contAIn™. The C.O.N.T.A.I.N. Concept Baseline

To get the most out of this exercise you really need to concentrate. This baseline should take about 30 minutes. contAIn is an active process, there are no wrong answers — it is purely designed to help you focus on how AI works, and how you work, so you can decide where and when to use it and for what.

At the end of it, you will have built your own concept of how you want AI to work for you.

McKinsey's State of AI 2025 found that 88% of organisations use AI, but only 6% get meaningful results. You're about to join the 6%.

I guarantee this will change how you think about working with AI. Even if you do nothing else on the contAIn™ journey, you will have a clearly defined view of ONE discipline. C for Concept.

So without further ado, let's crack on..........

Sam

Pick one real task you would like to regularly complete with AI, preferably something you're working on right now. Not your whole life or the entire business, just one specific job.

Answer each question fully, not a bullet point or a sentence. This is your first full brief of what you want the system to do. Be honest. This is your personal baseline, so the more brutally honest you are the better.

I made up a word while building contAIn™. A Claudism. It's something AI says that reveals, in real time, why you need a system around it.

"That's not a document problem, that's a discipline problem in the AI."

The machine diagnosing its own failure. Knowing it lacks discipline, but not fixing it.

You might have a Grokism. ChatGPTism. A Geminiism. Different tools, same problem. They all need YOUR brief, they all need the discipline and Human element that you bring.

That discipline is what you just started building.

Before you close out, do this. Open a new chat in the AI you've been using, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever, and ask it these six things about YOU and YOUR work:

Tell it to be blunt, not to give advice, and pull from all the sources it has.

1. Profile. Who do you think I am? My role, my focus, my goals.
2. Evidence. What have I actually told you that led you to that?
3. Known. What facts about me and my work are you confident about?
4. Guesses. What are you inferring about me that I haven't actually said?
5. Gaps. What don't you know about me that you'd need to help me properly?
6. Made up. Where have you filled in blanks or made assumptions?

The answer might surprise you, in one of two ways:

If it shows you how much it's been guessing. That gap, between what you've just defined in YOUR six answers and what AI actually knows about you, is exactly where contAIn lives.

If it knows you scarily well. That's a different conversation. You might want to check your privacy settings. Either way, knowing about you isn't the same as knowing what YOU want from it. Only you can define that.

You have honestly documented what AI knows about you, where you are, what's failing and identified the steps you need to take to fix it. That is exactly what the contAIn™ methodology was designed to do.

You completed C. The first discipline. The one that has to exist before anything else makes sense. Consultants charge £150 to £600 an hour for this, and you just did it yourself, in 30 minutes, for free. Most people who use AI never stop to do that. The ones who do are the ones who get results.

What you just did wasn't a quiz. It was 30+ years of project management and hundreds of documented AI failures distilled into 30 minutes, and you've just walked through it.

Now you are not building on someone else's system, you're using a methodology to start building your own system.

Now you've done that. The next step is Activate.

Join the Activate waitlist (£27 launch) →

You already defined what you would like AI to do for you, but realistically how much time would you like back?

Not a price, a bonus stack, or a countdown timer. A genuine question.

I spent hundreds of hours and more sleepless nights than I can count building this. The dirty looks from the dog because I was at the computer again. The deadlines that didn't care about Christmas. I built this so you don't have to go through that.

That's the only sales pitch I've got……

One more Claudism. This one simultaneously made me laugh out loud and realise I was on the right path with contAIn.

While working on the property project I got some AI slop back, when I picked it up, here's what Claude said…

"Good catch. The memory already has an accuracy-related note but it's not strong enough. Let me replace it with something tighter."

That is what AI does if you don't direct it, and push back. It ignores what you have told it and reverts to generic output, or fills in the gaps with assumptions and presents them as facts.

In Activate you'll take C further and add two more disciplines. Three disciplines working together. That's where the directing really starts, and where the AI starts following YOUR rules.

Activate launches soon at £27. Three disciplines from C.O.N.T.A.I.N. I'll let you know when it's ready.