K2's Getting Started With Artificial Intelligence

You'll see Copilot's deep integration with Microsoft 365 in action. The instructor walks through real examples: asking Copilot to write engagement letters in Word that you'd otherwise draft from scratch, creating 15-slide presentations on information security that serve as a professional first draft, and uploading a 141-page financial statement PDF into Excel to analyze trends and anomalies in 45 seconds. He shows you why Copilot works differently from ChatGPT or Gemini—it's woven into Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook so tightly that you don't copy-paste between tools. The time savings are substantial if you're in the Microsoft stack.

This is addressed as the number-one issue in the course, and the instructor distinguishes sharply between free and paid versions. Free versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, and others explicitly reserve the right to train on your data by default—meaning a client's tax return or a private company's financial statements could feed into their models. Paid business versions (typically $20–$30 per month) do not train on your data by default. Critically, with Copilot and Microsoft 365, data privacy controls are locked on automatically—you cannot turn them off as an end user, and Microsoft does not share or train on your data. The course teaches you how to verify and enable privacy settings in other platforms.

No. The course opens by defining AI in plain language ("computers doing things humans would otherwise do") and walks through how these tools work using a simple analogy: the large language model is just a very large database trained to recognize relationships between words. The instructor uses familiar examples like blocking email in Outlook (machine learning you've probably used for years) to build comfort before moving to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot demos. By the middle of the session, you'll have seen live prompting, custom instruction setup, and output modification, all explained step-by-step.

You will be able to create professional documents (engagement letters, tax memos, policy and procedure manuals) by prompting rather than starting from a blank page. You'll know how to upload a complex financial document and get AI to surface trends, anomalies, and patterns in minutes instead of hours of manual review. You'll be able to generate flowcharts for internal controls, build presentation decks, and query data across multiple AI platforms—and you'll understand which tool to choose based on your workflow (Copilot for Microsoft 365 users, Gemini for Google Workspace users, ChatGPT as an all-around option). You'll also know how to validate AI output by requesting citations and cross-checking with other platforms to catch errors before they cost you.

The course is structured around live demonstration. After 38 minutes of foundational concepts (definitions, major platforms, pricing and privacy), the instructor spends the remaining 77 minutes showing you working examples: opening ChatGPT and Gemini side-by-side to draft engagement letters, modifying prompts in real time, generating and refining a flowchart for accounts payable controls, uploading Disney's 141-page financial statements to both ChatGPT and Copilot/Excel, and building a PowerPoint presentation from a single prompt. You see the tools, watch the outputs, and hear the instructor critique what worked and what didn't (like Copilot missing the exact word count). This is working knowledge, not theory.