A prompt is what you send to an AI model. It can be a simple question, a detailed instruction, a set of examples, a system-level directive, or a combination of all of these. The model generates its output based on the prompt and its training.
In enterprise AI, prompts are typically structured and carefully engineered. They include system-level instructions that define the agent's role, scope, format requirements, and constraints. A prompt that specifies exactly what the model should produce, in what format, and what it should avoid will consistently outperform a vague one — with the same model. Most of the gap between AI that works and AI that does not comes down to prompt quality.
