If you are using an AI tool for answering customer questions, managing your bookings, or helping your team you’ll soon discover that the most important factor in its performance is not the model itself but the prompt you give it. A prompt is simply the instruction or question you pose to the system. Like any tool, it works best when used with care, precision and deliberate thought. In this post I’ll walk through:

• What a prompt really is and why it matters
• How you can craft prompts that produce useful, reliable results
• Practical suggestions for your business
• How to refine your prompts over time so your AI stays aligned with your operations

What are prompts?

Think of a prompt as the set of instructions you give a human colleague when asking for a task. The clearer you are, the less likely there will be misunderstandings. With an AI system the same principle holds, the better the prompt, the less you’ll need to follow up and correct.

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Behind the scenes the model receives what you typed, considers the patterns it has learned from data (text, conversation, context) and generates an answer. If your prompt is vague, it will fill the gaps (and that might lead to wrong assumptions). If your prompt is specific, it guides the system toward the outcome you want. For a business like yours the difference matters. A vague prompt might result in a generic reply, a booking error or an unsatisfactory customer experience. A well-constructed prompt helps your AI agent deliver responses that reflect your policies, tone and operational realities.

Zero-shot vs few-shot

This method is just about giving good examples. A zero-shot prompt is when you ask an LLM to do something without giving an example such as “Write a product description for a kayak lesson”. A few-shot prompt is when you show the LLM a few examples so it knows exactly what style you like i.e “Here are 2 product descriptions I love. Now write one using the same tone and style for my Kayak lesson.”

If you love a particular tone or format, copy-paste it as an example. AI learns from context quickly, so showing it the style you want gets better results.

Using chain prompts

Think of it like a recipe. Step-by-step. Instead of writing the following prompt:

“Write me a blog post about yoga lessons in London.”

You break down your prompt into a series of steps to explain the topic and a perspective or angle you want explored. This gives you way more control. The output is usually clearer, more accurate, and closer to what you need. You can tweak and refine the output until it is what you are after.

• Tell the system who it is, what its job is and any relevant business constraints
• Use clear actionable instructions
• Include constraints or format requirements
• Provide examples when useful

Understanding multimodality

It sounds fancy. It’s not. It just means ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others can learn from more than what you write in the prompt.  You can also:

• Show it an advert or product photo you want it to use
• Upload content or data and ask it to use that in the response
• Provide competitor info or industry trends to reference
• Ask it to conduct its own research on the web

Next time you’re stuck, upload the thing you’re working on (an image, a doc, whatever) and say “Here’s what I’ve got, what would you improve?". All the major LLMs are continuing to expand multimodal capabilities. These features are becoming increasingly useful for small businesses who juggle multiple formats of content.

Key take aways

The power of an AI system is unlocked by the prompt you craft. Take it seriously. Give it context, constraints, clarity. Think of it as setting instructions for a smart assistant rather than simply asking a question. The better you guide it, the more reliable the result.

• Give good examples
• Break big asks into step
• Refine and retry until you land on the right prompt

Mastering an LLM isn’t about being technical. It’s about being clear, curious, and in control. As a business owner, that’s already your superpower. If you want to see how these techniques apply directly to customer bookings, check out our blog on if is it safe to let AI manage your bookings.