To get real value from AI chatbots, you must master the art of crafting great questions, explains Fiona Young
Be honest: have you tried out ChatGPT and been utterly underwhelmed with what it’s created for you? Have you turned away from AI chatbots altogether because your initial trials were so disappointing? If so, you’re not alone. I hear this every week and every day from Assistants I’m working with.
Although it’s easy to pick up these tools and play around with them, there’s a real art to crafting the right question to get you high-quality outputs, fast.
That’s what I want to share with you today: prompting tips, tricks, and tactics so you can build your confidence using AI chatbots – and build confidence in their outputs.
Language
First things first, let’s define some key AI terms. I’ve found that language is often a barrier to talking about technical stuff like AI, so it’s important to have a grasp of these.
Prompt
This is the question or set of instructions you give an AI chatbot like Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT to get a response. Prompting tactics are the focus of this article because the quality of your prompts really determines the quality of your outputs from AI chatbots.
Large language model (LLM)
This is a machine learning model that’s trained on a huge amount of text data – we’re talking trillions of sentences from around the web. They are a specific type of generative AI that can communicate with us in our human language. LLMs can take our questions and instructions to generate a response on any question you can imagine in a human-like way. LLMs are the enginesbehind AI chatbots; for example, the current LLM behind ChatGPT is GPT-4o.
AI chatbot
This is an LLM plus a chat layer, so it’s the actual product you and I interact with. Some popular AI chatbots you may have heard of or used include ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Gemini. This is what allows us to interact with the AI and get answers.
How to Practically Use AI Chatbots in Your Work Life
AI chatbots are exceptionally versatile tools that can help you in more ways than you think. Look at the top 10 buckets of tasks you can outsource to AI chatbots as an Assistant:
Use your AI chatbot of choice as a sparring partner, a copilot, and an assistant to give you first drafts for anything you create at work.
Writing and editing
- Drafting reports, emails, and presentations
- Helping structure a report or presentation from beginning to end
- Providing feedback on written content and suggestions for improvement
- Help synthesizing multiple documents into one
Research and business intelligence
- Imagine your exec is going to a charity fundraising dinner – you can easily create a briefing of people on their table and their businesses, and suggest key topics of conversation that will be of interest to all
- Briefings for key external meetings
- Competitor briefings
- Tailored summaries of chunky reports and thought leadership pieces specific to your exec’s role and your industry
Meetings, minutes, and events
- Quickly create slick meeting minutes, meeting summaries, lists of actions, and follow-up emails – from a transcript, rough typed notes, or even a picture of your handwritten notes
- Create detailed project plans for important work events like company offsites and strategy sessions
- Help you brainstorm creative themes, elements, and activities for company events like your holiday party to make these unforgettable
Prompting Pro Tips
Now let’s get into how to craft the prompts you put into AI chatbots to get your high-quality outputs.
Garbage in, garbage out
This is the cardinal rule of prompting.
If you put in a very generic, very high-level, very non-specific prompt into a chatbot, you’re going to get a very generic, very non-specific result. It will be underwhelming and not worth the effort.
You need to imagine that your AI chatbot is a motivated and well-intentioned intern – they want to help, but they know very little about you, your business, and even how the work world works, as they’re green. So you need to really spell it out for them.
The more detail and context that you put into AI tools, the better the output you’ll receive.
That’s why it’s so worth investing the time to learn how to craft expert prompts that will get you great outputs fast. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Where People Go Wrong
There are a few key areas where most people get prompting wrong and end up disappointed.
Mistake #1: Not being specific enough
Be excessively clear about the context.
Be clear about the role you want it to play and the expertise you want it to have, based on the job at hand. For example, tell the AI chatbot to imagine it is a leadership coach, or an experienced corporate lawyer, or a social media marketing expert.
Be clear about you: who are you and what your role is, what you are trying to do, what you need from it.
Be clear about the tone of voice and style. This will help the chatbot generate a written output as close to your intended style as possible.
Mistake #2: Taking the first result as final
Look at results from AI chatbots as a jumping-off point. They are a great starting point – but be prepared to take the output, hone it, and shape it to get it to your standards for human-created work.
You can do this within the chatbot by continuing to ask questions and giving it feedback. Alternatively, you can do the final polishing yourself offline.
Mistake #3: Expecting ready-to-use content
AI chatbots won’t get you 100% of the way there, but with skilful prompts, they can get you 80% there. Then all you must do is get the final 20% to get it to the finish line.
And that’s a good thing. It’s nice to feel like we still have value, right? Our human touch is still very much needed.
