By Soren Neupane — content writer, tutor. He is based in Wellington.

I promised to give you my prep strategy before attending Jon Bell’s Masterclass in last week’s writeup. So here it is.

No secret sauce. Just homework.

Why so scared?

Let me say it plainly, because it keeps getting said badly: AI is taking everybody’s job is not the problem. It never was. The problem is the shying away — the refusal to sit down with the thing and learn how it behaves.

And here you need to hold two ideas at once. The first is that knowing what AI is, in the abstract, is nearly useless. The second is that knowing how to make it work in your own corner of your own job is nearly everything. One is a chit-chat session of opinions. The other is a skill.

Most of the anti-AI crowd I meet in Wellington have plenty of the first and none of the second. Which is a bit like having strong views on cricket without ever having held a bat.

The homework: a search, a ship, a spreadsheet

My preparation began, appropriately enough, with a Google search: resources for Claude Cowork beginners tutorials.

What came back was this :among the results was an exercise built on the Titanic — the passenger list, the counts of men, women and children, who boarded where, who survived. It is a public dataset, freely available to anyone (search “Titanic dataset” and you will find it). Data scientists have been practising on it for years.

And yet, for a beginner, it is perfect. You already know the story. You know how it ends. So you are free to play with the questions — ask them clumsily, ask them cleverly, phrase them five different ways — and watch how the answers change.

That was the real lesson. Not the data. The conversation.

Without that rehearsal I would not have kept pace with the class on the day. With it, I was — dare I say — occasionally ahead.

The machine: brilliant, eager, clueless

The biggest mistake the sceptics make is imagining AI as an evil genius plotting world domination from a server farm somewhere in Hobsonville. It is not.

Think of it instead as an intern fresh out of university. This intern has read every book, watched every YouTube tutorial and memorised most of the internet. Blindingly fast. Fiercely enthusiastic. And, yet, completely devoid of common sense.

You do not need to code it. You need to talk to it. If you can text your mate Dave to ask whether the All Blacks game is on free-to-air, you already have all the technical prowess required.

The lazy path: start where it hurts least

If you are inherently lazy — and if you are reading an article about avoiding effort, let us be honest, you are — AI is your new best friend.

Stop trying to build a rocket ship. Use it for the boring stuff you despise.

Say you need to decline a wedding invitation from a second cousin you have not seen since the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Do not spend twenty agonising minutes wondering whether “Kind regards” sounds too aggressive. Type this instead: Write a polite, distinctly Kiwi email telling my cousin Bruce I can’t make his destination wedding in Taupō because my couch needs me. Keep it casual.

Done in seconds. Migraine avoided. Fifteen minutes reclaimed for staring blankly at TikTok.

The quirks: imperfect, and that’s the point

The secret to getting comfortable with AI is accepting that it does not need to be perfect. It needs to get you eighty percent of the way there. Let it draft the newsletter boilerplate. Let it brainstorm dinner when the fridge holds half a lime and a jar of generic mustard. Then stroll in like a benevolent boss, tweak a few words so it sounds less like a robot, and take all the credit.

It is glorious. It is also, I should add, still your job to check its work. The intern is clever. But … The intern is not accountable. You are.

The view from the back row

Here is what I learned, sitting in a masterclass at an age when most people assume you have stopped learning anything at all.

Nobody is asking you to swear by The Burning Man or start wearing fleece vests. But clinging to typewriter-era pride while the world speeds past is a fine way to end up wondering why everyone else has moved on while you are still counting on your fingers.

The robots are not going to take your job. A human who knows how to use them just might.

You snooze, you lose. Or, as the bus driver on his normal daily route would put it, he is not waiting for you either.

If you want a gentler on-ramp than I had, Jon Bell is running another one-day class, Getting the Most from AI: Practical AI for Everyday Use, on October 18. Go. Sit in the back row if you must.

Then open a chat window, type something into it, and see what happens. The ship has already sailed — but unlike the Titanic, this one still has room on board.

A “thank you” to Soren Neupane for sending this article to The Upper Hutt Connection.

06/10/26