What is Prompt Engineering?

A prompt is everything the AI receives: instructions, context, examples and the task. Prompt engineering improves results by being specific about the role, the goal, the format, the constraints and what to do when information is missing.

For business systems, prompts are usually written once and reused thousands of times, for example the instructions behind an AI receptionist or a lead follow-up assistant. That's why they're tested with real examples and refined over time.

Prompting works hand in hand with grounding (giving the AI the right data), guardrails and evals. A great prompt can't fix missing or outdated information.