Applied AI Skills Capstone Exercise — Applied AI Skills for Professionals

What you'll learn

Apply skills from across this course in a single realistic professional scenario
Produce a concrete, role-relevant deliverable using AI tools
Self-assess your output against professional quality criteria

This course has taken you through how AI systems actually work, how to prompt effectively, how to recognise and handle hallucinations, how to navigate AI ethics in professional settings, and how to treat AI as a genuine collaborator rather than a search engine. The final test of those skills is not a quiz. It is whether you can plan and execute a real work week using AI across different types of tasks, with intentional choices at each step.

This capstone asks you to design a personal AI usage plan for a realistic working week. The plan needs to show that you can select the right tool for each task, write purposeful prompts, evaluate the output critically, and identify where human judgment takes over from the AI.

Capstone Exercise

Design a Personal AI Usage Plan for a Working Week

Context

You are a manager preparing for a quarterly review week. You have three different work tasks to complete: analysing team performance data to identify patterns, drafting a written summary report for senior leadership, and researching a new methodology your team is considering adopting. Each task is different in nature: one is analytical, one is written communication, and one is research-based. You want to use AI deliberately across all three, not just copy and paste outputs.

Your Task

Create a structured AI usage plan covering all three tasks. For each task, document four things: which AI tool you would use and why (choose from Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot), the exact prompt you would use to start the task, how you would evaluate whether the output is good enough to use, and the specific human judgment step you would apply before treating the output as final. Write this as a plan you could actually follow, not as a description of what AI can do.

Your notes (optional)

Deliverable

A structured AI usage plan with three task entries, each containing: tool choice with a one-sentence rationale, the prompt text you would use, a two-sentence output evaluation criterion, and a one-sentence human judgment note.

Quick check

Each task in your plan ends with a human judgment step, and this capstone is explicit that 'I will review it' does not clear the bar. Which entry for the research task does?

Select one answer.

Key takeaways

Intentional tool selection beats defaulting to one AI for everything: different tasks benefit from different tools and prompting approaches
A prompt is a brief to a collaborator: the more context you give, the closer the output lands to what you actually need
Output evaluation is a skill you build deliberately, not a feeling that something looks right
The human judgment step is where professional accountability lives: AI produces drafts and options, not decisions