AI in Human Work – Abilities, Applications, and Value Creation
Lesson 5: Building Your First AI Workflow Brief
Lesson Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students should be able to:
- Write a workflow brief with users, inputs, outputs, risks, and evidence.
- Turn a broad AI idea into a specific, repeatable workflow.
- Choose the next course in the OpenAI path based on the workflow type.
Lesson Content
An AI workflow brief is a one-page plan for a repeatable piece of AI-assisted work. It contains:
- User: who needs the workflow.
- Job to be done: the useful result the user wants.
- Starting material: notes, files, goals, data, requirements, examples, or constraints.
- AI role: drafter, analyst, tutor, reviewer, coder, researcher, planner, simulator, or agent.
- Human role: goal owner, reviewer, editor, approver, expert, or accountable decision-maker.
- Prompt sequence: the staged requests that guide the AI from context to output.
- Quality standard: rubric, checklist, examples, acceptance criteria, or test cases.
- Risk controls: privacy boundaries, verification, professional review, tool permissions, and a way to undo mistakes.
- Deliverables: the concrete text, checklist, plan, report, code, or presentation produced.
- Evidence: before/after comparison, time log, review notes, source list, or test results.
The brief tells you what you will make, why it matters, and how you will know it worked. It also tells you which course to take next: writing-heavy briefs point to the writing and prompting courses, research briefs to Workspaces and Deep Research, multi-step briefs to ChatGPT Work and agents, and software briefs to Codex.
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