Introduction

uh today I know Kung Fu and I've just realized I forgot to check if we got sound on this thing so there may be a boring bit in the middle so um this is a

Discovering the Power of AI Prompting

The Power of Prompting talk about a technique you can use with no code at all just about prompting to achieve some very high value wins and

Adopting AI for Business Solutions

The Use Case for AI in Business I've been using this for a few months now um so I needed a case I needed some kind of use case to do it and I I picked

Common Challenges and AI Solutions

uh imagine you've got uh an agency or a consultancy or something like that or you're a contractor and you want to increase your revenue and you want to use AI within it so some typical problems you might have uh you might have won a contract but the client wants a big discount rather annoying you might have registered a domain but you need a landing page and calls to action and copy or you might have some sales prospects already you just need to write an opener email um that last one is the classic one that we keep seeing uh that'll uh write this for me buttons on but they're not equivalent overall is

Analyzing the Impact of AI Solutions

that appearing yes is brilliant um so very briefly uh they have very different weights and um uh uplift if your clients are asking you to take a pay cut on each contract um even just getting some of those to come through at the full value uh constitutes double digit up to Triple digit percent uplift on your product on your Revenue the other end of the scale just sending better emails outbound prospecting emails it's you're you're playing around with single digit percent

Negotiation Challenges and AI Assistance

stuff so we're going to pick the hard problem at the top imagine you've won a fee what comes next you need to negotiate uh this is a specialist skill client but they'll only pay 50% of our it's quite scary um the what's on the on the line is quite serious so you're going to get one shot at this if you do it well you'll double money if you do it badly potentially half your money depending on where you're looking at it but more terrifyingly if you screw it up really badly you might lose the whole contract they might walk away um this is the bit where uh the

Harnessing AI for Expertise

Kung Fu Knowledge and AI sound probably won't work but let's see what happens I know Kung Fu show me so the key Point here is what we would really like is to be able to download the knowledge of someone who's actually brilliant at this thing we don't want to go and learn

The Quest for Instant Expertise

The Quest for Instant Expertise the whole of kung fu and spend your lifetime doing that we want something simple that um just lets it stick it straight into our head so here is a

Crafting Effective AI Prompts

Crafting the Right Prompt really bad prompt um where I just said you know just kind of solve it for me uh

Avoiding Ineffective AI Responses

client suggested 10 hours a week $200 an hour uh I actually want $400 an hour what's it done is it's gone and written an email um that's really spectacularly not helpful um and in that email it goes and Waffles a bit and it asks various questions and if I received this email I'd immediately know it was written by an AI so that is that's not good we

Developing Complex AI Prompts

don't want that here is a more complicated prompt this is what we're actually going to

Strategic AI Prompting for Negotiation

build today so this is quite a long prompt uh but the output we start to get and we'll go through this uh in detail later on um it's giving us uh preparation for our conversation it's giving a uh strategy on a plate it's telling you how to set the agenda and how to control the conversation and then it starts to deal with common problems that the client will bring up like we can't afford $400 an hour to which you turn around and say

but you're going to pay it anyway um and ultimately uh it gives this quite nice long thing gets to the end there and this is this is what we're looking for this is good now um in particular at the very end there um I asked it to give its projected outcome and what it's actually aiming for and the really big difference as we'll see later on is that with this approach that we're going to adopt this

is the only prompt that uh after lots of prompts I tried that the the AI did not give up and concede money this is the one where it's stuck to its go guns and got us our $400 an hour so we get a clean sweep on achieving every goal in the negotiation so how do we approach this

Instant Solutions with AI: A How-To Guide

Instant Solutions with AI well we want an instant solution your classic respon uh approaches are hire someone who is an expert and already knows it or read a book do some training

Combining Expertise and AI

or reach for chat GPT uh so what we're going to do is we're going to do one and two together we will put together both the expert and the book into one package and then let chat jpt deal with the rest so we have to pick a book we need to find a book like a real proper expert book and we're going to have to get that into our prompt we need to uh find or get the AI to adopt the Persona of an expert then we'll need to explain the

problem to the AI we need to give enough context it can actually do something useful the first prompt I did where I just said ah client's not paying enough the AI didn't really have anything to jump off and finally we need to scaffold the response we need to give a we need to give some pointers what are the artifacts what would we what would we like to come out of it we're going to fight very hard not to be prescriptive on that because the more you constrain that the lower quality you tend to get

