How to effectively prompt AI tools

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a powerful tool for making your business more efficient. AI chatbots can be used to summarise information, to assist with scheduling, and to help streamline the production of customer-facing material such as contracts and e-mails.  

But to tap into those powerful capabilities, you need to learn how to talk to the AI. When asking it to perform a task, the difference between an odd, stilted response, and something genuinely useful, is all in how you ask.  

The good news: prompting is a skill - and it’s not as tricky as it seems. 

In developing our AI-powered app, DentalDial, we spent a great deal of time ensuring our prompt produced the most useful and insightful outputs, and have developed some pointers which we will share with you today.  

How to effectively prompt AI tools

What exactly is a prompt? 

Think of a prompt like writing a really good brief, or set of instructions.  

Imagine you have a new employee, and on their first day, you simply say, "get to work", "do that thing", "do this task". Blank stares and confusion would be expected. Well, talking to AI is exactly the same. Like a new employee, it requires details, context, and a little direction.  

For example, tell the AI to "Summarise this call", and the AI will follow your instructions and go as generic and vague as possible. But tell the AI "Summarise this phone call from a dental practice, highlighting any treatments mentioned, tone, and follow-up tasks", and suddenly, the output is more relevant, more insightful, and - most importantly - more actionable.  

Tips we live by  

1. Give it context.

   Don’t just say "Write a caption.” Say “Write a friendly caption for a business post on LinkedIn, introducing a new team member or feature.” This will help the AI to know the specific jargon and terminology to use, and to keep the output relevant to your business.  

   
   

2. Be specific.

   Ask for bullet points, a list, a paragraph - whatever you need. Tell the AI what tone you're looking for - be it light-hearted, professional, witty, or even sarcastic - or you risk it defaulting to a dull, robotic manner.  

   
   

3. Use examples.

   If you want a particular style or wording, give it a quick demo: “Write something like this...” then paste a line or two. This allows the AI to better grasp the style and tone you're after.  

   
   

4. Finally - and this may be the most important tip - refine and re-ask.

   Just like any new employee, it's unlikely that the AI will get it perfect first time. When testing, it is essential to make a note of where the AI slips up, refine your prompt accordingly, and re-test the new prompt with more data.

   
   

   For example, a notable mistake our AI made was not grasping calls that weren't strictly between patients and receptionists - this, therefore, required telling the AI specifically that it may encounter non-patient callers (such as suppliers, other dentists, or IT support (us!). Refining the prompt in this way helped the AI to "understand" the calls, and the issue was resolved quickly and simply.  

Shaping your chatbot into a helpful assistant is not magic - it's just a case of knowing how to talk to it. The more you prompt, the better you get. You learn what works. You figure out where the AI fumbles. You start writing prompts like a pro. 

And once you do, suddenly, the AI stops being a bumbling newbie, and becomes a genuinely helpful assistant. 

You'll be surprised how much smarter AI gets when you learn how to talk to it.