Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is the discipline of crafting input text (prompts) to effectively communicate tasks, context, and constraints to a large language model (LLM), in order to obtain more accurate, relevant, and useful outputs.

As LLMs become central to business workflows, the ability to write effective prompts is increasingly valuable. Good prompts specify role (e.g., "You are an expert tax accountant"), provide clear context, define output format, and include examples where necessary. Advanced techniques include chain-of-thought prompting (asking the model to show its reasoning), few-shot prompting (providing examples), and system prompt optimisation.

For product teams, prompt engineering directly impacts the quality and consistency of AI-powered features — from customer support chatbots to content generation pipelines. A well-engineered prompt can dramatically reduce hallucinations, improve tone adherence, and keep responses within desired boundaries.