The READY Method in Action

You've spent six modules building each skill separately. Now it's time to see them work together. Let's walk through a complete real-world example, stage by stage, so you can see how the READY Method flows in practice.

The Scenario

Your company's leadership team has asked you to prepare a 12-slide presentation on renewable energy trends — specifically, what's happening in the sector right now and what it means for your organisation's sustainability strategy. You have three days. You're not an energy specialist, but you're expected to deliver something sharp, credible, and actionable.

This is exactly the kind of task where AI fluency makes a measurable difference. Let's work through it.

R — Recognise the Goal

Before you touch any AI tool, pause and get clear on what success actually looks like.

Ask yourself:

• What is the real purpose of this presentation? (To inform? To persuade? To trigger a specific decision?)
• Who is the audience, and what do they already know?
• What does "good enough" look like — and what does "excellent" look like?
• What constraints exist? (Time, format, length, tone, brand guidelines?)

Your analysis might look like this:

The purpose is to give the leadership team enough context to make an informed decision about whether to accelerate our sustainability investments. They're commercially minded — they want trends tied to business implications, not just data. The tone should be confident and concise. Twelve slides maximum. I need it by Thursday.

This stage takes five minutes and saves you hours. Without it, you'll produce something that's technically about renewable energy but doesn't actually serve the brief.

Key recognition: This task is a strong candidate for AI collaboration. You need research synthesis (AI is good at this), structured argumentation (AI can draft this), and visual slide suggestions (AI can help here too). But the strategic framing, the connection to your specific organisation, and the final editorial judgement — those stay with you.

E — Evaluate What to Delegate

Now map the task against what you know about AI capabilities and your own expertise.

Your delegation plan:

Sub-task	Delegate to AI?	Mode	Why
Research current renewable energy trends (2024–2026)	Yes	Collaborate	AI can synthesise publicly available information quickly, but I'll need to verify currency and accuracy given knowledge cutoffs
Identify business implications for our sector	Partially	Collaborate	AI can suggest generic implications; I'll need to add our specific context
Draft slide structure and talking points	Yes	Collaborate	AI is good at organising information into presentation frameworks
Write executive summary slide	Partially	Collaborate	AI drafts, I refine with internal knowledge
Design visual layout	No	Manual	Our brand templates require specific tools and I know the leadership team's visual preferences
Final quality check and strategic framing	No	Manual	This is my professional judgement — the "Your Responsibility" stage

What you've just done: Instead of throwing the entire task at AI with a vague prompt, you've broken it into components and made deliberate choices about where AI adds value and where it doesn't. This is the Delegation Matrix in action.

A — Articulate Clear Instructions

Time to prompt. But not with "Make me a presentation about renewable energy." You know better than that now.

Prompt 1 — Research synthesis:

I'm preparing a 12-slide presentation on renewable energy trends for my company's senior leadership team. They are commercially focused decision-makers in the [manufacturing/retail/finance — insert your sector] industry.

Please identify the 6-8 most significant renewable energy trends from 2024-2026, focusing on:

• Market growth and investment patterns
• Technology breakthroughs (solar, wind, storage, hydrogen)
• Policy and regulatory shifts in the UK and EU
• Supply chain developments

For each trend, provide:

1. A one-sentence summary
2. One supporting data point or statistic (with the source if known)
3. One sentence on why this matters for businesses outside the energy sector

Format as a numbered list. Flag any points where your information may be outdated given your training data cutoff.

Notice what happened here. The prompt used the Prompt Trinity — it gave context (who the audience is, what sector), it was specific about the task (6-8 trends, specific categories), and it defined the format (numbered list with three components per trend). The AI flagged its own limitations because you asked it to.

Prompt 2 — Slide structure:

Based on these trends, draft a 12-slide structure for the presentation. The audience is our senior leadership team. The goal is to help them decide whether to accelerate sustainability investments.

Use this structure:

• Slide 1: Title slide
• Slide 2: Executive summary (3 bullet points maximum)
• Slides 3-9: Key trends (one per slide — pick the 7 most relevant)
• Slide 10: What this means for our organisation (leave as prompts for me to fill in)
• Slide 11: Recommended next steps
• Slide 12: Discussion questions for the team

For each content slide, provide: a slide title, 3-4 bullet points, and a suggestion for a supporting visual or data visualisation.

You're steering the conversation — not handing over control. You've specified the structure, told the AI which slides you'll customise yourself, and asked for visual suggestions rather than letting it decide the entire approach.

D — Determine If the Output Is Good Enough

The AI delivers a full slide outline. Now you evaluate. Run through the five quality checks:

1. Accuracy check: Are the statistics plausible? Do the trend descriptions match what you can verify? You spot that one statistic about hydrogen investment seems inflated — you flag it for manual verification.

2. Completeness check: Does the structure cover what the leadership team needs to make a decision? You realise there's nothing about risks or potential downsides. A credible presentation for senior leaders needs to acknowledge uncertainty. You go back to the AI:

This is a good start, but it reads as overly optimistic. Senior leaders will be sceptical if we only present the upside. Please add to each trend slide a brief "risk or uncertainty" bullet point — something that honestly flags where this trend could stall or where the data is less certain.

3. Relevance check: Is this tailored to your sector, or is it generic? You notice the "What this means for our organisation" slide has placeholder language that could apply to any company. That's fine — you planned to customise that yourself.

4. Tone and register check: Would your CEO find this compelling? Or does it read like a Wikipedia summary? You ask for a revision:

The bullet points are too descriptive — they read like encyclopedia entries. Rewrite each slide's bullets in a more decisive, action-oriented tone. Instead of "Solar costs have been declining," try "Solar is now the cheapest new energy source — and the gap is widening." The tone should be confident and commercially aware.

5. Reasoning check: Does the logical flow make sense? Does the presentation build an argument, or is it just a list of facts? You restructure slides 3-9 so they tell a story: first the macro trends, then the technology shifts, then the policy tailwinds, then the business implications.

This is the Describe-Determine loop in action. You evaluated, identified specific shortcomings, described what needed to change, and sent it back. After two rounds of refinement, the content is substantially better than the first draft — and substantially better than what you'd have produced by writing from scratch under time pressure.

Y — Your Responsibility

The AI has given you strong raw material. Now you make it yours.

What only you can do:

• Add internal context. Replace generic business implications with specific references to your organisation's current initiatives, budget cycle, and strategic priorities. The AI doesn't know these — and shouldn't.
• Apply editorial judgement. You cut two slides that feel redundant and strengthen the executive summary based on what you know the CEO cares most about.
• Verify critical claims. You spend 20 minutes checking the three most important statistics against primary sources. Two are accurate. One is slightly outdated — you update it.
• Add your professional perspective. The "Recommended next steps" slide is where your expertise matters most. The AI suggested generic actions. You replace them with three specific, costed recommendations tied to projects your team could actually execute.
• Write your transparency statement. For this context, it's a brief note on the final slide: "Research synthesis assisted by AI tools. All statistics verified against primary sources. Strategic recommendations and organisational context are the author's own."

The result: A presentation that's well-researched, clearly structured, commercially relevant, and genuinely useful for decision-making. It took you roughly three hours instead of twelve — and the quality is higher because you spent your time on strategic thinking and editorial refinement rather than on wrestling with blank slides.

That's the READY Method working as a complete system.