AI Basics for Business
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Good Prompts vs. Weak Prompts
Reading about weak versus strong prompts only gets you so far. It's much easier to see side by side, on a real business task — so here's the example this guide keeps coming back to.
“Write a sales email.”
“Write a short, friendly follow-up sales email to a small business owner who downloaded our free pricing guide three days ago but hasn't replied. Objective: get a reply booking a 15-minute call. Tone: warm and low-pressure, not pushy. Keep it under 120 words, no generic sales language, and end with one clear, easy next step.”
What makes the second one work: it closes off nearly every gap the AI would otherwise have to guess at. The audience is a small business owner. The situation is spelled out — downloaded a guide, went quiet. The objective is a booked call, not just "sound nice." The tone is warm, not pushy. Even the output is constrained — a word count, no generic sales language, one clear next step. The AI isn't working any harder for the second prompt. It just has far less left to guess.
The pattern worth noticing
Almost every weak prompt fails for the same reason: it names the task but skips the situation. Almost every strong prompt fixes that with context, an audience, an objective, a tone, and some shape for the output. The next lesson turns exactly that pattern into a method you can reuse.