When employees work with AI without clear guidelines, typical mistakes can quickly creep in. The result is inaccurate output, additional correction work and inconsistent corporate communications.
Most problems are not caused by the AI itself, but by incomplete, contradictory or overly general instructions.
An overview of the most common mistakes:
- Overly general wording: If the target audience, tone or format is missing, the AI often produces generic or poorly suited results.
- Too many tasks in a single prompt: When several complex tasks are requested at the same time, the quality of the results often suffers.
- Lack of context: Without company knowledge, reference documents or examples, the AI lacks important information.
- No clear guidelines: If the wording to use or avoid is not defined, inconsistent results are produced.
- Different prompt versions: If each team uses its own prompts, consistency and quality standards are lost.
An example:
❌ Unstructured prompt:
"Write a long text about our product and also create five social media posts and an email to go with it."
The AI has to solve several tasks at the same time and often produces superficial results.
✅ Structured prompt:
"Create a product description for our website. The target audience is medium-sized industrial companies. Take our terminology and style guide into account and limit the text to a maximum of 200 words."
The AI receives clear guidelines and produces a result that fits the requirements much better.
In short:
Most prompt engineering mistakes are caused by a lack of context, unclear instructions and insufficient standardisation. Clear structures and consistent prompt templates help to avoid these mistakes.