Selecting the Right Resources

out so first off pick a book make it easy we just Google four the top books on negotiation um just pick a few pick a few you like uh in this particular example I I looked for uh hourly rate tough questions client demands and got um learn your Lines by Jonathan Stark that incidentally is a great book anyway and I highly recommend it now is this

Creating an AI Expert Persona

bit going to work so this doesn't matter too much what you write here um classic thing is to put you're a 20-year veteran of something or other um I saw in the rather nice talk beforehand that you're doing similar thing there um what does matter is what we're trying to do here is to elicit the Persona of someone who writes about thems uh someone who has an impressive blog who has a big LinkedIn page how would they describe themsel because that's what we're trying to hit with this

one so then we need to attach uh a personality uh the main thing I want to say about the um oh have I just done that the wrong way around sorry I've just skipped ahead uh done some of that

Injecting Book Wisdom into AI Prompts

as well we're going to tell the AI it has read the book um it needs to be a book by the way it needs to be a book that a lot of people have read and a lot of people have talked about so when you're at this stage and you're picking which book to use I typically go to Amazon and look for one that has not a few dozen reviews but a few hundred ideally a thousand 2,000 average of

fourst star reviews would it work if I just do this no w h uh this is getting too confusing I'm just going to stick on that screen and talk through the slides so the next one

Defining the Problem to the AI

Defining the Problem uh tell the AI the problem so for this one open AI themselves actually recommend you just dump your stuff in some simple tags uh so I've used XML tags there it it really doesn't matter if you don't even put the tags in it works fine um it

just needs you to put a description of what your situation is so we're going to tell it um you know we want to provide one person 4 to8 hours a week $400 an hour and the client has come back with no no I want to pay you half that much $200 an hour more work uh and as clients have a tendency to do they've said and we don't want to talk about it we don't want to discuss it we just want to want you to get on with it so next we're going to have to

Scaffolding the AI Response

Scaffolding the AI Response scaffold the output I'm just going to I'm going to do it this way around so uh to scaffold the output we want to tell chat GPT a bit about these artifacts we need to tell it roughly what to produce but all the times that I have tried to come up with a detailed description produce this output that here's a nice format it has always reduced the quality so we're going to go

very free form um what I typically do with this is I go back to Amazon back to Google and look for excerpts of the book and that normally gives you some key phrases some key words to throw in there and uh this is one of those big regrets is doing it like this so for instance uh use the book's guidance to guess likely responses from the client that was one of the things that was in the abstract for this book that it tells you what your clients are thinking and another one we have um this book apparently uh learn your lines it'll give you instructions on what to say and how to deal with the conversation so we'll go

through We'll add some more what have we got on this um uh and yes preempting likely mistakes so this is a central theme of a lot of negotiation books is that where people go wrong is you make common mistakes that were very avoidable if you knew what you were doing now um uh yeah I'm going to just actually jum ahead to that and then we

have a final stanza which is just if I can hit the button um right yeah describe your expected outcomes so your expected outcomes this is where I asked chat GPT to creatively figure out what do you think is going to happen if I go out and give this meeting will it work what will happen now this is not in there in order for me to make chat GPT provide a better prompt I don't think it does but it might but I haven't this is the one part I haven't uh extensively tested I have tested all the rest adding them taking them away modifying them uh this one I haven't this one's mostly for me this one is at the end I want a summary of you know looking back over what it's just said what does it think's going to happen uh it's like a a reinforcing step uh but I have found that also very useful when wading through many windows and trying to figure out which prompt was which so back to here uh

Understanding AI's Handling of External Knowledge

Outcomes and Expectations and big question often comes up at this point what if chat GPT hasn't read the book what if it's not in its Corpus

Does the AI Need to Have Read the Book?

