Every week brings a new word for something your AI can supposedly do. Most of it is noise. Three features are the exception, and setting them up once pays off on every task after.
Instructions. Skills. Projects. Styles. Agents. The vocabulary keeps growing, and it is easy to assume you are falling behind on all of it. You are not. After thirty years in retail and a decade working with AI, I can tell you that only three of these features change the quality of your output right now. The rest can wait.
Here is the problem they solve. Every time someone opens a fresh AI chat, they start from zero. The tool does not know your brand, your tone, or that you sell homeware rather than software. So it produces something generic, and whoever is using it burns the first few minutes of every session re-explaining who you are. Do that across a team, every day, and the wasted time adds up fast.
By default, AI hedges, preambles, and hands you four options when you only needed one. You can fix most of that in about twenty minutes. Almost nobody does.
01 · Instructions
Your permanent rulebook, applied to every chat
Instructions are an account-wide set of rules that load before every conversation. Think of them as the standing briefing you would give a new team member on day one, the things you never want to repeat again. Set once, applied everywhere.
For an ecommerce brand, the essentials are short and specific:
Who you are and what your business does, in one sentence.
Your tone: what it sounds like, and just as importantly, what it never sounds like.
How you want responses structured: no preamble, no summaries, direct answers.
Your country, currency, and the platforms you run on, such as Shopify or Klaviyo.
What the AI should never do: corporate language, bullet points for copy, hedging.
Keep it tight, ideally under 500 words. Instructions load into every conversation, so the longer they run, the less room there is for the actual work. Put the essentials here and save the deep brand context for Projects. A useful test: if removing a line would not change how the AI responds, cut it.
How to set it up. Open your settings and find the profile section with a box labelled something like “Instructions.” Write your brand rules there, starting with what the AI should not do. That is more effective than describing ideal behaviour, because the tool already tries to help; your job is to remove the habits that annoy you. Then test it on three real tasks you do every week. If the output is clearly better, you are done. If not, add one rule at a time until it is. Do not over-engineer it on day one.
02 · Skills
Repeatable instructions the AI follows every time
Here is a small example that shows exactly why Skills matter. For a long time, every email draft I got back signed off with “Best, Kelly.” I do not say “Best, Kelly.” I say “Thanks,” or just “Kelly.” I corrected it over and over, and it never stuck, because each correction lived inside one chat and died there the moment I closed it.
A Skill fixes that. You write the rule down once, and the AI reaches for it every time the task comes up. No reminding, no re-explaining. It just triggers. The more Skills you build, the less editing and redrafting you do, and that is the whole point of them.
Is it a Skill? A quick test
It repeats often.
It has clear rules.
It takes the same shape of input each time.
It has a defined “done” you can check against.
It is low stakes if it needs an edit.
Not a Skill: one-offs, rules that only live in your head, anything that needs real judgment, and anything high stakes with no human check, such as legal, medical, or financial sign-off.
You do not have to work out your own Skills from scratch. There is a Skill Creator tool you can install, and once it is on, you can ask the AI to look across your calendar, email, and recent chats and name the handful of Skills that would save you the most time. It is a revealing exercise on its own, because it shows you where your time actually goes. When I ran it, it flagged my content drafting. One prompt later I had a Skill that writes in my voice and strips the things I always strip, and the sample it produced was close enough to copy and paste.
Make it a habit. Every Friday, ask which Skill would have saved you the most time that week, and build it. Think of the whole thing as a progression: Skill first, then Project, then agent. Skills get you to roughly 90 percent ready to go. Without them you are closer to two-thirds, and that gap is your editing time. On a team plan, you share the Skill once and everyone produces the task in your format, your way.
How to set it up. In your capabilities settings, switch on memory and search first, since the Skill finder relies on both. Install Skill Creator from the available list. Then start a new chat, ask the AI to review your recent activity and suggest a few Skills, and pick the one that stings the most. Say “create a skill for that,” review what it writes, and save it. From then on it triggers automatically.
03 · Projects
A dedicated workspace for one function, with your documents attached
Projects let you build a dedicated workspace for a specific function: one for content, one for customer service, one for product data. Each Project carries its own instruction set plus a library of documents you upload, and every chat inside it inherits all of that automatically.
This is the feature that closes the gap between AI that is generically helpful and AI that actually knows your business. A content Project loaded with your brand voice, product catalogue, best campaigns, and seasonal context produces output that needs almost no editing.
For an ecommerce content Project, upload:
Your brand voice document.
Your product catalogue, or your top 50 to 100 SKUs with their attributes.
Returns, shipping, and FAQ content.
Your best-performing email campaigns.
Current campaign context: the season, what is on promotion, what is launching next.
Give one person ownership and have them update it each quarter, adding fresh campaign context at the start of every season. A Project that is six months out of date is worse than none, because it will produce confident, on-brand copy about products you no longer sell. The upkeep is a couple of hours a quarter, and it is worth every minute.
How to set it up. Create a new Project and give it a clear name, something like “Content and Copy” or “Customer Service” rather than “Project 1.” Write instructions specific to that workspace, going deeper than your global Instructions since this is context that only applies to one type of work, and upload the relevant documents. Every chat inside the Project then loads all of it. On a team plan, everyone added to the Project gets the same context with no individual setup.
When to use each one
| Instructions | When you want the same rules everywhere, always. Your baseline identity and tone. |
| Skills | When a task follows a repeatable process or needs a specific tone. Bank it once, run it forever. |
| Projects | When the work needs deep brand knowledge and documents. A permanent workspace for a function. |
| All three together | A brand voice Skill, plus a content Project, plus your Instructions, equals product descriptions that ship without edits. |
Using a different platform?
The same principles hold, just under different labels. Account-wide Instructions map to custom instructions elsewhere. Projects map to the equivalent workspace or custom assistant: the same idea of instructions plus your documents loaded into every chat. Skills can be built on other platforms too; you ask the tool to build you a skill creator first, then run the same exercise. Whichever tool your team runs on, the setup work barely changes. The context wins, not the tool.
The teams pulling ahead are not the ones with the smartest model. They are the ones who have configured it with the deepest knowledge of their own business.
None of this takes long. Instructions are a twenty-minute job. A first Skill takes one prompt. A Project is an afternoon and a quarterly habit after that. Do the three together and the improvement compounds on every task from then on. If you want a hand working out what to configure first for your own store, get in touch with the team at Tribe Gen AI and we will map it out with you.
