How to get the most out of AI prompts (part 1)

12th September 2025

Without the right inputs, AI responses won’t be worth much: how can you achieve the best results?

Following the explosion of AI use over the last couple of years, many of us use it now more than we use search engines. We ask it questions, have conversations with it, work alongside it to streamline workflows and improve processes.

Sometimes though, when we ask AI something, we don’t always get the exact response we wanted. While occasionally this might be due to an error with the AI itself, mostly this is because we didn’t ask the right questions – our prompts were too vague.

So, what is the best way to prompt an AI assistant to get the desired outcomes first time round? There are many methods, and it depends on exactly what type of result you need, but any of the following can usually help to clarify and provide AI with more details, leading to better answers:

Be clear and specific: the more information that you provide, the more accurate an answer you will get. For example, asking an AI to “write an article about AI prompting,” will yield some decent answers but “write an article about AI prompting for an IT services company that explains how to improve results,” and you will get a far more accurate response.

Set the tone and style: this will impact not only the result but how the result is formed. Say you’re in a company writing two emails with AI, one to a co-worker and another to a client – you would ask to make the former more friendly and the second more formal, and you can ask AI to help you do that.

Define the format: sometimes you might want a response in plain text; in other instances, you may want a graph, or chart, or to display the results in bullet points. Ensure you ask the AI assistant to give you the results as you want them – it will save you having to do formatting yourself!

Give context or background: if the AI understands why you are asking something, it can help to make the output more appropriate for the situation. For example, I might say “I am writing an article for an IT services company based in Sussex…” and then the AI would know to make it formal, informative, and include any local references if there are any relevant.

We have even more ideas on how to improve AI prompting to get better results that you can find in our next article. In the meantime, talk to Interfuture Systems for anything you might need concerning IT, and check out our video guide on this topic below!

Video guide: https://youtu.be/oOXVf9HN8ZU

YouTube: https://youtu.be/b91H4X8XxHM