Everyday guide to AI prompt engineering
Prompting can be the difference between strong and poor artificial intelligence outputs
The difference between an impactful and a worthless AI response often comes down to the prompts you provide.
Get them right and artificial intelligence tools can save time, spark ideas and help you do your best work.
Goshorn presents during Cincy AI Week 2026. Photo/Stephen Kenney
This practice is known as prompt engineering. At its core, prompt engineering is the process of writing AI prompts that give the context and clarity to help tools like ChatGPT and Claude better fulfill your requests.
At the University of Cincinnati’s 1819 Innovation Hub, tech leaders use AI to strategize, streamline work and serve as a companion in innovation. Home to startups and high-profile partner companies such as Fifth Third Bank, Procter & Gamble, Western & Southern Insurance Group and Kroger, 1819 is where business leaders regularly put AI to the task.
Thousands of innovators gathered at Cincy AI Week 2026 in June to learn how AI best practices can transform their careers and benefit their teams. Greg Goshorn, owner of AI Growth Map and Mapping Your Marketing, shared practical advice on prompt engineering during his session.
Missed the event? Here’s how to write AI prompts in ways that produce stronger results.
Aimless AI prompts lead to aimless AI answers. Fortunately, the opposite is also true.
Before asking AI to tackle a job, decide exactly what success looks like. Do you want readers to feel a certain way? Is there one aspect of the project that deserves extra attention? If so, say so.
The clearer your destination, the easier it is for AI to help you get there.
Goshorn emphasized the importance of setting your own end goal before sending a prompt to AI. “The people that do the best with AI have a couple of things in common,” he says. “Thought and a vision; they know what they want out of it.”
The clearer your destination, the easier it is for AI to help you get there. You can always steer the conversation through follow-up prompts, but it’s usually easier to point AI in the right direction from the start.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, but it can’t get inside your head without an explanation. Tell AI details about how the final product should look. Explain your preferred style and tone, length, structure and layout, welcome and unwelcome elements and any other specifications that matter.
“How do you want AI to act?” Goshorn asks before listing a few potentially helpful instructions. “Don’t always agree with me. Don’t use jargon. Use bullet points. Include the citations. Show the
Your requests may look different from Goshorn’s because your goals probably aren’t the same. According to him, that’s exactly why specific instructions matter. Without them, AI won’t know how to meet you where you’re at.
The longer an AI conversation continues, the likelier the tool generally is to move away from your original intent. This process, known as context drift, occurs because each detail across multiple prompts becomes part of a larger cloud of information, and AI won’t understand which specifics matter most.
You can get AI back on track by reminding it what matters most throughout the conversation. Often, though, the simplest solution is to begin a new chat without the baggage from the previous one.
If you’re doing something that’s really long and involved, it makes a lot of sense to break it into sections.
Greg GoshornOwner, AI Growth Map and Mapping Your Marketing
“If you’ve had these long sessions, you may feel like AI gets dumber and forgets what you started to talk about at the end because there’s a context window,” Goshorn says. “So, if you’re doing something that’s really long and involved, it makes a lot of sense to break it into sections.”
Starting fresh usually removes the extra context that may be getting in the way, but it also means losing helpful background information. When breaking a project into smaller pieces, it’s best to finish one milestone before opening a new conversation and carrying over only the key takeaways and guardrails.
While AI speaks with confidence, it lacks human judgment to tell when its output is true or false. Blind faith in its results could leave you with inaccurate information that harms your brand, business strategies or understanding of a situation or idea.
Check carefully before using any work produced by AI. Photo/Kocheguraa
“You’ve got to look at the outputs and check the facts,” Goshorn says. “It’s making stuff up; it’s called hallucinations, and [AI] will do it.”
Goshorn’s concerns don’t stop with factual errors. AI may settle on a voice, tone, style or points of emphasis that don’t match your own, making a careful review essential.
“The human at the end is so important,” he notes. “You’ve got to look at what [AI] outputs. Is it correct? Is it what you wanted? Is it in your brand voice? It’s not just about copying and pasting.”
Trusting AI without checking its work puts your credibility on the line. Small mistakes may slip through now and then, but eventually they’ll catch up with you.
Prompting the rise of AI
Prompting AI effectively is a skill, and innovation leaders come to UC’s 1819 Innovation Hub to hone it. Partner companies and startups can explore prompt engineering through programming in the Learning Lab, while students and community members take part in events hosted at 1819 and across the Cincinnati Innovation District.
View of a Cincy AI Week session. Photo/Stephen Kenney
Cincy AI Week shone another bright light on Southwest Ohio’s wealth of AI expertise, drawing a sellout crowd of thousands. The annual event, founded in Cincinnati in 2024, has since expanded its programming to Atlanta, Columbus, Nashville, Tampa and other cities.
On top of that, Cincy AI Week showcased the work happening every day on UC’s campus and at the 1819 Innovation Hub. As AI continues to reshape the workplace, mastering prompt engineering is a practical way for innovators to keep pace. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, writing emails or analyzing data, better prompts usually lead to better AI responses.
Frequently asked questions
Prompt engineering is the process of writing AI prompts that give the context and clarity to help tools like ChatGPT and Claude better fulfill your requests.
To master prompt engineering, explain your end goal to AI, give detailed instructions, break big requests into multiple prompts and check for errors or flaws before using anything.
UC students and business leaders can learn more about prompt engineering by attending events at the school’s 1819 Innovation Hub and throughout the surrounding Cincinnati Innovation District. Programming regularly involves artificial intelligence, with sessions on how to prompt AI occurring regularly.
Featured image at top: Woman working on a computer at UC. Photo/Andrew Higley
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