Building AI Assistants

 

You've written the perfect prompt—and tomorrow you'll have to write it again. And the next day. And the day after that. Custom AI assistants solve this problem by letting you build once and use forever.

In this lesson, you'll learn what custom AI assistants are, how they differ from standard prompts and AI agents, and which editorial tasks are best for AI assistants. We'll also walk through the setup process and cover privacy settings to keep your data and any intellectual property protected. By the end, you'll have a clear roadmap for the assistant you'll build throughout this course.

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Learning Objectives: 

• Differentiate between standard prompts and custom AI assistants

• Identify high-value editorial use cases for automation, such as repetitive checks

• Set up privacy controls to protect data and intellectual property

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An AI assistant is only as good as what it knows. In this lesson, we explore the Knowledge component, the built-in library that allows your assistant to reference style guides, brand documents, and client profiles without overloading the chat window.

We'll focus on the practical side: which types of documents work best as knowledge files, how assistants access and apply them, and best practices for organizing and updating your library. You'll leave with a list of the documents your assistants need and a clear plan to structure them for AI accessibility.
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Learning Objectives:

• Identify which document types are best suited for an AI assistant's knowledge base

• Understand how AI editing assistants access and apply knowledge documents

• Apply best practices for organizing, formatting, and maintaining knowledge files

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How much of your editing time goes to catching the same mistakes over and over? Misspelled product names, inconsistent hyphenation, serial comma violations—you know the rules cold, but checking for them is tedious, time-consuming, and easy to miss when you're tired. What if an assistant handled that pass for you?

In this lesson, we’ll examine assistants designed for strict adherence to rules:​​

 

• Style Guide Assistants: apply complex formatting, terminology, and voice rules while preserving meaning

• Checklist Assistants: review content against set criteria to catch errors before or after the edit

 

Your job is evolving from producing a corrected page to building a correction engine. Build these assistants once, and they'll run the same checks the same way every time.

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Learning Objectives:​

• Build an AI assistant that enforces specific house style guides and glossaries​​​

• Design checklist assistants that evaluate content against editorial rubrics

• Test and refine rule-based assistants to improve accuracy and reduce false flags

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Editing isn't just about fixing errors. It's also about resonating with the reader. In this lesson, we'll focus on the creative and strategic capabilities of AI assistants.

We’ll see how to build:

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• Ideal Reader Assistants: simulate your target audience's reaction to content, helping you predict engagement and identify problems before you publish 

• Content Repurposing Assistants: transform content for different formats, platforms, and audiences 

These assistants help you think like your audience and stretch your content further.

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Learning Objectives:

• Develop reader persona assistants to test emotional resonance and clarity

• Build content repurposing assistants that adapt text for different formats and audiences

• Identify use cases for ideal reader and content repurposing assistants

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This hands-on workshop is dedicated to testing and getting your custom AI assistants launch-ready.

If possible, bring the assistants you've been building throughout this course. We'll run them through real-world scenarios, look for opportunities to tighten instructions and improve output quality, and make sure your knowledge documents are working as hard as they can. This is your chance to fine-tune before your assistants go live. 

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Learning Objectives

• Test your custom AI assistants against real-world editorial scenarios

• Identify opportunities to improve system prompts and knowledge documents

• Refine and finalize your custom AI assistants for use in your editing workflow