how to hire your first AI employee (Claude Cowork)

Summary

AI employees are real, but most people are selling them wrong. here are two specific Claude Cowork workflows that move the needle, plus the mental model for thinking about what to hand off.

the two workflows:

1. speed to lead. lead comes in, lands in Slack, Claude scans Slack and your CRM hourly, enriches with public web data (LinkedIn, Instagram, business), and drafts a contextualized email in your personal Gmail. you review and send. the 391% sales lift study from 2012 still works, but the bar is higher now because everyone has automated 1-minute replies. contextualization is the edge.

2. weekly KPI tracking. Claude runs every Monday morning, takes over your Chrome via the extension, pulls Instagram insights (or any platform), updates your Monday.com scorecard, then pings you in Slack with the weekly delta. compound this across 15 KPIs and you’re saving hours a week.

the mental model: think of Claude as an employee, not as prompting software.

• level 1 does what they’re asked. Claude is A+ at this.
• level 2 thinks ahead and solves problems before they happen. Claude is barely here.
• level 3 proactively finds growth opportunities. Claude is nowhere near this.

the Cowork frame: context, rules, and systems (project files). checklists and low-level employees (skill files). automations (schedules). build employees, not prompts.

Transcript

ai employees are officially here

AI employees are officially here, but not the way most people are selling them. In this video, I’ll show you exactly how I hired Claude Cowork as my first AI employee with two real world workflows. One that makes you more money on every inbound lead and one that wipes out hours of recurring data work every single week. I’ll also walk you through Aaron Levy’s systems first thinking and the simple three-level framework I use to decide what to hand off to Claude and what to keep for myself.

If you don’t know me, I’m Jerred Moon. and I’ve hit the Inc. 500 twice and I run five total companies optimizing all of them with AI one week at a time and showing you the systems that work. So, if you’re ready to build something cool, let’s dive straight in. All right, I think it’s best if we jump in with two specific use cases. One that’ll make you more money and one that will save you more time.

use case #1: speed to lead (make more money)

So, the first way we’re going to make more money is speed to lead. So, Alexi talks about this all the time. Speed to lead in any business is the ultimate lever you can pull as long as you’re doing everything else already. He often references this study where there are 3.5 million leads across 400 companies and it showed this data. If you can reach out to a lead within one minute across those data points, it showed a 391% lift in sales.

And then that decreases where you’re getting down to 3 minutes, it’s a 98% lift in sales. So the faster that you can reach out to lead, the better. And there’s kind of this golden window within 1 to 5 minutes. But here’s the problem in 2026. Everyone’s already figured this out. This data that Hormosi refers to is from 2012. It is not 2026 data. It doesn’t mean speed to lead’s not important. It’s very important. But now we have to contextualize this data because people are inundated with automated responses that happen within a minute that don’t actually increase your sales.

So what you’re going to do is contextualize this data with Claude. And that’s what I’m going to talk about how to do. So I’m going to show you exactly how this works. You track visitor behavior. You send these leads to Slack. Claude scans Slack. It scans your CRM. It drafts a contextualized email. Then a person goes and sends this off. It’s better to look at a visual workflow. So you have a lead that comes in. The lead gets pushed to Slack.

This is built in a lot of CRM. Don’t over complicate it. HubSpot can send a lead directly to Slack. It’s built in. If you have trouble with this, you can go check out Zapier. It could do this for you. But this is where you want it to live. So they come into Slack and then Claude takes over. You put Claude on a schedule. And I’ll show you the prompt here in a second. You put Claude on an hourly schedule.

It’s going to scan this Slack channel every single hour for all the leads that are coming in. It’s then going to check it across your HubSpot account and contextualize that data with anything that’s inside your world. And then it’s going to go out to the internet and contextualize it further, finding their LinkedIn profile, Instagram, their business, everything else. Then it’s going to draft that email with everything that it’s pulled. So, it knows what this person has done within your business, website pages that they’ve visited, forms that they’ve filled out, what’s the what they’re interested in.

