Are you or your people having trouble learning how to prompt AI? Effective AI prompting is the most crucial skill to fully take advantage of this emerging technology.
At Embrace, we’ve seen firsthand how the right prompts can transform AI outputs from generic to exceptional. Our experience with AI and our customers has taught us valuable lessons in this area.
Here are some best practices to help you get the most out of your AI interactions.
🔹 Be Specific and Detailed
Think of AI as a skilled contractor. They have great experience and abilities but need clear instructions to deliver what you envision.
Vague prompts yield vague results. Instead of typing a few words like a Google search, provide detailed guidance. Specify the context, desired tone, and any particular points you want covered.
The more information you provide upfront, the less reworking and revising you’ll need later.
🔹 Leverage Agents for Consistency
Consistency is key in maintaining your brand’s voice and style. If your AI solution allows for the concept of Agents (functionality we have within Embrace), use them to set guidelines around tone, voice, and the use of acronyms.
This ensures that every output aligns with your brand’s identity. Whether it’s a knowledgebase article, a whitepaper, or a social media update, consistent guidelines help maintain a unified brand presence.
🔹 Specify the Output Format & Length
Clearly state what form you want the output to take. Are you looking for a blog post, a knowledgebase article, or a social media post? Each format has its own structure and style. Providing this information helps the AI tailor its response to meet your needs. For longer content, like whitepapers, include an outline and notes. This gives the AI a roadmap to follow, ensuring the final output aligns with your vision.
Giving the AI some direction around duration is helpful. Often a target length stated in terms of word or paragraph counts is helpful. In our experience, you won’t receive a response exactly of the requested length, but you will receive a directionally accurate output.
🔹 Provide a General Structure
Outlining your prompt can significantly improve the quality of the AI’s output. At Embrace, we often jot down notes in a roughly organized form. These can be thoughts, sentence fragments, or key points. Providing a general structure helps the AI understand the flow and main ideas, resulting in a more coherent and relevant output.
💡 Inside the Process: The Prompt
Between the Agent and the prompt here are some specific instructions we provided to create a first draft of the post you’re reading now:
- Draft a 500 word blog post about best practices in AI/LLM prompting drawing from Embrace’s experience working extensively with AI and our customers who are learning to use AI.
- You are authoring marketing content that will be consumed by business leaders
- Vary sentence length but bias towards short sentences
- Avoid unnecessary words
- Avoid adverbs
Prompting Embrace.ai to write this blog
🔹 Refine and Iterate
Prompting is an iterative process. Don’t expect the ideal output on your first try. Initial drafts often need follow-up prompts and revisions. Be prepared to refine your prompts and provide additional guidance. This iterative approach helps you get closer to the desired result with each round.
🔹 Be Hands-On with Final Revisions
AI can speed up the drafting process, often saving 50-80% of the time needed. However, you’ll likely want to apply your skills, experience, and personal touch to finalize the content. While AI can get you to a solid draft quickly, your expertise will ensure the final product meets your standards.
🔹 Utilize Related Content
Drawing from related assets can enhance the quality of the AI’s output. If you’re writing a knowledge article about a support topic, include content from related support tickets or transcripts of interviews with subject matter experts. This additional context helps the AI produce more accurate and comprehensive content.
🔹 Embrace the Learning Curve
The world is still learning to prompt effectively. At Embrace, we’ve seen users start with simple, Google-like prompts and gradually move to more detailed instructions. The more you practice and refine your prompting skills, the better your AI outputs will become.
💡 Inside the Process: The Content
To make it tangible, you can see our notes here that shaped this post. We uploaded the doc as content within a Collection we created just for the purposes of authoring this post.
Google Doc uploaded into a Collection in Embrace.ai
Conclusion
Mastering AI prompting is an ongoing journey. At Embrace, we’ve found these practices invaluable in helping our customers harness the full potential of AI. Start implementing these best practices today and watch your AI outputs improve.
To learn more, book a demo of Embrace.ai.
Image generated using Midjourney
Text generated with help from Embrace. Some images generated with Midjourney.
