Why Your Employees Should Be Fluent in ChatGPT Prompting
TL;DR: Ever wonder why your AI tools aren’t living up to the hype? The problem may not be the technology, but how you’re asking it to serve you. Teaching your employees how to write good ChatGPT prompts is your doorway to opportunity and will give you a competitive edge.
“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” — Lau TzuYou can apply this ancient wisdom to the world of AI. Substitute “fish” with “prompt templates”, and “fishing skills” with “craft effective prompts, and you have yourself an AI-flavored Tao Tenet. Equip a person with a prompt template, and they’ll solve a task; teach them to craft effective prompts, and they’ll solve thousands.
Efficient Prompts Aren’t Simple
Like any technology, ChatGPT is only as good as your ability to use it. To ensure its utility, you must articulate commands that give a clear and detailed picture of the desired task. It is crucial to provide specific context and precision—the more precise we are in input or instruction, the better our output becomes. Instead of requesting “Give me writing tips,” a prompt such as “Provide 10 compelling tips to improve my writing skills for business email communication” would yield a list of more targeted advice.
Swap a bland “How do we boost sales?” with “brainstorm some quirky yet effective strategies for boosting our holiday sales.”Giving context is just one requirement. With time, your employees can explore more advanced techniques like few-shot learning (providing examples to guide how you want ChatGPT to respond), chain of thought (guiding the model’s thinking in sequence), and meta-prompting (asking it to write its own prompt), among many others—but that’s for another post.
Teach Your Employees to Fish (for Words)
Generative AI is not just a trend; it's reshaping the contours of our professional lives in profound ways. While many organizations remain on the sidelines, the seismic shifts caused by this emergent technology are becoming impossible to ignore. Recognizing and engaging with large language models like ChatGPT is no longer a ‘nice-to-have,’ but a critical step in ensuring your business is prepared for an AI-driven future that is not on the horizon—it's already here.
1. Accessing AI’s Full Capability
It’s simple: superior prompts elicit superior responses. Indistinct prompts yield equally vague responses. You might have read or heard about all the possibilities of ChatGPT but these things were not achieved with a basic, vague prompt.
In Practice: Marketing Strategy Refinement
Suppose your marketing team is grappling with low engagement rates for a new product launch. Instead of asking, “How can we improve engagement?”, a more focused query like “Suggest five experimental marketing techniques to increase user engagement for our new fitness app” could yield actionable, tailored ideas that the team can immediately test and implement.
2. Improving Productivity and Efficiency
Awkward prompt structure or poor framing could divert time into AI puzzle-solving externally — time better invested in your company operations directly. By educating employees about prompt formation, businesses boost their efficiency, preserving manpower.
In Practice: Streamlining Customer Support
A specific prompt like “Generate a troubleshooting guide for common customer complaints” is more actionable than a nebulous one like “Help with customer issues.”
3. Increasing Business Agility and Building Resilience to Change
Empowered with the skill to ask the right questions, businesses can quickly pivot around obstacles, adapt to new trends, and unearth critical insights.
In Practice: Market Trends and Consumer Behavior
A poorly constructed prompt such as “Tell me trends” might yield a list so broad and unfocused that it becomes almost meaningless, covering everything from fashion fads to stock market shifts. However, a well-thought-out prompt like “Provide an analysis of emerging trends in the SaaS industry for 2023, focusing on customer expectations and technological advancements" would produce a targeted, useful list. This specificity enables your team to strategically align with future industry shifts, better preparing them to innovate and stay competitive. NOTE: For information after September 2021, use either Bing Chat or Perplexity, which run on the same models as ChatGPT (GPT-4 and 3.5) but have access to the internet.
4. Mitigating Risks, Misunderstandings and Mistakes
Unambiguous and explicit prompts not only fetch better results but also limit the mishaps AI could commit. It’s a safety net—clear instructions lessen the likelihood of falling into ‘interpretational traps’ that could sneak into AI-generated results from ambiguous queries.
In Practice: Navigating Legal Jargon
Consider an example where your legal team needs to understand a contract’s fine print. Instead of a general “Summarize this contract,” a prompt like “Break down the liability clauses in this contract in layman’s terms” minimizes risk.
5. Fostering Innovation
Comprehensive answers fetched by smart prompts breed a conducive environment for innovation. Exceptionally phrased queries can dig deep into AI’s extensive knowledge database, helping employees draw connections, find inspiration, and spark innovative ideas that a shallow or lackluster prompt might have skipped.
In Practice: Fueling the Creative Engine of R&D
Instead of the typical R&D question like “What can we do with our tech?”, try sculpting a prompt that hones in on the details. Use “Identify three ways our existing sensor technology can be adapted for early detection of diseases in the healthcare sector, with an emphasis on affordability and scalability.” This query doesn’t just invite innovation; it specifically directs the AI to consider market viability and societal impact, thus guiding your R&D team toward genuinely transformative ideas.
6. Upskilling Workforce
Effective prompting demands clarity of thought, forethought, and a keen understanding of details—vital skills transferrable across the many avenues of professional life. This marginal upskilling helps employees grow, fostering their professional development, all while improving their day-to-day efficiencies!
In Practice: Multi-Skill Development
When employees use prompts to seek information on cross-discipline topics, like “Summarize how blockchain could impact supply chain management,” they engage in self-guided learning.
7. Informed and Expedited Decision-MakingThe difference between a quick decision and an informed quick decision can be monumental, especially for executives and managers. ChatGPT can sift through extensive datasets or reports, but it’s the prompt’s precision that ensures the analysis is both rapid and relevant.
In Practice: Executive Synthesis
Imagine that your management team needs to gain immediate insights without having to comb through pages of data. Instead of simply stating "Summarize,” which risks omitting important information, using a prompt like “Provide the key takeaways from this quarter’s sales reports with a focus on underperforming sectors and potential growth areas" will get them the answers they need.These examples can be applied to any large language model (LLM), not just ChatGPT (though prompts do need to be adapted to the model). In fact, new ones are being released every day. By committing to the development of prompt-crafting skills within your team, you’re not just enhancing the performance of a single AI tool; you’re fundamentally upgrading your business’s ability to navigate the digital landscape.
Food for Thought
Although the spotlight here has been on mastering single (a.k.a. zero-shot) prompts, this is just the opening act. There are many advanced techniques that can even further optimize your AI-human collaboration, and the companies whose employees are becoming fluent in the dialogue are in the spearheading minority—for now.
Your competitors are already trying to figure out how to make the best use of AI.
To hold an edge over the competition, it’s important to be among the front-runners in the AI race. As the crazy tide of AI sweeps over us all, let’s learn to fish in these new waters!