Then, it’s taking internet scraping data, like everything it could possibly find out about somebody that’s publicly available on the internet. Then, it’s throwing that into a drafted email in Gmail, your personal Gmail account. We’re not automating messages here. This is not a campaign email or broadcast email. This is getting put into my personal Gmail account. Now, I can reach out to this person and I want Claude to draft it. I don’t want Claw to send it.

Again, I can have an automated message go out within one minute, but I need a contextualized email to go out. One that actually can make an impact and show the person that we know your struggles and we can help you. So, I’m going to go into my draft every hour, every 30 minutes, every, you know, at the end of every day, whatever you have capacity for, and I’m going to look at the emails. I’m going to make sure everything makes sense that Claude pulled.

I’m not going to double check every single thing, but I’m make sure there’s no M dashes. I’m going to make sure the email is appropriate, that it hit on the pain points, that it knows who this person is. Then I’m going to send that email to the lead. And now I am sending faster emails to my prospects that are fully contextualized. And here’s the prompt that you would want to use. Very simple. Now, if you want to get access to any of this, I go in a much deeper dive inside of our school community.

So you can look at the link into the description if you want deeper dive on how to set all this up for your business. This is hitting most of it. So, it’s going to extract lead details from Slack. Enrich data from your CRM, whether that’s HubSpot, go high level, doesn’t matter. It draft a customized outreach email after it’s already looked from everything out on the internet and your CRM. And then it’s going to draft that email.

It’s not going to send anything. And then if it doesn’t have anything pulled within the last hour, it tells you just kind of ignore it. So, this is ultimately how you can move faster because if you can get faster speed to lead, you can get any kind of increase. What’s your baseline right now? Most people are like, 391% increase. I need to do it in a minute. Not necessarily. Just increase your baseline and see if it gives you that sales lift that you’re looking for.

Because if right now it takes you two days to reach out to a lead, let’s shrink that up to 24 hours. That’s still a 17% increase in sales. Now, if you’re like, I can I do it in an hour already or we do it within the same day. Cool. Let’s shrink that up. Can we get within eight hours and then move it up to 1 hour, within 30 minutes? and just keep pushing yourself or your team to get faster and faster to read up reach up to these leads until you kind of get to the golden window which is in that one to five minute range.

A one to five minute response with that much contextualized data would have been nearly impossible when you were working with a human to do these things. That is so much data to pull to find out their Instagram profile, their pain points, look in the CR, all of this data. But now you can do it all with Claude and Claude can be on a schedule to do this every single hour. Then you just have to have the person go in, verify, and send.

And you will increase your sales if you implement this system into your business. Now, let’s talk about how to save some time.

use case #2: weekly kpi tracking (save hours)

Every business owner knows they need KPIs, but what happens is they often don’t have time to pull those KPIs or they haven’t assigned it to a team member and it starts to get dropped. And so, they’re having to do this retroactive pulling of KPIs when they need them. And it’s a huge pain when it’d be much better to just to keep a constant weekly pulse on how the business is operating. So, I’m going to give you a simple example of how to use this with Instagram tracking.

So, you could do something like that, but it goes for really anything that you want. So, this is the setup. Every Monday, 9:00 a.m. it starts. What it does is Claude has can access your browser via Chrome extension. So, if you install the Chrome extension for Claude, it can just take over. So, what I’ve I’ve given it is the URL that you need to go pull data from Instagram. It pulls the Instagram insights. It updates my monday.com scorecard.

So, we use Monday for all of my businesses. You could to put this in a Google spreadsheet, notion, it really doesn’t matter. And you can do that through a direct connector. You don’t need any fancy technology for this. Claude can just do it all. Then it’s going to send me a Slack message once it’s done. And kind of giving me the insights like, hey, there was a 40% increase week over week, so on and so forth.

So, what happens is I pull it all. It does that every Monday. And it looks like this inside of my Monday account. It pulls up and it shows me exactly how my reach is increasing for Instagram. This one is crazy simple this example, but you could do this for anything. And the reason I want to show people this one is because some people sometimes people are getting in the weeds with API integrations and inadin and all this stuff when sometimes it’s just easiest to let Claude do what you would have done anyway to pull the data.

