Imagine this scene
You’re on a kickoff call with a new agency. They’re smart and eager — but they don’t know your organization. The success of everything that follows hinges on one thing: the brief you give them. Working with AI is no different. Prompts are briefs.
A common mistake beginners make is treating AI like a search box. But AI doesn’t respond to keywords — it responds to context. A strong prompt includes: who the audience is, what you’re trying to achieve, what format you want, how it should sound, and any constraints (length, reading level, formality).
If you ask AI, “Write an announcement,” it has no idea who it’s for or what success looks like. So it plays it safe. The result sounds polished but empty. This isn’t an AI failure — it’s a briefing failure.
Weak
“Rewrite this email”
Strong
“Rewrite this email for senior leaders, no more than 150 words, neutral but confident tone”
Adding constraints makes AI more creative, not less. Think of constraints as rails that keep the train on track.
The Mindset Shift
Don’t ask AI to do your job. Brief it the way you’d brief a smart but context-poor teammate.
Rewrite a vague prompt into a strong one — then compare the results.
Pick a real task you need to complete this week — a draft, a summary, talking points, or a message to a specific audience.
Write the vague version of your prompt first — the one you'd instinctively type before this course. Something like "write an email about the new policy."
Rewrite it using the briefing framework: who is the audience, what outcome do you want, what format, what tone, and what constraints apply (length, reading level, formality)?
Run both prompts in an AI tool and compare the outputs side by side. Which one is closer to what you actually needed?
Identify the one constraint or detail that made the biggest difference. Save your stronger prompt somewhere you can reuse it.
