Prompting is just briefing: the skill you already have

The word “prompt” makes it sound technical. A more honest word is “brief”. When you ask a generative AI tool to do something, you’re briefing a fast, capable, slightly literal assistant who has no idea about your context unless you supply it.

Anyone who’s ever delegated a task well already knows how to do this.

Give it the context a colleague would need

If you asked a new team member to “write the client update”, they’d have questions: which client, what happened this month, what tone, how long. Answer those in the brief. “Write a short, friendly monthly update for a retail client. We launched their new reporting dashboard, hit a two-week delay on the mobile work, and start user testing next month.”

Show it what good looks like

Paste an example of a previous update you were happy with and say “match this style”. This does more than any amount of describing the tone.

Say what you don’t want

“Don’t use marketing language.” “No bullet points.” “Keep it under 150 words.” Constraints sharpen the output.

Then have a conversation

The first response is a draft. Read it, tell it what’s off — “too formal”, “you missed the delay”, “cut the last paragraph” — and it revises. People who treat it as a one-shot request get one-shot results.

Why this matters for teams

The gap between someone who finds AI “useless” and someone who finds it genuinely helpful is almost always briefing skill, not tool knowledge. That’s a teachable skill, and a fast one to pick up.