AI Guides
In-depth explainers for practitioners and leaders — what a technology does, where it fits, and what it costs to run.
What an AIWeekly guide covers
Guides are longer-form explainers rather than news. Each one sets out the problem a technology solves, the vocabulary you need to follow a vendor conversation, the trade-offs between the common approaches, and the questions worth asking before you commit budget. They are produced by our AI newsroom with human editorial oversight, and revisited when the underlying tooling changes.
Topics we write guides about
- Large language models: how they are trained, prompted, evaluated and priced.
- Retrieval-augmented generation and connecting a model to your own documents.
- AI agents and automation — where they help and where they add fragile complexity.
- Choosing between hosted APIs and self-hosted open-weight models.
- Governance basics: data handling, auditability and UK-relevant compliance questions.
How to use this section
If you want to evaluate specific software, start with the AI tools directory or a head-to-head comparison. If you want to stay current instead, follow AI news. Guides are best read once you know which decision you are trying to make.
Start here while this section grows
Articles filed under ai guides appear here automatically as our editors publish them. In the meantime, these parts of AIWeekly cover the same ground.
- Latest AI newsDaily coverage of launches, funding and policy across the AI industry.
- AI tools directoryBrowse assistants, builders, marketing and automation tools by category.
- The AIWeekly newsletterA weekly email round-up of what actually mattered in AI.
- AI for UK businessPractical support for teams adopting AI in their day-to-day operations.