weekly updates for international partners.”

📚 Provide Context & Data: Upload or link to key documents (e.g., previous updates, brand guidelines, or programme brochures).

🔁 Refine Through Use: Test how the assistant responds, refine its instructions, and adjust as needed to align with your tone and purpose.

🌍 Real-World Use Case

A recruitment officer configures a custom GPT in ChatGPT to generate personalised outreach emails based on region and student interest. Another team member creates a Gemini assistant that analyses monthly engagement metrics and offers insight summaries.

🛠️ Interactive Exercise 🛠️

Goal: Create and test a basic custom AI assistant tailored to one of your recurring tasks.

Context: Choose a process you repeat regularly—e.g., writing event summaries, responding to funding enquiries, or drafting internal updates.

Source: Base it on documents or tasks you already manage manually.

Expectations: A working assistant that delivers first-draft support or key insights with minimal effort.

💬 Suggested Task: Use ChatGPT to build a custom GPT designed to answer FAQs from international students. Give it 3–5 examples to get started.

✨ Today’s Action Step ✨

Customise: Use your preferred AI platform to build a lightweight assistant for one of your tasks. Add a role description, some reference material, and test how well it supports your workflow.

Tomorrow, we’ll see how to take things further by using AI to completely automate those repetitive jobs that still take up too much of your time.

Enjoy your coffee break,

Cato ☕✨