Not the technical side. Not how any of it works under the bonnet. Five things, and you can have all of them inside a month.
Somebody asks me this in nearly every session, usually near the end and usually quietly. There is a lot on offer and no obvious order to it, and most of the courses seem to assume you want a new career in technology.
You do not need most of it. Here is the honest list.
1. How to ask better questions
This is eighty percent of the value, and almost nobody teaches it as a skill in its own right.
Online you will see this given a grand-sounding technical name. Ignore that. It is ordinary briefing: telling it who you are, who the answer is for, what you want, and what a good version would look like. The same thing you would do with a capable new starter on their first morning.
Everyone who is disappointed with these tools is under-briefing them. Fix that and everything else improves at once.
How long: an afternoon to learn, a fortnight of real use to make it automatic.
2. What it is bad at
Knowing the failure modes matters more than knowing the features.
It invents specifics with total confidence. It agrees with whatever you seem to want. It flattens things into tidy lists when the truth is messy. It has no idea what happened last week unless it looks it up. It cannot tell you whether something is a good idea in your particular context.
Once you know those five, you stop being caught out by them, which is the whole difference between a useful assistant and an expensive mistake.
How long: one good session, then it becomes instinct.
3. Where your data goes
Not the technical detail. The practical rules.
What your organisation allows and forbids. Whether what you type is used to train anything. What counts as confidential in your line of work. Why client names, staff records and unpublished figures need stripping out before anything is pasted in.
This is the part that causes real trouble for real people, and it takes an hour to understand well enough to stay safe.
How long: an hour, plus whatever your employer's policy says.
4. Which of your own tasks are worth handing over
Everyone's list is different, and the generic advice never fits.
The test is simple. Would an eighty-percent-right version be useful? And would you know if it were wrong? Two yeses and it is a candidate. Anything else stays with you.
Sit down with your actual week and sort it. Most people find three or four obvious candidates they had not spotted, and one or two things they were about to hand over that they definitely should not.
How long: thirty minutes with a pen.
5. How to check work that was produced this way
Increasingly this is the skill that gets noticed at work, because AI-assisted output is arriving faster than anyone's ability to review it.
Verify every specific. Ask what the strongest counter-argument is. Notice when it agrees with you too quickly. Trust it least in the areas where you know least, which is the opposite of what feels natural.
How long: ongoing, but the habits form quickly.
What you can safely skip
How the models work under the bonnet. Interesting if you like that sort of thing. Irrelevant to using them well.
Tool comparison content. The main assistants are close enough that the choice matters far less than the practice. Pick one and stay with it for three months.
The news cycle. Written to make you feel behind. The underlying skills move much more slowly than the headlines.
Certifications, mostly. With a few professional exceptions, a certificate in this proves you sat through something. Being able to show what you have actually built or changed at work carries more weight.
The realistic version of a month
Week one: one tool, three real tasks, brief them properly. Save what works.
Week two: sort your own week into hand over, keep, and never. Write it down.
Week three: learn your organisation's rules on data, and read them properly rather than assuming.
Week four: deliberately try to catch it being wrong. You will succeed, and that lesson sticks better than being told.
That is a month of ordinary effort, no course fees, and you will be more capable with this than most of the people currently posting about it.
Where next
If this was useful, the live sessions are the same thing with your own work in front of you and someone to ask when it goes sideways.