After a year or two of testing the AI waters, I’m diving in. This page highlights my upskilling journey and how I’m using AI as is, here and now.
Prompt Engineering
Get scientific with your creative approach
I used to think prompt engineering was an inflated term for writing instructions. Now I’m convinced engineering is accurate because it implies rounds of testing and further tinkering. My AI prompt use cases are focused on content generation and grant writing. By separating end goals into tasks with a series of checkpoints, I can test more creative options for achieving goals.
- Level-up your prompt writing by running A/B tests on new iterations of each prompt. This can help you refine variables and find areas where additional information will improve AI outputs.
Use both sides of your brain
Advertising great David Ogilvy thought copywriters should be poets and killers. Poets use emotion to connect; killers use logic to influence. Killer poets write great prompts by bringing human intuition not found in AI’s cache of knowledge. They’re naturals at emotionally defining perspective and logically explaining context.
- Build emotion and logic into your prompts by answering “why” with each directional step. Why this “what”? Why this “who”? Why this “how”? Even why this “why” or goal or request?
Start a prompt library today
There’s an ad popping up on Apple News offering lifetime access to an unlimited number of AI prompts for $79.99. (If you signed up, please share details.) Since prompts should be hyperspecific for each purpose, and you already have unlimited lifetime access to the facts of your life and work, you can start your own prompt library free of charge.
- Create prompt templates and share them with your team. Include example outputs that demonstrate how variables can be customized to change the output. Consider adding a space where team members can share their feedback and use cases.
Online AI Courses
AI learning opportunities range from free to $5K; buyer beware. Aside from watching AI tutorials on LinkedIn Learning and YouTube, my AI education began 10 weeks ago. My key takeaways so far include:
- University professors know how to teach and often collaborate with business experts as guest lecturers.
- Courses created by business experts may lack the aspect of student connection provided by university-based courses.
- AI playgrounds provide places to learn by doing:
- Definitions of skill levels vary greatly between courses:
- Take the introductory course if it is free or is part of a certification program. You can skim anything redundant and may learn something new.
- I look like an expert in some rooms, but I’m rapidly learning how much I don’t know.
- If in doubt, contact the instructor to discuss your background and learning goals before typing in your credit card details.
Courses I recommend and why
- AI for Life and Work (University of North Florida, Professional and Lifelong Learning)
- Provides the best overview of AI history, adoption rates, and real-world implications
- Each module is led by a different expert or panel of experts providing a more comprehensive overview of AI’s impact on various industries
- Practical AI and prompting for marketing professionals (AI Business School on Coursera)
- Provides templates to test out concepts and refine prompts within the course
- Allows you to apply their example use cases or customize the variable to create your own use cases
- AI agents and creator tools for marketing professionals (AI Business School on Coursera)
- Builds on learning from previous course
- Provides templates to structure prompt sequences and methods for training AI agents with prompt refinement
Angela Gilboy 