AI can do amazing things, from improving cancer screenings to combating climate change. Little ole you and me, we may have more modest ambitions, but we still want to get the most from this technology. How do we do that without having to become an AI coding expert?

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to wring value from AI. We just need to broaden our understanding of its capabilities, recognize its limitations, and follow a few best practices.

AI is great for writing ad copy, a speech, a sales pitch, or an essay. But it pays to get creative. Some less obvious uses may inspire you to dream up your own ideas:

I found many great ideas in a ChatGPT reddit group; you can find AI prompt examples in Google’s library, too.

When I asked Gemini to find restaurants with private meeting rooms in my area, its recommendation to “check their websites or contact them directly” didn’t help me. Grok gave me several options, but the top one has been closed for a couple of years. ChatGPT gave me great recommendations, many with information about room size or maximum number of guests, plus a map and links to directions, websites, and phone numbers.

You may need to use an AI app that is designed for a narrower function. For example, to record and transcribe phone calls or meetings, try Otter.ai, or the Google app, Braindump.

Specifying context and parameters, and using an AI-friendly format, will generate more specific, relevant, and accurate results.

If you don’t like the results, revise your query. Most chatbots will continue to follow the thread you were working on, so you don’t have to start over. For example, an image of people I requested from ChatGPT had bad lighting; I asked it to revise the image to have more detail, and it did.

: There are many thorny legal issues concerning the use of AI, including the alleged use of copyrighted material to train AI models, the impact of AI bias, and proposed liability rules. Businesses need to be aware of the risks and have compliance policies in place to avoid them.

: Some businesses, and even government agencies, have been caught using fabricated AI-generated content. While AI apps work by accessing massive amounts of data housed in large language models (LLMs), that data might be outdated, incorrect, or even fictitious, so protect yourself by visiting the sources they cite and verify the information.

: If you upload anything to a general-purpose AI chatbot, it will likely be stored in the cloud, become owned and managed by the chatbot operator, and may be used to train their models. So don’t upload personally identifiable information, and certainly don’t upload confidential work-related data.

Even if what you do with AI isn’t sensitive, you should still take steps to secure your interactions by adjusting the security settings within your chatbots.

Some enterprise AI apps, including SAP’s Joule copilot app, access only corporate data that is secured on private cloud servers. Only SAP customers can access Joule, and the only private data they can access is their own. Joule doesn’t allow file uploads, and customer data isn’t used to train the models it runs on.

: You can download a free app like Ollama or gpt4all and run AI models on your personal computer. Your data will remain local, though your queries will run more slowly than they would in the cloud, where they benefit from AI companies’ huge, nuclear-powered data centers.

Still want to learn more about how to get the most out of AI? Take online AI courses. Many are free, though if you want to crow about it on your resume or your LinkedIn profile, you may need to pay for a digital certificate.

The importance of AI literacy to AI adoption to learn more about how others are addressing this issue.

A version of this story appears on SAP.com