Hello,
Bought a caravan yesterday. My second one, the last was about six years ago, and the difference between the two purchases has been rattling round my head all weekend.
With the first caravan I did what everybody did back then. Got it home, wanted to understand the water system, the heating, the gas, the wee niggles every second hand van comes with. It took me a week of evenings on YouTube and Google, watching videos of caravans that were nearly mine but not quite, and reading forum threads from 2011 where somebody had the exact same fault and the thread just ends.
This time I sat in the van with my phone and asked the AI. Two hours later I had the water system fault diagnosed, the gas set up, and I understood the self levelling, the awning, the cooker, the hitch lock and the alarm. All specific to my exact model.
A week of evenings the first time. Two hours the second.
I’ve been trying to work out what actually changed, because I’m not suddenly a caravan expert. What I had was an expert sitting beside me that never gets bored of questions. The knowledge isn’t in my head, it’s on tap whenever I need it, and on tap turns out to be better. I don’t want to memorise a heating system, I want the heating working tonight.
Now forget the caravan, because the same thing sits waiting in every business. The employment question you’d normally pay a solicitor to look at before you even know if there’s a problem. The clause in a lease. The VAT oddity. The machine flashing a fault code. The supplier contract you signed without properly reading. The quote for work you can’t tell is fair or not. All of that used to cost real money or a week of evenings just to understand where you stood, and now understanding costs twenty quid a month.
The knack is the same whatever the problem is. Open a chat and give it the full picture the way you’d brief a specialist. What the situation is, what’s actually in front of you, what you’re worried about, what you’ve already tried. Photograph anything real, the letter, the contract page, the fault code, the invoice, because it reads documents and photos better than your summary of them. Then ask one thing at a time, and when it gives you an answer or a fix, tell it what happened next, because that back and forth is how it gets you somewhere instead of giving you a Google answer.
And keep the chat. A dispute, a contract, a dodgy machine, each one gets its own thread that remembers everything, so when the thing rumbles on for three weeks you’re not starting from scratch every time.
Worth being straight about one thing. If it’s legal, tax or safety, use the AI to understand where you stand, not to replace the professional. You’ll walk into the solicitor’s office knowing exactly what to ask, which usually shrinks the bill anyway.
And everything in this note is the basics. It works, it’ll save you real time and money this month, but it’s the shallow end. The next step up is a feature in Claude and ChatGPT called Projects, permanent workspaces that hold your documents and standing instructions so you’re not rebuilding the picture every chat. That’s how the meeting minutes setup from the last note runs. We’re well beyond that in our own business now, but projects is the step that unlocks everything after it, so that’s the note I’ll write next.
Most of what I see online about AI is folk building empires and software platforms. These notes aren’t that. This is AI for normal, plain, boring businesses, the kind that fix things, sell things and deliver things. The wins look like today’s, an afternoon saved, a fee avoided, a fault found, and they add up faster than the empire stuff ever seems to.
Reply and tell me what it sorted for you. Somebody will have a better story than my hitch lock.
Andrew
Ps. Take photos even when you think you can describe the thing fine. A picture of the actual clause or the actual fault code beats three paragraphs of you guessing, and it’s usually where the answer starts.