You know that feeling when you ask AI for help and it gives you something back that is technically fine but completely misses the mark, like it's too generic.
To surface level, not quite you.
That's not a prompt problem, it's a context problem, and it's probably the single biggest reason people aren't getting their results they hoped for from AI. The fix is something Neo and I use constantly. We call it a briefing document. In this episode, we walk through exactly what it is, why it changes everything, and how to create one without sitting down to write.
A big wall of text.
We are sharing the actual prompt we give to our Inventium AI workshop participants to have AI interview you, so the whole thing gets done in about fifteen minutes over a cup of copy. By the end, you will have a clear system for giving AI the context it actually needs to understand your world, so that every chat you open feels less like starting from scratch and more like picking up with someone who already knows what you're working on. Welcome to how IAI with me Doctor Amantha Imba and
Neo Applin, head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share one practical way to use AI better at work and in life. No fluff, no tech jargon, just things you can use straight away. Back in twenty twenty four, maybe some of twenty twenty five, all the talk was about
prompt engineering and how can you craft better prompts. But in twenty twenty five, and you know, certainly now in twenty twenty six, I think that everyone working in AI would agree that context trumps are well written prompt Would you agree with that.
Neo, Yeah. A lot of people are saying that prompt engineering is dead because AI guesses what you're after and it gives you the result. But if you don't give it the background of your business, your needs, your problems, all those kinds of things, you're going to get a great average response.
And this is really the biggest mistake that we see people making with AI, not giving the AI enough context. So today we want to talk about how we recommend doing this and doing this really easily in a way that is not going to be cumbersome or overly time consuming for you. And that is what we call at Inventium AI a briefing document. Can you share what this is?
Neo?
Yeah. Before I show you what it is, let me tell you about the old fashioned way of doing things. So we all know you should give background to AI, and so you might say, this is the project I'm working on, this is what I've done so far, blah blah blah blah. You can imagine you've got to write or if you've listened to other episodes, then hopefully you've dictated to AI. You're going to write all that back or dictate all that background to AI, and then you
can tell it what you want it to do. So imagine, I would argue, if we're going a big complicated thing we're talking about, multiple paragraphs of background is probably what you need to add. So cheap number one is upload a document or three. That's kind of cool, so it gets some kind of the background there, but you really need to give that background before you get it to do the thing. And that's the old fashioned way of
doing things. But here's the thing. Every time we open up a new chat thread, you're going to have to do the same thing. You're gonna have to add all that background and give all that kind of context. Every single time you do that again and again. You're doing that so many time reads every day that either one
of two things are going to happen. One is you're going to be bored of giving the background, or two you're going to be what most people do, which is lazy, and then you don't give it the background, and therefore you don't get a really targeted result. So what we're going to do is we're going to capture that background
in one document. We'll call it a briefing document, and then you can then upload that each single time you've got a new chat, or you can even add it as knowledge to a project or it from an agent. So that's always got that knowledge, always got that background, So every time you come to AI, you can start talking Turkey and it already knows all about you and your background. That's a briefing document.
Now, it can be a little bit annoying to go, oh, well, what should I put in a briefing document?
Or have to sit down and.
Type it all out, but we have solved that problem for you. Neo, Can you share the prompt that we give to our workshop participants to help make it really easy to create a briefing document.
Yeah. So the briefing document, a good one has things about your job, context, stakeholders, how you work. It might be products that you work with. That might be customers you've got, it might be all those kind of things. So you could type all that down, but why not have it a bit more engaging, in a little bit more fun. So what we're going to do is we're going to have an interview with AI. So this is something that you can use on the adaptive Advanced Voice mode.
This is the one that looks like a little squiggle button. You can actually have an interview with AI. It'd asks you question by voice. You can answer it five voices, not easier. So sit back with a cup of coffee, get at the interview about your job, and then it'll create a document at the end. So here's the prompt we're going to use. Run a short adaptive interview that captures only what matters about my role, context, stakeholders, and how I work, and then produce a single structured briefing
that covers all information. Be efficient, inquisitive rather than prescriptive, and tailor the depth in questions to my role and signals. In other words, don't follow a really regimenter process. But really I want you to understand and be inquisitive about what I do and my background and all those kinds of things. And then I want you to produce a briefing document. And so when you do that, it's probably fifteen twenty minutes, sit back, have a chat with it
and tell it. Make sure you tell it the important parts about your job. And if it doesn't ask you a question that's important, feel free to just tell it well like, well, this is my boss and this is what they really need and these are my main clients or these are the main products, or those kind of things. So make sure everything's really important about your job is in this document.
And so at the start, you'll probably have just the one briefing document that is about you, the organization that you work in, and your role.
But as you.
