How to write the best AI prompts

Transcription:

Hi. My name is Jack Fisher, and I'm a Solutions Architect here at Nasstar in the AI and Automation practice.

In today's video, we're going to talk you through the art and science of prompting and how to follow the GCSE framework. Now I'm sure, for anyone who's studied in England, they probably have an idea of what a GCSE is. But we're going to look at this in the context of how you prompt Copilot to get the most out of it.

Just to set the scene here, we're looking at the art and science of prompting, and particularly the right-hand area of this slide that we're looking at, which is the GCSE framework (Goal, Context, Source, Expectations).

Copilot prompting

It shows how you can include the right prompt ingredients. So, to get the best response, it's really important to focus on some of the key elements below when you're phrasing your Copilot prompts.

So make sure that you have a goal. So that's the ‘what’. What response do you want from Copilot?

Make sure you have a context. So this is the ‘why’. Why do you need it, and who is involved?

Next, we have the source. So that's the ‘which’. Which information sources or samples should Copilot use?

Then we have the ‘how’, which is the expectations. How should Copilot respond to best meet your expectations?

We're going to do a bit of a demo. I've jumped over into Microsoft Word. I've just added the slide that we were looking at, a snippet of the slide that we were looking at before, to keep that idea there of the GCSE framework. So ‘goal’, ‘context’, ‘source’ and ‘expectations’.

We're going to prompt this document twice. The first one is going to be a relatively simple, one line prompt. We'll review that output, see what Copilot comes up with, and then we're going to use a similar prompt, but following the GCSE idea, and compare and contrast the kind of output that we get from each.

So first off, we are going to prompt it, and we're going to hit the little Copilot box here in Word.

Then we just said, ‘create me a document on how best to prompt Copilot’. We hit generate. So whilst that's generating, we'll come back and review the output once the document is created.

Okay, so now we're back. We've had a bit of a digest of all of the information it's created here, and it has had a really good stab at it. But one of the things I just want to highlight here is, because we just simply asked it ‘how best to prompt Copilot’, it's come up with really good ideas but some of it isn't actually relevant because I wasn't specific enough in what I was asking for.

So, here is talking about how to use prompts for writing code, which is great, but actually, I want this top 10 Tips to be all around M365 Copilot, rather than things like GitHub Copilot. It's taken a broad amount of information and condensed it into these 10 top tips. I need to employ this GCSE framework so that we get a specific and targeted output for the right type of audience, etc. We're going to sort of black this document back so it's just blank, and then we'll start again with a much more in-depth prompt that's following this goal, context, source, and expectations.

Back to our blank Word document here.

Blank Word document ready for prompting

We're going to build a prompt that follows this framework. So again, we're going to hit the Copilot box. Then the first thing we're looking for is the goal. What is the goal of what I'm trying to create here? The goal is going to be, ‘create me a document to give people tips and tricks on how best to use Copilot for m365’. I've been more specific here with the goal of what I'm trying to achieve.

Then, I'm going to give it some context. The context is going to be, ‘this is to help our latest group of cohorts enrolled in our Copilot adoption plan’. Now we've got the goal, we've got the context.

Next, we're going to give it a source. So, in here, I'm going to say ‘you can use’, and then I'm going to use the forward slash, and that will then allow me to start searching for documents that we can use as a source. So I've said ‘you can use’, and I know that I've got a PowerPoint presentation which had this very slide and some others in it, called ‘prompting guidelines’. So I'm going to point it at the prompting guidelines Powerpoint file, so you can use prompting guidelines to help create this.

Next, we're going to give it our expectations. So, what audience are we creating this document for? What type of people are going to be using these 10 top tips? I'm just going to give some expectations around, ‘please don't use overly technical language, as it's for a wide audience of both technical and non-technical people. Try to keep the document to two pages long’. So we've got the goal, the context, the source, and the expectation we're going to hit generate, and then we'll wait while it creates that, and we'll come back to you.

Okay, so Copilot has gone off and done its thing, and this time, it's much more focused on what we wanted. It's created a bunch of tips and tricks for prompting Copilot for M365, it's given us a little intro again. So, ‘what is Copilot and how it can help you’, but then it's gone on to ‘how to prompt Copilot effectively’. I pointed this out at the ‘prompting guidelines’ PowerPoint we had, which had this slide about GCSE framework in it, and it's actually gone into great detail about this.

So a good prompt should include the following elements: goal, context, source and expectations. And then it's expanded upon each of those. It's then gone on to say how to keep the conversation going with Copilot, so that you can keep improving upon what you're doing, and then a few helpful hints to keep in mind. So this is really good. It's also kept it no longer than the two pages that I wanted, because I want this to be a fairly easily digestible document for the people that are going to be consuming it.

That's the GCSE framework for you, and that's how you should be trying to craft the prompts that you give Copilot to get the most out of it.

Thanks very much.