Pro Cool 1: If I set someone up with AI today

A while back I spent three and a half hours in Troy's office. Troy runs Pro Cool, the air con and electrical business in Maitland that looks after mining and transport gear, and he's also behind Hunter River Retreat, the spa cottages out at Rosebrook. Two completely different businesses, one bloke, and he wanted to know what he could do with AI beyond the basics.

It got me thinking about a question I get asked a lot. If someone's starting from scratch today, what's the actual setup? Not the theory, the shopping list. Here it is.

Get a Claude subscription. Start on Pro, around twenty bucks a month, to find your feet. The moment you're running things daily or on a schedule, step up to Max, because the agent work chews through usage faster than normal chat and you'll hit the wall on Pro pretty quick.

Install the Claude Desktop app on your Mac or Windows machine. This is where it gets good, because the desktop app now holds three things in one: normal chat, Cowork (hand it a whole task and it works across your files, email and the web until it's done), and Claude Code (the coding one, more on that later in the series). No terminal, nothing to program. You talk to it like a person.

Add the browser extension and the phone app, and put it on your iPad if you've got one. Connect your email while you're there, that's built in. Here's the part that changed recently, and it's a big one: Cowork now runs your jobs in the cloud, not just on your machine. You can kick something off, close the laptop, and it keeps going. Scheduled jobs run even with nothing switched on. Set the Monday briefing for 6am and it's waiting when you walk in.

Then have a look at the connectors. There are hundreds ready to go. If you're on Microsoft or Google, you hook those up in about two clicks, so your email, calendar and docs are connected before anyone's built a thing. Xero has one too, though it's fairly limited, so don't lean on it too hard yet.

Already living in ChatGPT? They launched their own version of this in July, ChatGPT Work, same idea, an agent that works across your stuff. It's newer and a bit rougher out of the gate. I run on Claude, so that's what this series is built on, but the shape is the same whichever camp you're in.

That's the whole starter kit. A subscription, the desktop app, the extension, the phone, and whatever's already in the connectors list. You can have it running this afternoon.

Here's the thing I keep landing on. The AI was never the hard part. The models are brilliant, and basically a commodity now. The hard part is connecting them to the stuff you already use: your accounts, your systems, your actual work. The ready-made connectors get you most of the way for free. The custom ones are where it gets interesting, and that's next time, because Troy's setup needed a fair bit more than what's on the shelf.

Cheers,
Jez

Want to dig in? Claude, and if you're already in the ChatGPT camp, ChatGPT Work.