Briefing the AI like a new starter

If you take one thing from this whole course, take this lesson. Context, giving the AI the facts of your business before you ask it to do anything, is the single biggest lever you have. Get this right and a cheap AI tool will outperform an expensive one used badly. Get it wrong and no amount of clever wording will save you.

What “context” actually means

Context is simply the information you put in front of the AI before it answers. Your trade, your area, your prices, your tone, the specific job in front of you right now. None of it is complicated. Most of it is stuff you already know without thinking about it, which is exactly why it’s easy to forget the AI doesn’t know it too.

Treat every new chat like a new starter’s first morning. They’re sharp, they’re willing, and they know nothing about you until you tell them. A plumber in Leeds who opens a chat and types “write a callout charge explanation for a customer” is asking a stranger to explain his own pricing policy back to him. Of course it comes back vague. Add three sentences of real context first, “we’re a plumbing firm in Leeds, our callout charge is £45 including the first 30 minutes, we’re explaining this to a customer who’s queried it on the phone”, and the same request produces something you could read out on the call.

What’s worth including

You don’t need an essay. A short, honest paragraph covering the situation usually does it:

• Who you are. Your trade, your business, roughly your size.
• The specific situation. What job this is for, who it’s going to, why it matters right now.
• Anything that changes the answer. Your actual prices, your policies, a deadline, a constraint that rules out certain options.

A joiner asking for help with a tricky customer email might write: “I run a small joinery business in Bolton. A customer is chasing where their custom staircase has got to. It’s currently three days behind because a supplier let us down, not our doing, but we don’t want to blame the supplier by name. We’ve fitted for this customer before and they’ve always been reasonable.” That’s four sentences. What comes back afterwards is unrecognisable from what a bare “write an email about a delay” would produce.

Why owners skip this step

Mostly because it feels like extra typing for what should be a quick job. It’s worth reframing: those three or four sentences are the entire difference between a usable draft and a rewrite. Thirty seconds of context regularly saves ten minutes of editing, or worse, sending something generic out under your name.

The other reason people skip it is habit. Search engines reward short queries, so most of us have spent years training ourselves to type as little as possible. AI runs on the opposite instinct. The more real detail you hand over, the better it works.

Next lesson, we get specific about the second half of a strong prompt: not just giving it the facts, but telling it exactly what you want back.