On Wednesday I taught a live training where we went from zero — no account, nothing installed — to a working AI setup in sixty minutes, ending with attendees building their first AI Employee. Nobody needed to be technical. What they needed was the right sequence, because in AI setup, order matters more than effort.
The five steps, in order
- Step 1 — Get set up on Claude. A free account is enough to start. Opt out of model training during signup: that's your privacy foundation, laid before anything else touches the box.
- Step 2 — Personalize it. Give it instructions for how you communicate, what tone you write in, and how you want answers delivered — before this, you're talking to a stranger.
- Step 3 — Build your AI brain. Load your business context once: what you sell, who your clients are, your voice, your standards. This is the step most people skip, and it's the reason most people don't get great results.
- Step 4 — Connect your accounts. Your inbox and calendar at minimum, because that's where the real work is.
- Step 5 — Build your first AI Employee. One skill, one defined job — like an inbox dashboard that tells you every morning exactly what needs you.
Why one tool, learned deeply
People ask why I run my whole setup in one AI tool instead of a stack of ten. Simple: I'd rather learn one tool and do as much as I possibly can with it. Are there tools that do one specific thing a bit better? Sure. But if I can do 90% of my work very well in one place, I'm going to be amazing at that place. Ten half-learned tools lose to one mastered one — and your team can actually follow you there.
The step everyone wants to skip
Step 3 is the least glamorous and the most important. Building the AI's brain is the most work in the whole setup — and once you've done it, what you get out is tremendously different. Load it once, and you never have to re-explain your business again. Skip it, and every chat starts from zero, which is why most people's AI results feel generic.
The full sequence is what my free Travel AI Kit walks through, and it's what we build together — live, with your laptop open — in my AI Masterclass. One hour, in the right order, and you're on the other side of the divide.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise sales at Google, Microsoft, and IBM; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.
About Claire
