AI agents, powered by advanced AI language models, are transforming businesses into more efficient, innovative organizations. These intelligent agents act as digital employees, capable of handling diverse tasks, from customer service and content creation to data analysis and sales. For business owners, understanding and implementing AI agents is becoming crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. To effectively leverage these agents, it’s essential to learn how to build them in a way that aligns with your business goals, drives revenue growth, and reduces costs. This white paper will provide a practical introduction to prompt engineering, a key skill for harnessing the power of AI agents in your business.

What Exactly is Prompt Engineering?

Prompt engineering is similar to onboarding a new employee. To get the best results, you need to provide clear instructions. You might even want your new hire to model their behavior after a successful employee in the same role, showing them examples of what success looks like (and what it doesn’t). All of this touches on aspects of prompt engineering. Ultimately, it is the method by which you set the personality, priorities, role, and instructions for your new digital employee, or AI model.

Why Should Business Owners Care?

Prompt engineering empowers businesses to leverage AI agents effectively to achieve tangible benefits. By leveraging advanced AI tools, businesses can automate repetitive tasks and streamline operations.

• Increased Efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks and streamline operations, freeing up valuable time and resources for higher-value work.

• Example: A manufacturing company uses VIVI to create an AI-powered agent that monitors inventory levels on the production floor, cross-references this data with order backlogs, and automatically places orders with suppliers to maintain optimal stock. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and order processing, reduces the risk of production delays due to out-of-stock items, and allows employees to focus on more strategic tasks like quality control and process improvement.

• Improved Customer Service: Provide exceptional customer experiences with AI-powered solutions that offer instant, personalized support and resolve issues efficiently

• Example: A telecommunications company uses VIVI to create an AI-powered customer support agent that can answer common customer inquiries, troubleshoot technical issues, and even process simple requests like changing a billing address. This provides customers with 24/7 support, reduces wait times, and frees up human agents to handle more complex customer needs.

• Enhanced Decision-Making: Make informed decisions with AI-powered agents that analyze data, generate insightful reports, and uncover valuable information.

• Example: A private equity firm uses VIVI to create a research agent that gathers information on potential investment targets. This agent can quickly compile data from various sources, including financial statements, news articles, industry reports, and social media, to help the firm conduct thorough due diligence and make informed investment decisions.

• Drive Innovation: Unlock the power of unstructured data with AI agents that effortlessly process diverse information types, leading to new insights, improved efficiency, and reduced errors.

• Example: A market research firm uses VIVI to create an AI agent that analyzes customer feedback from various sources, including surveys, social media, online reviews, and customer support interactions. This agent can identify key themes and trends without needing to manually consolidate or normalize the data, reducing human error and the need for temporary labor for data entry. The insights gained are then automatically integrated into the company’s CRM, providing a comprehensive view of customer sentiment and informing product development and marketing strategies.

This white paper will provide a practical introduction to prompt engineering, a key skill for harnessing the power of AI agents and optimizing AI’s response in your business.

VIVI: Jumpstart Your Agent Creation with Pre-built Prompt Templates

VIVI simplifies the process of creating, deploying, and managing AI agents, including writing AI agent prompts. Starting with a clear initial prompt is crucial for guiding the AI agent effectively. VIVI’s user-friendly interface and comprehensive tools make it easy for business owners to craft effective prompts, even without technical expertise.

Using Our Pre-Built Templates

Prompt engineering is the backbone of agent performance, and VIVI’s development team is highly skilled in generating effective prompts. Our pre-built templates allow you to leverage our expertise and jumpstart your agent creation process. Our templates help you outline key features and essential elements to guide AI responses effectively.

While we provide the foundational structure for effective prompts, you bring the essential knowledge of your business, your brand, and your goals for the agent. This is where your customization comes in. By adding the necessary personalization, you ensure the agent performs in a way that promotes your business and achieves your goals in a manner that aligns with your vision.

VIVI prompt templates are pre-built in markdown language to:

• Ensure clarity and structure: Markdown helps organize information with headings, bullet points, and formatting, making your prompts easier for the AI agent to understand.

• Save time and effort: Start with a pre-built template and customize it to your needs, rather than creating prompts from scratch.

• Reduce errors: Pre-built templates provide a solid foundation, minimizing the risk of syntax errors or missing crucial elements in your prompts.

• Improve consistency: Use templates to maintain a consistent style and structure across your AI agent prompts, leading to more predictable and reliable results.

A prompt is a set of instructions you provide to an AI agent, which determines:

• Identity: Define the agent’s persona (e.g., friendly, professional, humorous) and its role (e.g., customer service rep, marketing assistant, data analyst).

• Knowledge (sources of truth): Provide the context and background information the agent needs to understand your requests and generate relevant responses.

• Tasks: Clearly state the instructions for the agent, outlining the specific actions it should take, including which tools or integrations to use and how to use them. Remember, clarity and conciseness are key. Avoid overwhelming the agent with unnecessary details, as a focused prompt often yields better results.

• Examples: Include examples of desired outputs or behaviors to guide the agent’s performance.

• Workflow: For complex tasks, provide step-by-step guidance to ensure the agent follows the correct process.

VIVI’s prompt library or templates can be a valuable resource for understanding and creating effective prompts.