Give it the links that it needs. Give it the access it needs. Let it take over your Chrome browser. Set it on a schedule and it will get to work. So, this is exactly what the prompt looks like that I use. So, the steps are navigate to Instagram insights. I give it the exact link, extract the 30-day view count, update monday.com, and then report results. And then it gives you some constraints. This is the exact prompt I use, and it pulls this.

Now, this is just, like I said, one small example, but if I were to do that every Monday just to kind of keep track of things, that’s an easy report to pull, but it probably takes me 5 to 10 minutes. and you compound that over 15 different KPIs that I want to pull every single week. Now, we’re saving one, two hours per week, either of your employees time or your time, so you can sync more of that into the business.

There is a lot of ways to use Claude to get better at business, but saving time and making more money are the two best ways that you should be thinking about this. But let’s talk about becoming a systems thinker so you can start to apply everything I’m talking about not just in these two example use cases but in anything that you can think of within your business. So let’s get to the bigger idea and that is using Claude as an employee.

I’m challenging business owners to start thinking about Claude as an employee. And on my team we talk about the three different buckets for an employee. There’s a level one employee and this person does what they are asked. So hey I need you to go do X.

the 3 levels of employees

They do X. done. Level two is you do everything in level one, but you also think ahead and solve problems before they happen. So they are doing what they ask, but then they see something come up and they can go ahead and navigate that and solve the problem before it even gets back to you. And then level three is level one and level two, but they proactively look for areas of opportunity and growth in the business and figure out how to tap into them.

So level three is the A player everyone talks about, right? So they do what they’re asked. They’re thinking ahead. They’re solving problems, but they’re also looking at opportunities and finding growth opportunities for your business. Claude is not a level three, and it’s far from that. It’s barely a level two. I’ve seen some instances of level two. Like, it can kind of if you prompted it incorrectly, like, hey, I already went and looked at this lead and did this thing.

It changes its thinking a little bit to help you solve a problem or mistake, but it’s just barely there. But it is A+ at a level one employee. So, anyone on your team who just does what they’re asked and does it well, Claude can probably either augment them or you can think about Claude coming into your business as an employee doing level one tasks. So, start thinking of Claude as an employee, not just a prompting software and you are going to be getting a lot more done with Claude Cowork.

And then when you’re in Cloud Work specifically, here’s how I am also having business owners think about it.

the claude cowork framework

We have claude coowork and you have context, rules and systems is the first thing that you need to be thinking of. So what is your business? What is your voice? What are your current systems? And how you’re going to use claude is a claude project or a claude brain. If you want to know how to set up a cla brain, we use obsidian. I have a video for that you can watch. But also you need to be thinking of checklist in low-level employees.

These are the skill files. That’s essentially what I’m showing you here. This would be turned into a skill file so it can execute that on demand. And then automations are the schedule. So to reframe claude Cowork specifically for business owners, you need context rules and systems. You need checklists and low-level employees and you need to run that in automation. That’s schedules within claude. That’s skill files within claude. And then that’s a brain or project files within claude.

That’s how you need to start looking through the lens of building out your claude Cowork systems. You’re building employees that can save you time or make you money. You’re not just using it as a prompting software. You’re actually starting to use Claude as a business owner and you’ll be further ahead than 99% of entrepreneurs who are either wasting their time with vibe coding or they’re only prompting Claude and not having it do any of this agentic work.

Look, everything I just showed you works, but there’s a bigger move I want you to make before you log off. I just told you Claude is the cheapest level one employee you will ever hire. So, go hire one. And not just for these two automations. As a full executive admin, inbox, calendars, to-dos, drafts every day before you sit down at your desk.

hire claude as your executive admin

That’s how you actually get your hours back and how you free yourself up for the level two and level three work only you and your team can do. I made a full video on exactly how I made Claude my executive admin assistant. So, click the video on the screen or in the description to watch that one next and go hire your first AI employee.