Welcome to the Communications Support Team
Summit Workplace Solutions rolled out an AI writing assistant for employees. It hasn't gone well: complaints are pouring in that the assistant produces vague, generic, unusable responses. Your team has been asked to figure out why — and to teach the company how to prompt it properly.
The situation at Summit Workplace Solutions
The AI assistant isn't broken. The prompts are the problem. Employees have been typing one-line requests and expecting detailed, on-target results. Your job is to diagnose what's missing, fix real examples, and build a repeatable framework the whole company can use.
Essential question
What separates a prompt that gets a useful result from one that doesn't — and how do you write the useful kind?
Estimated time
About 50 minutes, in 11 steps. Your progress is saved automatically, so you can pause and come back.
What you will be able to do by the end of this lesson
- Use the six-part prompt framework: Role, Task, Context, Constraints, Examples, and Output Format.
- Explain why iteration, specificity, audience, tone, and success criteria matter when prompting.
- Diagnose what's missing from a weak prompt and rewrite it into a specific, usable one.
- Compare outputs from weak and strong prompts and explain the difference.
- Identify and remove confidential or private information before it goes into a prompt.
- Write and justify a complete, effective workplace prompt of your own.
A quick note on the "AI outputs" in this lesson
Every AI response shown in this lesson is pre-written by your instructor as a fixed example for teaching purposes. This site does not call any real AI service, so nothing you type is sent to an AI model anywhere.
The Six-Part Prompt Framework
Read each short explanation, then flip the cards to check your understanding. This part is practice — it is not graded.
Iteration: your first prompt doesn't have to be perfect
Few prompts are perfect on the first try. Reviewing the AI's output and refining the prompt — adding a missing constraint, clarifying the task — is a normal, expected part of getting a useful result.
Specificity, audience, and tone
A vague prompt forces the AI to guess. The more specific you are about the audience (who will read this?) and the tone (formal, friendly, urgent?), the more usable the output will be.
Success criteria
Before you prompt, it helps to know what a "good" answer would actually include — that's your success criteria, and it's also how you'll judge whether the output is usable.
Never put confidential information in a prompt
Never paste confidential information — like customer account numbers, unreleased financial results, or private medical details — into a prompt. Once it's typed into an AI tool, the company may lose control over where that information goes.
Framework check (practice)
Click a card to flip it and see what that part of the framework is for. Flip through all 6 before continuing.
0 of 6 cards flipped.
Activity 1: Diagnose the Problem
Four employees complained that the AI assistant gave them a useless answer. For each of their prompts, check the two framework parts that are most clearly missing.
Activity 2: Convert Vague to Specific
For each vague prompt, choose the rewrite that best applies the full framework.
Activity 3: Build a Prompt
HR needs a prompt that will get the AI assistant to write a short, friendly reminder email about updating emergency contact information by Friday. Build the prompt by choosing the best option for each of the six parts.
Activity 4: Compare Weak vs. Strong Outputs
Below are two pre-written example outputs for each scenario — one from a weak prompt, one from a strong prompt. Identify the stronger output and why it's stronger.
Activity 5: Department Repair Challenge
Five departments sent in weak prompts. For each, choose the ONE framework part that's most critical to fix first.
Activity 6: Remove Confidential Information
An employee drafted this prompt for the AI assistant. Flag every line that should be removed before this prompt is ever sent, because it contains private or confidential information.
Activity 7: Your Final Workplace Prompt
The Facilities department needs employees to RSVP for the annual all-hands meeting by next Friday.
First: before you send any prompt to the AI assistant, what's most important to check?
0 characters (minimum 60)
Activity 8: Final Knowledge Check
A mixed set of questions covering everything from this lesson.
Reflection & Completion
0 characters · 0 sentences detected (need at least 2)
Your results so far
Total: 0 / 100
Lesson complete
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