Prompt or do not prompt. There is no try.
Prompting is no longer a technical task. It's strategic leadership.
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June 12, 2025. Most users treat prompting like typing into a search bar. A few keystrokes, a vague instruction, a hit of the return key. A nervous wait, and then surprise! The Gen AI tool delivers the wrong information.
It’s frustrating for a generation raised on autocomplete. Even more frustrating for digital natives who grew up with Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, and AOL Online, and excruciating for the boolean pioneers.
Why? Everyone assumes Gen AI will fill in the blanks. It won’t. Not yet.
If you’ve seen the series Andor, you’ll know that in the Star Wars universe, strategy often comes down to how leaders orchestrate messy, decentralised forces.
One prefers shadows and improvisation; the other, rigid structure and hierarchy. Leading AI agents will require similar types of orchestration depending on the strategic goals you want to achieve.
These aren’t the responses you’re looking for
The reality is that prompting is a form of programming. The structure, scope, and specificity of your input determine the usefulness of the output.
Those who know how to prompt well exercise precision, context, and control. They benefit twofold from better answers and the behaviour of the models they use.
Natural language prompting is coming to an end. It’s going to give way to speech, gesture, video, and AI agents that prompt on our behalf. But the core principles will persist.
Your AI agent (or your digital twin) needs to be trained to learn what you want it to do for you.
Attack of the Syntax
Before you roll your eyes at the prospect of scanning through yet another prompting guide, think again. This post isn’t about how to prompt better. But I want to reinforce one principle:
A prompt is a set of instructions. It reads like a design brief or a courtroom submission. Use a syntax (structure) like this, and you’re more likely to gain the information you want rather than an AI-informed guesstimate:
Role: who is the model acting as?
You are a financial advisor.
You are a lawyer.
You are a quantity surveyor.
You are an expert on local businesses in and around Vancouver.
Task: what do you want it to do?
You are a financial advisor. Tell me how US treasury bonds work.
You are a lawyer. Draft me a complaint letter.
You are a quantity surveyor. Tell me how much cement mix to buy to build a wall.
You are an expert on local businesses in and around Vancouver. Recommend naturopathy doctors I can visit to treat fatigue.
Context: what should it know before starting?
You are a financial advisor. Tell me how US treasury bonds work. I would like to buy bonds, but am not sure whether or when to invest in them.
You are a lawyer. Draft me a complaint letter. A retailer sold me a dud vacuum. They won’t honour the warranty and I want my day in court.
You are a quantity surveyor. Tell me how much cement mix to buy to build a wall. I’m going to visit Home Depot (or B&Q).
You are an expert on local businesses in and around Vancouver. Recommend naturopathy doctors I can visit to treat fatigue. I live in North Vancouver and I don’t want to drive more than 45 minutes.
Constraints: what should it avoid or prioritise?
You are a financial advisor. Tell me how US treasury bonds work. I would like to buy bonds, but am not sure whether or when to invest in them. Don’t recommend financial products, just tell me about historical bond yields during the last year.
You are a lawyer. Draft me a complaint letter. A retailer sold me a dud vacuum. They won’t honour the warranty and I want my day in court. Don’t tell me about Roombas because my cat has an inferiority complex.
You are a quantity surveyor. Tell me how much cement mix to buy to build a wall. I’m going to visit Home Depot (or B&Q). My bricklayer wants cement mix but won’t tell me if I need to buy sand. Prioritise the most important raw materials I should buy.
You are an expert on local businesses in and around Vancouver. Recommend naturopathy doctors I can visit to treat neck stiffness. I live in North Vancouver and I don’t want to drive more than 45 minutes. Prioritise doctors who have a greater than four-star rating on Google.
Output format: what should the answer look like?
You are a financial advisor. Tell me how US treasury bonds work. I would like to buy bonds, but am not sure whether or when to invest in them. Don’t recommend financial products, just tell me about historical bond yields during the last year. Draw a set of line graphs and a bulleted list of recommendations on how to assess when to invest my money in bonds.
You are a lawyer. Draft me a complaint letter. A retailer sold me a dud vacuum. They won’t honour the warranty and I want my day in court. Don’t tell me about Roombas because my cat has an inferiority complex. Draft the letter for me using American English, and provide me with notes on how to enhance the letter.
You are a quantity surveyor. Tell me how much cement mix to buy to build a wall. I’m going to visit Home Depot (or B&Q). My bricklayer wants cement mix but won’t tell me if I need to buy sand. Prioritise the most important raw materials I should buy. Build me a calculator which will tell me how much cement mix to buy. If I need to buy sand, tell me how much I’ll need to buy. I own a two-door sedan and so, calculate the weight of materials and tell me if I’ll need to hire a transportation van.
You are an expert on local businesses in and around Vancouver. Recommend naturopathy doctors I can visit to treat fatigue. I live in North Vancouver and I don’t want to drive more than 45 minutes. Prioritise doctors who have a greater than four-star rating on Google. Provide me with a table with three columns: the doctor’s name, their location and clinic opening hours, and how long it will take for me to drive to their clinic if I leave my apartment at 10am.
With the right prompt, you’ll gain a set of neatly formatted financial charts, or a well-polished letter designed to ensure it gets read.
If you went out to buy cement or sand, you’ll probably have opted to hire a van to preserve the suspension on your beautiful sedan.
And if you were feeling fatigued, I hope you’ll be directed to visit Dr. Mashael Mawji, MD in New Westminster, BC (Ed. Note - please go see her, she’s excellent!).
A New Orchestrator
Platforms like Manus are fast becoming the operating layer for enterprise AI. Utilising Google’s agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol, operating layers will route inputs across different agents giving rise to the ‘orchestrator agent’.
A2A will allow you to prompt one agent to coordinate tasks, either in sequence or in parallel to generate an output greater than the sum of one agent.
Lead, you must
Back to Andor. It’s one of the best pieces of television ever produced (Ed. Note - if you don’t want to take my word for it, read the reviews on IMDb).
Without revealing any spoilers, the show presented two vastly different leadership styles: Luthen Rael’s shadowy, guerrilla warfare and the ISB’s Leo Partagaz’s pragmatic, visible, command and control structure.
Prompting is like running a campaign using hundreds of thousands of unknown agents each operating with a goal to create a new move 37, or a specific outcome to obtain new resources, and to build something defined.
For executives, I’d recommend watching the show and studying just how Rael’s and Partagaz’s leadership styles operated, and how they could be transposed into your orchestrator agent’s role.
A tightly controlled agentic AI policy may lead to faster results, potentially fewer hallucinations, and a defined outcome. But at the expense of sacrificing innovation which the agents might be capable of producing but for the fact they had the blinkers put on them.
On the other hand, a looser collective of agents could empower your organisation to innovate from within, drawing insights from data at rest and long-forgotten troves.
This is the new executive skillset
Your role is to find ways to direct hundreds of agents to collaborate, harmonise, communicate and produce work for the departments you lead.
Your chances of success lie in being able to clarify when and how much intelligence to put into the mix, and how to distinguish signals from facts.
That begins with how you prompt. And if you’re going to lead and teach others, I’d recommend getting to grips with it yourself first.
If you still think this is sci-fi, watch this advert from Singapore Bank about how learning the basics, pays off when you’re at the top.