The Shifting Focus From Output To Input

Have you ever complained about having to spoon feed your vendors, consultancies or team-members regarding a requirement? Alternatively, have you been discouraged from asking questions because, ‘if the client tells you everything, what do they need us for?’. Well, there’s bad news and good news.

I will start with the bad news. The way the future is panning out, with gen AI becoming integral to getting things done, the only way to ensure quality is to build the patience for and ability to break down our requirement with as basic detailing as possible. This means we need to state the context and the problem every single time. Like we were talking to a first time employee on the job. Also, until machines develop the ability for human emotions, the classic manipulation tactics of blaming them and demanding they figure things out themselves, will make us look like fools. We can’t bullshit with AI. We will have no choice but to work on bettering our instruction, time after time. With patience and humility. Till we get the results.

What’s the good news? I hear you asking. Well, AI doesn’t mind scrapping and re-doing the whole project when a bug is found. Unlike humans who try to fix the bug instead. You know – we reach out for the trusty smart correct white ink. AI however, can make a fresh version of the entire product quickly and inexpensively. After all, the output is what matters. What’s interesting is that, going forward our focus will be squarely on the quality of input.

Gen AI is completely paralysed with poor instructions. Only trouble is, we can’t fire AI. So, we need to communicate with it. No matter where on the bell of the adoption curve you stand, you have certainly heard about the importance of ‘prompt engineering’. The inputs that we feed Gen AI are called prompts. The word given to the skill of using prompts correctly so as to get the ideal or maximum output is “prompt engineering”. We love making everything sound as sophisticated as possible. For instance, my favourite term for what I specialise in is, “brand scientist”. What I really do is simply to study and educate about brands and brand building. Coming back to Prompt Engineering: in simple words, it’s ‘spoon-feeding instructions’. Which amounts to deconstructing the requirement into chewable bites.

Of course nothing will ever matter more than the final output. However the focus is now on how well we can explain what needs to be done – the input. The irony is that this is not a new truth. This is the most logical idea there ever has been. – the greater the effort put into the input, the greater the result. In advertising circles, we have a saying that goes, “the creative output is as good as the brief”.  It had to take the advent of gen AI to make people really wake up to this logic. So, let’s say it one more time because we can’t say it enough – Gen AI is not replacing jobs. Gen AI is accelerating the output of those who know their job. If we were good before. Gen AI can make us exceptional.

To stay relevant and save our jobs, we need to put deliberate practice into using gen AI, or in other words into giving instructions or in other words, into prompt engineering. We also need to be able to curate the results to extract the best output. For this we need to be particularly good at what we do. I always maintain that relevance trumps experience. But, I hope it is understood that I do not mean to undermine the importance of experience. This is a good opportunity for me to present a strong case for experience. To curate the copious amounts of results Gen AI can throw up, it takes experience. I am pretty confident that if asked to, I could do a Ted-talk on a completely unfamiliar topic like say, the progress in the field of neurosurgery.  But, in all honesty, I would still need at least one session with a Doctor to validate all the material I get from ChatGPT or DeepSeek.

So, let me conclude by saying that we live in times where relevance is key. And being relevant at work today is to be input-focussed which in turn gets us great results. The quality of input and more importantly the ability to accelerate output relies on (and has become the true test of) experience and expertise.

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Pooja Nair

Pooja Nair has over 20 years of experience as a branding consultant across leading global Ad consultancies. Pooja is also known to be an ex theater performer, actress and model. Since September, 2022, she has focussed completely on her passion for the changing face of business, brand-building and reputation.