AI Basics · Plain English
Prompt
The instruction you give an AI system — and the discipline of writing instructions that get reliable results.
A prompt is simply what you ask an AI to do — the instruction, the question, the context you hand it. The quality of the answer tracks the quality of the prompt: "summarize this inspection report for the customer, keeping all measurements" beats "summarize this."
In business systems, the important prompts are not typed by users at all. They are engineered into the system: the assistant on this site, for example, carries standing instructions to answer only from approved sources, cite them, and refuse when sources are missing. Those system prompts are versioned and reviewed like any other controlled document.
Where it shows up in this proposal: prompt and model versioning is a named control on the Security and Governance sheet.