Putting It All Together: Prompt Engineering Techniques in Action

When crafting prompts, remember to provide clear instructions, relevant context, and illustrative examples. Incorporating creative prompts can stimulate innovation and help generate new ideas within your organization. This will guide the AI agent and increase the likelihood of achieving high-quality results that meet your specific needs. VIVI’s user-friendly interface and pre-built templates make it easy to put these principles into practice and create effective prompts for your AI agents.

Prompt Engineering and Agent Creation: Connecting the Building Blocks with Large Language Models

Effective prompt engineering goes beyond simply instructing an AI agent on what to do; it also involves guiding the agent on how to interact with other essential components of its environment, including the AI system itself. This includes:

Understanding the limitations and quality of training data is crucial for optimizing AI system performance.

• Knowledge Bases (e.g., product documentation, internal wikis, customer support databases): A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that an AI agent can access to answer questions or complete tasks. When connecting an AI agent to external knowledge bases, prompt engineering plays a crucial role in instructing the agent on how to effectively utilize these resources. This includes specifying:

• Search and retrieval: How to search for and retrieve relevant information from the knowledge base.

• Source evaluation: How to evaluate the credibility and relevance of different sources within the knowledge base.

• Information synthesis: How to synthesize information from multiple sources to provide comprehensive answers.

• Integrations & Tools (e.g., CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, data analytics tools): Integrations connect AI agents with other software applications or tools, enabling them to perform a wider range of tasks. Similarly, when integrating tools with AI agents, prompt engineering guides the agent on:

• Tool selection: Choosing the appropriate tool for a specific task.

• Input/output formatting: Properly formatting inputs and outputs for seamless interaction with the tool.

• Limitations and constraints: Understanding any limitations or constraints of the tool and adjusting its usage accordingly.

• Channels (e.g., chat, email, social media, SMS): Channels are the various mediums through which an AI agent can communicate, such as chat, email, or social media. Prompt engineering can also be used to tailor an AI agent’s communication style and output format based on the channel it’s interacting with. This ensures the agent’s responses are appropriate and effective across different channels, such as:

• Chat: Concise and conversational responses for chat interactions.

• Email: More formal and detailed responses for email communication.

• Social media: Engaging and platform-specific content for social media posts.

By considering these aspects, prompt engineering ensures that AI agents can effectively leverage external knowledge, utilize tools, and adapt to different communication channels, maximizing their overall performance and value.

The Power of Iteration and Evaluation

Prompt engineering is an iterative process. Following prompt engineering best practices is essential for achieving high-quality results. Experiment with different prompts, analyze the results, and make adjustments until you achieve the desired outcome. However, evaluating the effectiveness of your prompts and the overall performance of your AI agents is crucial for continuous improvement.

VIVI provides powerful evaluation tools that allow you to:

• Conduct Evaluation Runs: Assess your agents’ performance by running them against specific test scenarios.

• Measure Groundedness: Determine how well your agents’ responses are grounded in the provided knowledge base and identify any instances of “hallucination” (generating inaccurate or irrelevant information).

• Check for Correctness: Compare your agents’ responses to sample answers to assess their accuracy and relevance.

• Evaluate Usefulness: Analyze the relevance and usefulness of the agents’ responses in addressing user queries or completing tasks.

• Monitor Response Time: Track the time it takes for your agents to generate responses, ensuring they meet performance expectations.

• Compare AI Models: Test different AI models against each other to evaluate their performance and choose the best one for your needs.

By leveraging these evaluation tools, you can fine-tune your prompts, optimize your agents’ performance, and ensure they deliver accurate, relevant, and timely responses. This iterative process of experimentation and evaluation empowers you to continuously improve your AI agents and maximize their value to your business.

Collaborating with Your IT Department: A Shared Understanding of AI Tools

While your IT department might handle the technical implementation of AI agents, your knowledge of prompt engineering empowers you to actively participate in the process. Understanding your target audience is crucial for defining the agent’s purpose and personality. You can:

• Define the agent’s purpose and personality: Clearly articulate the agent’s role, desired behavior, and alignment with your brand.

• Provide domain expertise: Share your knowledge of your business operations and customer needs to guide the technical implementation.

• Make strategic decisions: Identify suitable use cases, set realistic expectations, and evaluate the potential ROI of AI initiatives.

• Translate business needs into technical requirements: Ensure the AI agent meets your specific needs by effectively communicating your requirements to the IT team.

• Foster collaboration: Work closely with your IT team, using VIVI’s platform to collaboratively create, test, and evaluate AI agents.

VIVI’s intuitive interface demystifies agent creation and facilitates this collaboration, making it easier to work together on AI projects and achieve successful outcomes.

The Future is Now

AI agents, powered by large language models, and prompt engineering are transforming the business landscape. By embracing these technologies and understanding the fundamentals, you can position your business for tangible success. Large language models play a crucial role in generating content and automating customer support.

VIVI provides the tools and resources to make this journey smoother and more successful. With VIVI, you can onboard a virtual workforce, automate tasks, and enhance customer experiences, all through the power of prompt engineering. A prompt engineer is essential for crafting effective prompts that guide AI models towards desired results.

Leveraging prompt engineering techniques can drive innovation and growth in your business.

Prompt engineers are key to enhancing the performance of AI language models and ensuring valuable outcomes.