Mastering the Art of Prompt Engineering/Writing for Small Business Owners

This is adapted from a series of workshops I presented in partnership with Northeastern to give small business owners helpful tools to master prompt engineering techniques and learn some marketing use cases for Generative AI assistants. I have also presented this material at Tech Intersections.

In learning to work with AI assistants more effectively, I have found that the following techniques can help.

Persona

You can designate a role or identity to your AI assistant to guide its responses.

This can include a communication style or attitude for the persona - such as communicating “formally” or “abruptly” or “professionally”.

You can also designate an identity for it to adopt so that the response includes a perspective or background. For example, write as a scientist or a five-year old or a chirpy medieval princess.

Context

Context is the most intuitive part of prompting and refers to any background information needed for the request.

Task

If context is best understood as the background information needed for the request, the task refers to the actions needed for the model to make.

Result

You can get specific about the format, content, or tone of the results you are expecting. This can be particularly useful when you are generating content.

Constraints

This refers to any limitations or restrictions that your model should avoid in the request.