Does the AI Need to Have Read the Book? short answer we don't care we actually would prefer if it hasn't read the book

what we really trying to do here is find all the people who have read the book have then used what's in the book tried it out improved on it and then have written about it and that was the reason that we were gunning for this um uh Persona right at the start of this this person who is an expert who spent many years doing it um we we don't want the book at all the book is a

placeholder so there we have our long prompt uh all the pieces in there um you just have to trust me if I copy and paste it i' have got the same answer because the angles a bit painful um so

Optimizing AI Prompt Outcomes

what do we get we start to get um as I said earlier we get um a focus on what's what's actually in the book which is these set of um handwritten strategies but we get that mixed with um highlighting key points I'm just going to jump to one of them down here uh so um the preparation you need to do this is something that if you take the book out this is missing uh if you have an expert if you have chat GPT do stuff if you give it lots of handhold ing it doesn't come up with this thing of go and research the client beforehand um and the other big one is down here when things start to go wrong preempting mistakes and problems accepting price discounts this is the classic big problem in negotiating a contract when you're a small company is you tend to fold you tend to Cave whenever anyone pushes back um all the books will push you to do this but chat GPT won't until you inject this book

Analyzing AI-Generated Strategies

into it uh in the interest of not going through this too painfully I actually copied and pasted everything that comes next so we're on the safe side what I then did was I went back and did that prompt at the start all the dropdowns were there because it lets me flip on off rerun Etc the main version of The Prompt um I'm happy to show this to anyone afterwards and we can go through it in detail but it'll be a bit painful on the monitor uh so the main version that we ended up with uh it covers the core principles of the author and this is one of the things that this approach does tend to pick up if a book has like a recurring theme if it has principles if the chapter headings uh have some strong concept those are the things that tend to get summarized by everyone else so those are the things that then get picked up with this

approach uh as I've said earlier it doesn't cave on price that is critically important uh and this is the only one that uh really was like I'm going to get everything this is a negotiation I want to win if you take the book out but you um and you take some of the structure out you actually end up with a better overall strategy than if you had the book if you took the book out but um left the structure in but you lose detail so this is the kind of thing where that scaffolding those artifacts matter they give you uh or they give the llm enough uh jumping off points to keep it on track even though it often ignores the things you asked for and gives you different things but they tend to be good ones take everything out take out the structure take out the you are an expert uh take out the book ah you just get some some rubbish frankly um and it gets worse and worse you then get to one where I for fun I actually changed it to um uh do it I sent the request as Jason uh as the our previous presenter mentioned and the thing that really surprised me is that it gave the response to the client as Jason as well so this one was a I'm not quite sure how how you'd deliver this to your client I don't think I would send them that as an attachment um but really slightly offensively actually the advice that um uh chat juty came back with in this one started with gently telling me that you know you need to talk to people it's important to talk to people and you need to communicate well and as I was reading it I realized because I've sent it Jason it's jumped into this mindset that I'm an engineer with no social skills um which is not true Engineers do have social skills perfectly good at this um but interestingly it also this is the only one the only variant where it came up with multiple competing strategies and said you can do this or this or that so it pushed it without me asking it to just by the changing the the format in which I'd sent it into a much more engineering friendly uh approach my guess would be that is a side effect of them trying to make it better at code code assistance uh and ultimately the very worst of all was the one where I just put 30 words I want more money the customer has the client has said they'll pay this I want them to pay that and it just caved and again it just wrote an email uh very unhelpful uh so hopefully I have only slightly or more than slightly overrun I

The Future of Prompt Management

apologize um what comes up next so I do a lot of prompting uh I spent the last three years working on uh ML and llm stuff but this year I've been almost exclusively doing prompting and I've been trying every prompt management tool I could find um been pretty disappointed um I did a review in April of all of them I've been using most of those since so I will at some point very soon put up a June or July my update um and just trying to share you know what works what doesn't I am also although there's nothing for any else to see yet

Developing Prompting Tools

Developing Prompting Tools working on my own prompting tools to try and make this stuff a lot easier because I find it as our previous presenter mentioned as well there is so much that isn't done for you and you end up having to build your own um non-tech friendly uh systems and interfaces so if anyone's got great prompt tools that they like I'd love to see it and review it or if you've got solutions to prompting better please come and talk to me and that's it thank you