AI Tips For Regular People.

AI For You | Kay Malcolm, VP @ Oracle | LinkedIn Top Voice | LinkedIn Learning Instructor

This is your running list of tiny AI tips, the kind you pull up and use. I add a new card every week. Here are two to start. Save them and steal them.

Tip 1: AI does my grocery run

How many recipes have you saved this month that you swore you’d cook and never did? For me it’s the boring translation step that kills it, turning “looks delicious” into a real list of stuff to buy. So I stopped doing it by hand. Screenshot the two recipes you want this week, hand both images to a free AI like ChatGPT or Claude, and paste this:

Combine these two recipes into one grocery list. Merge duplicate ingredients and organize by store aisle.

Ten seconds later you get one clean list, duplicates merged, grouped by aisle. The first time I ran it, it caught a head of garlic I’d already double-bought. Everything else is on the card.

WORK BESTIE TIP: Put both screenshots in the same message as the prompt, not separate chats. It needs to see both recipes at once to catch the overlaps.

The grocery-run recipe card: screenshot two recipes, drop them in, paste one prompt, send the aisle-by-aisle list to the cart

The whole method on one card. Save it and steal it every Sunday.

Tip 2: Make AI ask you first

Ever taken the first thing AI handed you, even though it was clearly built for someone else’s life? You ask for a workout plan and get a six-day gym grind made for a person with no job, no kids, and two good knees. Here’s the fix. Bolt these five words onto the end of any request:

Ask me 3 clarifying questions first.

It forces the AI to interview you about your real situation before it answers, so you get something built for your life instead of a generic guess. I tried it on getting back in shape and it asked how many days I can really train, the state of my knee, and whether I meant the gym or my living room floor. The card has five copy-paste requests to steal.

WORK BESTIE TIP: Tell it the truth when you answer. If you have three days, say three, not five. The plan is only as real as your answers.

The Ask Me First Bank: five copy-paste requests, each ending in "Ask me 3 questions first"

All five in one place. Save it and steal the line for anything.

Hope these help! Send to your bestie, don’t gatekeep!

VP @ Oracle | LinkedIn Top Voice | LinkedIn Learning Instructor | Views are my own

AI For You is a weekly newsletter for corporate women (guys you can read it too, relax fellas and let us girls support each other) navigating careers and lives in the AI era. Real tools. Real prompts. No tech background required. - kaymalcolm.com