When employees work with AI without clear guidelines, typical mistakes quickly creep in. The result is inaccurate output, additional correction work and inconsistent corporate communication.
Most problems are not caused by the AI itself, but by incomplete, contradictory or overly general instructions.
The most common mistakes at a glance:
- Overly general wording: If the target audience, tone or format is missing, the AI often produces general or poorly suited results.
- Too many tasks in one 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 desired or to-be-avoided wording 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 as well as an email."
The AI has to solve several tasks simultaneously and often delivers 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 specifications and creates a result that fits the requirements much better.
In short:
Most errors in prompt engineering are caused by a lack of context, unclear instructions and insufficient standardisation. Clear structures and consistent prompt templates help to avoid these errors.