Learning how to prompt better was a real moment for me in the early days of using LLMs. Understanding how to use even quite basic prompting techniques dramatically improved the quality of outputs from AI tools and gave me the motivation to truly integrate their use into my daily workflow. Effective prompting directly improves the accuracy, creativity, and relevance of AI outputs, and enables more useful, meaningful, and actionable answers. It’s a force multiplier of value.
But given how fast AI capability is improving, surely interacting with AI tools in this way will soon disappear? Several people that I’ve spoken to recently seem to think so, but I’m not so sure. Whenever I run the IPA Advanced Application of AI in Advertising course I have to update the deck quite significantly to take account of all the latest developments (things are changing so fast) but good prompting still provides the foundation – for several reasons.
More than anything, to do a good job AI’s need to understand user intent and context. They will undoubtedly get much better at using advanced contextual awareness and memory to infer meaning from relatively vague inputs. But the subtlety of good prompting, particularly for nuanced or complex requirements, means that it remains (and will likely do so for some time) the best way of articulating this. AI capabilities may be advancing rapidly but as they do so the main bottleneck in value is currently shifting from model performance to the user’s ability to articulate intent clearly.
More than this, effective prompting gives you an excellent understanding of how to work with AI. There’s really no substitute for conversing with an AI to understand it’s strengths and limitations, and how to get the most out of the machine. It teaches you how to refine and evolve instructions to continuously improve AI results. It allows for the development of the kind of idiosyncratic habits that enable you to generate unique and singular value.
As AI becomes more powerful and versatile, skilled prompting enables us to effectively exploit new functionalities like chained reasoning and multimodal inputs. The mistake that many make, I think, is looking for the perfect prompt right from the start. Despite what all the LinkedIn gurus say, there is no such thing. So learning how to interact with an AI to fulfil specific needs is a foundational skill.
I also think that prompting can help us to think better in a AI/human process. It can develop a users’ critical thinking skills, forcing them to clarify their objectives, assumptions, and constraints explicitly. Thoughtful and intentional use of AI can help us to be more thoughtful and intentional about what it is that we’re actually trying to do.
Having said all that, prompting IS likely to change in some notable ways. The increasing ability to interact with AI through dialogue, gestures, and even voice tone and emotion understanding, will enable AIs to interpret a far wider set of inputs than just text, data or images alone. It’s likely that AI systems themselves will increasingly handle prompt refinement and optimisation, automatically rewriting or clarifying user inputs in real-time. Highly personalised or custom-trained AI systems will become familiar with individual and grouped user behaviours, preferences, and communication styles. AI interfaces that are embedded seamlessly within productivity and workflow applications will infer context from user activity. These context-rich integrations will mean that prompts are more likely to become short contextual nudges rather than carefully crafted instructions. Iterative refinement and the use of quick feedback loops where the AI continuously refines outputs based on simple user reactions is already important, but it’s likely to get more so.
But even as AI grows more intuitive, certain tasks (notably creative, technical, or those that involve complex reasoning or specialist domain-specific contexts) will still benefit significantly from highly specific prompting. And the underlying skill of articulating clear intent and relevant context, remains an excellent foundation for future interaction paradigms. So yes, it’s still worth learning how to get good at prompting.
P.S. if you did want to get better at prompting, this comprehensive Google guide is a pretty good place to start.
A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over ten thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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