The biggest request at one of my day-long workshops was not about AI at all. It was about buyers.
Fashion Power Group is one of the country's leading RMG groups. A hundred-plus staff in the room, six hours, and the thing they needed most was a better email to a foreign buyer when an order slips. Before the session, they had all tried it the same way: "Write an email to buyer." The output came back in an American corporate voice that had nothing to do with a Dhaka merchandiser and a buyer in Europe who have worked together for years.
They concluded the tool was not good at their industry. I have heard that sentence in ministry rooms, in NGOs, in a bank. It is almost never true. The tool was fine. The brief was one line.
Every chat is the new employee's first day
Here is the picture I use in every room. Imagine a brilliant new hire joins your office today. Three master's degrees, and zero knowledge of your company. Would you say "go write a report"?
You would not. You would say who it is for, what it covers, how long, which format, what to leave out, when it is due. That brief decides the quality of the work.
AI is the most capable new employee in the world, and it arrives on day one in every single chat. Structured prompting simply means giving the day-one brief properly. I broke it into seven parts in my prompt-engineering ebook, and I have not needed an eighth since.
The seven-part brief
- Role. Which chair are you putting the AI in? "You are a merchandising head with ten years of buyer relationships."
- Task. Exactly what to produce, in one line. "Write a reply to a delayed-shipment complaint."
- Context. The situation, the audience, the background. Buyer's country, order history, what went wrong, what the relationship is like.
- Reasoning. How to think before writing. "First consider the buyer's position, then draft."
- Rules. Three to five constraints. "Apologise without admitting liability. Offer two alternatives. Keep it short. No jargon."
- Output format. What the result looks like. Email with subject line. Table. Script.
- Stop condition. When the job is done. "Ask me which part to change; treat it as a draft until I say final."
For the RMG group we filled Role, Context and Rules and left the rest short. One brief, and the output changed in a single pass. Their top management made a point of saying so after the training.
Which parts you can skip
Not every job needs all seven. A quick internal note needs Role, Task and Rules. But if the output is going to a client, landing on your boss's desk, or touching money, do not skip one. The seven parts are cheap. A wrong email to a buyer is not.
The moment this clicks is usually week two. You notice the same template with small edits is running ten different jobs, and you realise you did not write a prompt. You wrote a system for a kind of work. Systems are written once and pay for years.
Context is not confidential data
One warning I give every room. Give context generously, but never paste customer personal data, bank details or NDA documents into a chat as they are. Give only what the job needs. Change names and numbers where you can. The tool may be excellent; the judgement stays in your chair.
A habit that makes this painless: keep a "context paragraph" about your business in your phone notes. Who you are, what you sell, who you sell to, your tone, what you never say. Paste it at the top of every important prompt. It costs five seconds and it improves every output that follows.
The two-brief test
The fastest way to convince yourself is not to read this. It is to run one job twice. Take a real task from this week. Run the one-line version. Then run the seven-part version. Put both outputs side by side and grade them. That comparison is what breaks the "one line will do" habit in people who have used chat windows for two years. I have watched it happen in rooms from ministries to garment factories, and it never needs my help after that.
Practice
What to do on Monday
- Write your context paragraph and save it in your phone notes. Five sentences.
- Take the email you send most often and write it as a seven-part brief. Save the brief where your team can find it.
- Run the one-line version and the seven-part version of the same task. Grade them side by side.
- Delete the two parts you did not need for that job. That is your template.
Which email in your company still gets written from scratch every single time?