Practical AI Experimentation
Five lessons · hypothesis, compare, debug, report
Most people ask whether AI will help with their work and never design a test that could actually answer the question.
Lessons
- 01 Start with a Question, Not a Tool
Frame a work question AI might help answer — before you open Copilot.
- 02 Design a Test You Can Finish This Week
Control prompt, variant prompt, constants, and a simple score.
- 03 Compare Outputs Without Fooling Yourself
Blind comparison, pre-registered criteria, and honest scoring.
- 04 Debug a Bad Run
Diagnose failure modes before you abandon the experiment.
- 05 Report What You Learned
Question, method, result, decision, and next step — for you or your team.
Five lessons on framing a question, running a test you can finish this week, comparing outputs without fooling yourself, debugging bad runs, and reporting what you learned.
Begin Lesson 1This is not data science. You need Copilot, a real task, and fifteen to thirty minutes per lesson. Practice tasks take longer and are the point.
Recommended: Getting Started and Working with AI (or Copilot Basics) so prompting and verification habits are already in place.
When an experiment points to a repeatable workflow, the Build Your Own Agent workshop turns that insight into a tested agent spec.