Before diving into all the features of AI CTRL Secure Chat, it's important to understand how AI works and how to use it effectively in your daily business tasks. This section covers the essential concepts that will help you get better results and avoid common pitfalls.
What is AI and How Does It Work?
The AI behind AI CTRL is actually multiple different Large Language Models (LLM). Think of an LLM as a text prediction system that has been trained on vast amounts of written content from books, articles, websites, and other sources. When you ask it a question or give it a task, it uses patterns it learned from this training to generate helpful responses.
A "model" is essentially a specific version of this AI system. Different models have been trained differently and have varying capabilities - some might be better at creative writing, others at technical analysis, and others at reasoning through complex problems. This is why AI CTRL Secure Chat offers multiple models for you to choose from based on your specific needs.
AI's Knowledge vs. Your Knowledge
AI models are trained on vast amounts of text data up to a specific cutoff date, which means they have broad knowledge but with important limitations. AI may have some knowledge about your company from publicly available information that was included in its training data - things like your company's website, press releases, or public documents. However, it doesn't know about your specific projects, internal processes, current initiatives, or recent developments within your organization.
This is where you come in. You provide the context that makes AI truly useful for your work. When you upload documents, share project details in your conversation, or describe your specific situation, you're giving a model the information it needs to provide relevant, accurate assistance. Think of it as the difference between what the model learned in "school" versus what you teach it about your specific needs.
Training Cutoffs and Getting Current Information
Every AI model has a knowledge cutoff date - a point in time beyond which it doesn't have information. This means if you ask about recent events, current stock prices, or what happened in your industry last week, the model’s response will be based on older information. Importantly, the model will still provide an answer and often with confidence, even when its information may be outdated. This is why you need to apply your own judgment and verify information, especially for recent developments.
When you need current information, this is where AI CTRL Secure Chat's web search tool becomes essential. Instead of relying on potentially outdated knowledge, the web search feature allows AI to find and incorporate real-time information into its responses. If you're asking about recent market trends, current regulations, or breaking news in your field, make sure to enable web search to get accurate, up-to-date answers.
How Conversations Work
Within a single conversation, the selected model can reference earlier parts of your discussion because the application sends your entire conversation history with each new message. This allows the current model to maintain context throughout your chat session. For example, if you upload a document at the beginning of your conversation and then ask follow-up questions about it later, the model will still know about that document and can continue to reference it. However, if you start a completely new conversation, whichever model you select won't know about previous chats - each new conversation starts fresh.
Conversation Length and Quality
While AI can handle quite long conversations, extremely lengthy discussions can sometimes lead to decreased response quality. As conversations grow very long, the model may lose track of earlier context or provide less focused responses. You might notice this happening if the model starts giving generic answers or seems to forget important details you provided earlier in the conversation. Models have different sizes of context windows, or the amount of data the model can “remember” and interact with.
When you find this happening, it's often better to start a new conversation. A helpful approach is to ask AI to summarize the key points and context from your current conversation, then copy that summary and paste it into a new chat to continue with a fresh start while maintaining the important information.
Using AI in Your Daily Work
AI works best when you think of it as more than just an answer machine. While it can certainly provide information and complete tasks, the most effective users treat AI as a collaborative partner that can help them think through problems, practice skills, and explore ideas.
Basic Usage - Getting Things Done:
Draft emails, proposals, and reports
Summarize long documents or research papers
Create meeting agendas and follow-up summaries
Research industry topics and competitive landscapes
Intermediate Usage - Problem Solving:
Use AI to improve prompts for a specific AI process in order to get more useful results.
Work through project challenges and potential solutions
Analyze data trends and identify key insights
Break down complex topics for different audiences
Advanced Usage - AI as Collaborator:
Ask AI to interview you to help clarify your own thinking on complex issues
Have AI play "devil's advocate" to strengthen your arguments and identify weak points
Practice difficult conversations or presentations with AI role-playing different stakeholders
Use AI to challenge your assumptions and explore alternative perspectives
Brainstorm creative solutions by having AI build on your ideas
Remember, the most powerful AI interactions happen when you combine AI's broad knowledge and processing capabilities with your expertise, judgment, and understanding of your specific business context.
Key Take-Aways
AI based on Large Language Models (LLM) predicts text using patterns learned from training data, not by retrieving facts like a database. Different models have different strengths based on their training data.
Models have a knowledge cutoff and can sound confident but be outdated—verify critical facts.
It won’t know private/internal details unless you provide/upload them.
Enable the web search tool for real‑time information.
Conversation history is kept only within a single chat; new chats start fresh.
Very long chats can reduce quality—summarize and paste into a new chat if needed.
AI is its most powerful when you supply it with good data and clear instructions to help you process complex topics