Start to double down on this strategy, I would say you will end up with several briefing documents. So I think Neo and I we can both share the briefing documents that we have credit in our own working lives.
But really, anytime you are starting a new project, that really justifies creating a new briefing document that you can upload to any chat thread in AI when you want to give it that instant context so it knows, ah, yeah, this is what we're talking about so Neo, do you want to share a handful of your briefing documents what you've created.
I've got an overview Inventium one, so it's about our product services and all those kind of things. And I use this particularly when i've got sales e type chats that I need to have, you know, like when people ask you know, what do you do with these kind of things? I've got within that, I've got a sub briefing document section which is all about our products and services. So if someone asked a question about a particular program, then I can get AI to help me beat that
into shape. So about our company, I've got one for me, which is my role what I do all of those kind of things. I have another one which is about our AI programs. In fact, they've got two of those, So I've got one for our main programs which has all the main lessons in it, what you get out of it and earn all those kinds of things. And the reason that I do that is sometimes I need to work with some of my previous content to be able to like remix bits and pieces or how do
I pull that in and what have we gotten? Things like that, so I can then ask questions of AI about my stuff already built. Recently, we've got a big client and they've got a big fun project where we're going to be doing hands on fun. It's like a half day AI hackathon if you'd like. It's not quite a hackathon, it's something a bit cool more than that, but anyway, we'll call it that. Very detailed, lots of different ins and outs and things like that. So I've
created a briefing document for that. So yeah, for me, it might be projects, might be about the company, might be about me, but that's me, how about you?
So I have got quite a few briefing documents. I've got one, for example, in my role as a manager at Inventium that understands who are the people I manage, what are their goals or okayrs, what are the things that they're working towards, what are they're trying to work on as areas for development.
That's super useful.
I've got one for the How I Work podcast, which is incredibly relevant for all sorts of all sorts of workflows that I have with AI for helping to create how How I Work podcast and now also the how I AI podcast.
And I have had various.
Briefing documents for my latest book, The Energy Game, which is out on the seventh of July. And I mean the book is the book is now written, and it's just in the final stages of proofing and typesetting, but moving into the marketing stage.
This is super super useful.
Where I can do things, for example, that would have taken a long time to do previously, where you know I will most likely be guesting on a range of different podcasts, as is pretty typical for authors to do, and I can, and I've had this done to me as a podcast host, and I find it incredibly useful to give me a bunch of different questions or talking points that are going to be hyper personalized to the
podcast that we are pitching to. It helps reduce their work and it also helps lead to a better interview. There are other bits of marketing collateral that can be really time consuming to create, but with the help of AI and a really good briefing document, it can cut down time and also improve the quality of what we
are creating. So they are a few, but typically any project that I start that is a major project or a major area of my life, I will sit down and just spend that fifteen or twenty minutes creating a briefing document.
So we're talking about briefing documents. We've got aid interviewers to create them. We've talked about different ways you would have them. We didn't talk about where you'd actually place them at, how you'd actually use them. Where do you put your briefing documents?
I actually have a file and it's in the main company folder at Inventium that says briefing documents, and that's where I've saved most of the briefing documents that are relevant to me and the team. Obviously, things like the how I Work briefing document. It just saved in the how I Work folder.
So you upload them to AI as you need them.
I do, but also because I have done all the content that we are teaching in our AI Agent boot camp, what I actually also do is I create GPTs or projects. But do you want to talk a little bit about this is for those that are wanting to not have to manually upload them every time.
Yeah, I'm lazy. I don't upload in mine every single time.
So I've created either a project or an agent slash GPT depends on which of the tools that I'm using, which is preloaded with my briefing document, and some of the magic thing you need to tell it is before you answer my questions, make sure you read this briefing document as context and background, so something like that, and so that way, every time I open up the project, it understands, Okay, I've already read everything about NEO, or I've read everything about this project, and then I can
start talking turkey with it off the bat. And I don't have to upload this briefing document to every single chat threads because I'm lazy. Why do that if you can just get at the store in AI. But there is a gotcha here, which is I like Amanther's idea of just keeping in a folder because that way it's always updated and you've got the most up to date one. Mine takes a little bit of diligence, so if I update it, I need to go in there and update
it within the project or the GPT. So depending on which tool you want, which way you want to go, they're both very valid. But make sure your briefing document is updated because if your project changes and you've got an old briefing document, it's going to give you old information.
So we will put the full text of that prompt that Neo shared that will have AI interview you to create a briefing document and hopefully today you can just take your AI out for a coffee and just spend fifteen minutes creating a briefing document. How i AI was hosted by me Amantha Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank you to Martin Imber who does our sound editing, and Jim Rubio for production support, and thank you to John Kilby who composed the theme music.