The COIF Framework: Your Formula for Brilliant Prompts
We’ve created a formula for all the elements of a strong prompt to clarify exactly what you need to include. It’s called COIF.
Include these elements in every prompt for more significant projects where good outputs are important. This will provide the chatbot with all the context it needs.
See the example below to see how you could construct a prompt with these four elements included.
Imagine if you had just said “write me a social post for this conference session.” You would get a vague output in a totally artificial tone that needs lots of editing.
Again, imagine your AI chatbot is your obedient, enthusiastic yet totally green intern. If you don’t give it much of a brief, then it won’t give you a high-quality result back.
More Pro Tips
Here are a few additional pro tips to help you expertly craft your own prompts:
Iterate
Be prepared to have a back-and-forth exchange. Ask questions and give feedback to hone the output you get. This approach is also known as ‘chain of thought prompting’.
Right-size the prompt
For a tiny task, you don’t need a detailed, paragraph-long prompt. A simple, clear question should do the trick. But the bigger the project and the more complex the ask is, the more time you should spend crafting your prompt. The COIF formula is perfectly designed for this.
Avoid negatives
Rather than saying “Don’t make the tone of voice formal,” say “Make the tone of voice informal.” The way that chatbots were developed means that they don’t seem to understand negative instructions. Don’t say don’t, do say do.
Build up a template document
If you’re taking the time to build prompts that are a paragraph long, copy and paste them into a document to house all your prompts. Use them next time around to save even more time.
Copy-paste in writing samples
For example, if you’re asking the chatbot to draft a LinkedIn post for your exec, copy and paste in your exec’s last three LinkedIn posts. Tell it that these are examples of posts and to mimic the tone of voice and style in its proposed post.
Quality check
Make sure to take a critical eye to ensure the result is high quality and as good as if you had done it yourself longhand. It’s also important for fact-based projects to always, always check your facts.
Prompt Dissection
To help you see the difference in prompt quality, we’ve included three prompts for one task. They go from OK to better to best.
For complex projects, spending the extra time on a detailed prompt will significantly cut down how much time you spend refining.
Planning an offsite
The last example uses the COIF formula, giving the chatbot detailed information on the context, output, intent, and format.
At the end of this prompt, there is an additional sentence you can use to get an output that is really tailored to what you want. If you tell the chatbot to ask you questions, it can get any clarification it needs.
The Limitations of AI
One last thing: there are a few limitations of AI that you need to be aware of when interacting with AI chatbots. Much has been written about these in more depth in other articles, so if they’re new to you, please do further research and talk to your infosec team to make sure you’re using tools safely at work, within your company’s policies.
Hallucination
Occasionally AI chatbots can spit out information that’s completely fabricated and untrue – but sounds convincing. This is concerning when we’re counting on it to give us a great work output. Hallucinations don’t happen often, but they’re still important to keep in mind to avoid embarrassment. Always fact-check your outputs.
Data privacy
Any time you interact with a tech tool, you need to be concerned about data privacy risks. How is this company using your data? Storing it? Are you fully aware of this and OK with it? It’s important to know your company’s AI policy and follow it. Be sure to avoid putting personally identifiable information (PII) into these systems unless you have express permission to do so from your company. And be sure to check if they’re using your prompts and uploads to train their model – many AI chatbots do by default, but you can change this in your settings. Make a point to do this ASAP.
Context window
There are only so many words that an AI chatbot can hold in its working memory. Over a certain word count, it will forget things you told it earlier in the conversation and you will have to give context again – so you can think of the context window as being like short-term memory. AI chatbots also can’t carry memory over separate conversations, so you’ll have to give it the same details about you again when you start a new session (note that this is changing with ChatGPT’s custom instructions and memory features, which allow for more personalization – we expect to see more of this over time across all AI chatbots).
Writing style
Written pieces you create with your human brain will always have a certain je ne sais quoi. AI chatbots are not great at replicating this – your tone, your style, the way you structure your writing, words and phrases you commonly use, etc. (even if you use all the tips and tactics we’ve shared here!). Be realistic about this and expect you’ll need to edit the output to make it sound uniquely yours.
Take Your AI Game to the Next Level
With these tactics and a little practice, your prompts will be better than ever. Experiment and iterate, and you’ll soon save hours per week by outsourcing some of your admin to AI chatbots.
We’ve created a free prompt bank for Assistants including 20+ high-quality prompts (and counting) that you can swipe and use as a starting point for your own prompts document. Use this QR code for instant access.
