Giving the AI context it doesn't have
~4 min read
The AI can't see your inbox, your company, your files, or your history with a client — unless you tell it. This is the single biggest cause of generic, unusable answers.
Three things are almost always worth including: who the audience is, what's already been tried or said, and what the real-world stakes are — is this urgent, sensitive, going to a client versus a teammate.
A trick that works well: paste in the actual material you're working from — an email thread, a paragraph of notes, a table of numbers — rather than describing it from memory. AI tools are much better at working from real text than from your summary of it.
Watch out for one thing: don't paste in information that shouldn't leave your company — client contracts, personal data, anything confidential. If you wouldn't email it to a stranger, don't paste it into a public AI tool.
Checklist
Try this task
For your next work question, add one sentence of context you'd normally leave out because it seems 'obvious.' See if the answer gets noticeably more specific.
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