This article gets you signed in, through your first conversation, and pointed at the one setting worth changing on day one. It should take about ten minutes.
Prefer to watch? The video walkthrough covers the same ground.
1. Sign in
There's no new account to create and no new password to remember. AI CTRL uses the same sign-in your organization already uses.
- Go to your organization's AI CTRL address
- Click Continue with [your provider] (the button is labelled with your company's sign-in provider)
- Enter your normal work credentials
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You'll land directly in the chat interface.
Note: The sign-in page may say "Sign in to Open WebUI." That's the platform underneath AI CTRL. You're in the right place.
2. Ask your first question
- Choose a model. Click the model name at the top of the chat area. If you don't know which to pick, choose the Smart Model Router, it selects one for you.
- Type your question in the box at the bottom of the screen.
- Send it with the arrow button or the Enter key.
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Not sure what to ask? Suggested prompts appear beneath the message box, and they change based on what you type.
3. Keep the conversation going
Everything in a single conversation stays available to the model, so you can ask follow-up questions without repeating yourself.
Three things worth knowing on day one:
- Edit and retry. You can change your original question and generate a new answer instead of starting over.
- Check the sources. If your conversation used attached documents, the answer includes citations. Click one to see the exact text it came from.
- Take the answer with you. Copy it, or export it as a PDF, Word document, or Excel file.
There's more you can do with an answer, regenerating with different instructions, keeping versions, switching models partway through.
4. Set your personal system prompt
AI CTRL starts every conversation cold. It doesn't build a profile of you, and it receives nothing about you from your company's directory, so without instructions, it's guessing at who you are, what you work on, and how you want to be answered.
Your personal system prompt answers all three, once, for every conversation you have afterwards.
Setting Your Personal System Prompt
5. Finding your way around
Everything else lives in the sidebar. You don't need any of it today.
| In the sidebar | What it's for | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| New chat | Starts a fresh conversation. Use a new chat for a new topic. | — |
| Search | Finds anything you've asked before | — |
| Notes | A built-in notepad you can attach to any conversation | Folders, Notes & Sharing |
| Workspace | Where shared assets are built: custom models, knowledge collections, prompt templates, and skills | Choosing the Right Workspace Asset |
| Folders | Groups related chats, and can apply the same instructions and files to all of them | Folders, Notes & Sharing |
| Past chats | Rename, pin, share, clone, archive, or delete anything you've asked | Folders, Notes & Sharing |
| Your profile | Settings, personal system prompt, and your data controls | Settings, Memory & Your Data |
Where to go next
- Setting Your Personal System Prompt: the five minutes from step 4, in full
- Attaching Documents & Data: files, webpages, notes, and shared knowledge
- Understanding AI Basics: what these models are actually doing
- AI CTRL Chat App Installation: run it as an app on your desktop or phone
- FAQ