Saving prompts in Copilot is one of the simplest and most effective ways to ensure the tool meets your professional needs and those of your business.

Anytime you ask Copilot to fulfil a particular task, and it delivers pleasing results, prompt saving enables you to tuck the whole procedure behind your proverbial ear for safe keeping: you never know when that shrewd move will come in handy again.

Building your prompt library

Building up a store of prompts is quite straightforward. When you are in the chat screen and decide that Copilot has produced a useful response, hover your cursor over the prompt to reveal a small task bar. One option is the bookmark icon. Once clicked, your prompt will appear in a pop-up that asks you to confirm you want the prompt saved. The pop-up also gives you an option to edit the prompt beforehand.

Once you confirm, another pop-up provides a link to view the saved prompt as a tile in Copilot’s Prompt Gallery. Move your cursor over the tile and a menu icon again provides the option to edit the prompt or share with colleagues. If you click on the tile, Copilot takes you to a record of your original prompt-and-response thread, so you can remind yourself of why the prompt worked.

Over time, you can accumulate a whole prompt library in the Gallery. But how should you manage them to ensure they continue to provide the most effective support?

Creating mini systems

Mark Wickersham FCA has worked as an accountant since 1988 and became a sole practitioner in 1996. He now coaches fellow accountants on the benefits of AI, through his AI Academy YouTube channel and related training courses. In his view, Copilot’s Prompt Gallery should mainly store functions you’ll need more than once.

“I’m a big fan of systemising and automating work,” he says. “As such, I see prompts – particularly if we use them as templates – as little mini systems. So, whenever we’re thinking about what the right mini systems or prompt templates are to save for reuse, we first have to think about all the things we do in a business or accounting firm.”

He uses marketing as an example: while accountants running firms or businesses know it’s important, it’s outside of their skill set. “So, we could create standard prompts for key marketing functions. For example, one that builds out a social media calendar for the month, and another that helps you write social posts. In terms of marketing content creation, we can devise a prompt that does the heavy lifting of writing blogs.”

Meanwhile, Wickersham says, accountants can create prompts for market research or financial analysis, and for compiling reports ahead of client meetings. Crucially, those prompts can be tweaked from client to client, to reflect the different businesses – a particularly useful application.

“Typically,” Wickersham notes, “you’d insert placeholders, denoted by square brackets. So, you’ve written around 90% of the prompt, but the colleague actioning it must fill in those placeholders to account for variations.”

Introducing a prompting policy

When your firm or business creates a prompt library, Wickersham points out, it must ensure clarity and consistency on which prompts employees use under which circumstances. With that in mind, it must compile a set of instructions – potentially as part of company policy – informing staff where to find the right prompts for each task.

Plus, Wickersham notes, a system once created should be revisited and reviewed at least once a year.

“A prompt library is no exception,” he says. “AI changes rapidly, your business changes, the professional and commercial environments change frequently and functionalities come and go. For example, you may have prompts requesting delivery of results in a specific format or application, and that capability is suddenly shelved. So, you need to be across how various factors affect the relevance and long-term effectiveness of your prompt library.”

Reviewing Copilot’s outputs

Companies should apply the same degree of insight to tracking how often the prompts are used and whether the quality of their outputs remains satisfactory over time. In that context, Wickersham stresses, leaving it all up to AI is not enough.

“Regardless of how much you systemise, or how smart your prompts are, there should always be a human in the loop,” he says. “Even though you’re trying to automate areas of the business, an actual member of staff should always examine and assess the outputs, to ensure the prompts serve the business.”

He adds that a manager with appropriate business knowledge should review the outputs and assess whether they are fit for purpose. If they frequently are not, the relevant prompts should be amended or deleted.

Having immersed himself in prompt engineering, Wickersham has clear thoughts on what makes a strong, reusable prompt. “Ensure it has at least one of either examples or templates,” he says. “AI looks for patterns. So, if you want, say, a prompt that will review some financial statements and then produce a report for a client meeting, make sure it has a template for that report – or examples of previous reports – built into it. That way, you’ll get consistent outputs in the style you want them.”