How to dial in your prompts for 🤩 dazzling results
Learn how to craft exceptional prompts with our three-part series
There’s been a lot of talk about prompts and prompt engineering with AI, and for good reason.
Dialling in your prompts is absolutely critical to get high-quality outputs from AI chatbots.
In the past month alone, I’ve trained 100s of executive assistants on prompt crafting, and published a cover article on the subject for Executive Support magazine — and now I want to share some top tips with you, too. This is the first in a three-part summer series on prompting pro skills.
The basics
What are prompts? The questions or instructions you put into an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini and more.
What’s prompt crafting? It’s the process of carefully structuring a prompt that’s precise and detailed. It can be as quick as 20-30 seconds to type out a sentence or two, or it may be more involved including paragraphs of context and examples.
Why does it matter? Because the quality of your prompts determines the quality of your output — the cardinal rule here is garbage in, garbage out. Generic, basic prompts produce generic, basic results.. results that will take you a lot more editing and tinkering to get up to your standards.
It’s worth spending a little time creating strong prompts as they’ll save you time in the long run and unlock those 😲 “holy sh*t!” AI moments.
COIF: your formula for prompts
Our COIF framework breaks down the four key elements to include in every prompt.
Context — the expertise you want the AI chatbot to have, the role it should play, details about you and about your audience
Output — the job to be done, the output you want
Intent — the purpose, the ‘why’.. what are you trying to achieve with this piece of work?
Format — let the AI chatbot do the formatting for you by putting your output into bullets, headers, a spreadsheet, or by specifying word count, tone of voice, British English and so on
COIF in practice
Here are all the elements of COIF visually presented in a strong prompt:
Over to you…
👋 See you next week for prompts in action, including a ton of use cases specific to EAs.
…and if you just can’t wait, you can go down the rabbit hole with our useful FREE Starter Guide to ChatGPT 📚
Fiona