Up Strategy Lab

Workshop Takeaways  /  March 27, 2026  /  Gothenburg + Online

AI for Non-Dummies

What we covered and what to do with it.

DATE March 27, 2026
FORMAT Live workshop + online
HOSTS Noel Braganza & Daniel Nilsson
STUDIO Up Strategy Lab
Not a transcript. Not a highlight reel. Just the things worth keeping as you start exploring this yourself — the concepts, the tools, and the specific first steps that actually change how you work.
01
Mindset
The shift that matters

If you're still using it as a chatbot, you're using about 1% of the value.

Almost everyone is already using AI. The shift that matters is moving from chatbot (you type, it replies) to automation agent (it runs tasks, connects tools, operates on your behalf).

The gap between "I have an idea" and "this is live" has collapsed. Most people haven't fully felt the weight of that yet. The tools that make this possible are available to anyone with a Claude subscription.

Claude can write and run code, connect to your Gmail, read your CRM, generate and deploy full applications, and create design files — if you give it the right context and permissions. That's not the future. That's now.

02
Core concept
The most important thing to learn

Skills. Learn this one thing and everything else follows.

A skill is a file you load into Claude at the start of a session. It gives Claude context it otherwise doesn't have: your voice, your product, your customers, your process. Without skills, Claude produces generic output. With them, it produces yours.

01
Skills encode what's unique about your business. Your mission, customers, product, tone — if it's not in a skill, Claude doesn't know it. No skill = generic output.
02
They take about 10 minutes to build. Ask Claude: "I want to create a skill for [X]. Ask me questions to make it accurate." It'll guide you through the whole thing.
03
You can share them across your team. Once a skill exists, anyone can invoke it. Same quality, same voice, same context — across the whole organisation.
04
Build your own before using off-the-shelf ones. Public skills from GitHub and skills.sh are useful for inspiration, but they don't know your business. Start with yours.
03
Efficiency
Token management

How to not burn through your budget in 20 minutes.

Tokens regulate your Claude usage. Some things consume them far faster than others — and the expensive approaches are rarely the most effective anyway.

✕
Don't dump a PowerPoint into the chat. Claude has to install a library to decrypt it, extract the content and styles, then reconstruct it all. Take a screenshot instead — Claude reads images well and it costs far less.
✕
Don't paste 50 pages of documents. Summarise first if needed, or use a local model for data-heavy tasks (see LM Studio in the tools section below).
✓
Always use Plan Mode before building. In Claude Code, Plan Mode generates a full proposal before running anything. You review it, approve it, then it executes. Avoids expensive false starts.
✓
Break large tasks into small chunks. Get a working base first, then add to it. One giant prompt that tries to do everything creates 20 broken versions.
04
Building
Claude Code & Plan Mode

You don't need to be a programmer. You need to be able to describe what you want.

"If you can envision what you want, you would be able to do it. There is no wrong question."

Noel Braganza — AI for Non-Dummies, March 2026

In the live demo, we built a full meal planning app from zero: project plan, Supabase database schema with security policies, a Paper UI with 4 screens, and a pre-deploy engineering review — all before a single line of code ran. The app was then ready to deploy to Vercel.

The stack that makes this reliable: Claude Code + Vercel + Supabase + Resend + GitHub. Designed for AI from the ground up. Most small apps cost nothing to run at this scale.

05
Sales & automation
Where time savings become measurable in hours

The automations that are actually working right now.

→
Automated meeting follow-ups. Fathom records and transcribes, auto-posts to HubSpot. Claude reads the transcript + all previous emails + the client's website, and drafts a personalised follow-up. 30 minutes down to under 5.
→
Enterprise requirement documents. Claude reads all meeting notes and generates a tailored 12-page document for the client. One client saved 50 hours. Accelerates sales cycles significantly.
→
Apollo + Gmail prospecting. Claude reads your ICPs, writes unique email sequences per persona, logs into Apollo via MCP, implements settings and filters the list. One hour of AI vs. 50 hours manually.
→
Grant and vendor applications. Previously one per month due to time constraints. Now 100. Claude knows the format, the language, the criteria — you supply the specifics about your company.
30→5
Minutes per follow-up
From writing each email manually to a Claude-drafted reply reviewed and sent in under 5 minutes.
1→100
Vendor applications/month
What previously took weeks now runs in parallel across 100 targets simultaneously.
50hrs
Saved per enterprise doc
One client received a fully tailored 12-page requirement document — generated from meeting notes.
06
Tools
The ones we actually use

Not recommendations. The tools that earned their place.

CLAUDE CODE
Where you build. Connects to your file system and tools. Use Plan Mode first — always.
LM STUDIO
Run a language model locally on your Mac. Free. For large data enrichment where cloud token costs would be prohibitive.
OPENCLAW
Personal AI agent on Telegram. Good for async tasks: scraping, reminders, training plans, research.
FATHOM
Meeting transcription. Auto-posts to HubSpot. Sends client summary and sales summary automatically.
SUPABASE
Database + auth. Claude generates the schema including row-level security. Free at small scale.
VERCEL
Hosting. Claude deploys directly via CLI. Free tier covers most experiments and small apps.
RESEND
Transactional email. Free tier is generous. All event confirmation emails for this workshop ran through it.
SKILLS.SH
Public skill library. Good for browsing what a skill looks like. Vet before loading — not everything is trustworthy.
07
First steps
Where to start

If you walked away with one task, make it this.

Pick one thing you do repetitively, that's currently tedious, and has a clear output. Build a skill for it first.

Try this right now

Open Claude. Type: "I want to create a skill for my writing voice. Ask me questions to make it accurate." That's the first step. It takes 10 minutes.

Build a voice skill. Feed Claude 2–3 examples of your writing. Ask it to create a skill. 10 minutes.
Build an ICP skill. Give Claude your website and any customer research. Ask it to define your ideal customers and encode them as a skill.
Build a product skill. Feed demo video transcripts and product pages. Ask Claude to create a skill that accurately represents what you do and who it's for.
Try one automation. Connect Claude to Gmail. Ask it to draft a reply to a specific type of email in your voice. See what happens.
Install Claude Code and try Plan Mode. Pick a small tool you wish existed. Describe it. Ask Claude to make a plan. Read the plan. Say go.
Next session

We're running another session.

More focused next time. Follow Up Strategy Lab on LinkedIn to hear when it's happening, or just reply to this email and we'll add you to the list.

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