The Evolution of AI Prompting

 

Say the magic words to the AI and it behaves.

Prompts feel like control without the paperwork. Whisper the right words and the machine behaves.

The appeal is easy to understand: Prompts feel like control without the mess of actual management … no policies, no audits, no awkward accountability. Just vibes in a text box.

But as AI systems become more agentic* (less like tools, more like tireless junior employees) clever phrasing stops being governance. Vibes are not a control system.

CEOs already know how real control works. With humans, we use identity (who are you?), policy (what can you do?), and accountability (what happens when you mess up?). Nobody runs a company on tone of voice alone.

Yet with AI, we keep pretending a polite sentence is infrastructure. Like adding “be safe and ethical” is the same as locks on the doors. It’s charming. It’s also useless at scale. AI won’t be trustworthy until it’s wrapped in the same dull, necessary scaffolding we use for humans.

Trust comes from boring things: permissions, logs, enforcement. Not magic words. Which means the future of AI management probably looks less like poetry and more like compliance.

Not exciting. Just real.

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*QUICK BRIEFING: Generative AI vs Agentic AI

St. Patrick’s Day Rant

 

Ah, St. Patrick’s Day. The one day a year when the entire planet wakes up and collectively decides, “You know what would really honor Irish culture? Neon green beer and plastic hats.”

Every advertisement suddenly becomes a cultural historian. “Celebrate Irish heritage!” they say, while handing you a cup of something that looks like antifreeze and calling it festive.

I’m not an expert on Irish history, but I’m fairly confident that somewhere in the centuries of poetry, rebellion, and complicated politics, nobody said, “You know what would really capture the spirit of this nation? A beer dyed the color of a malfunctioning highlighter.”

And the outfits. Grown adults willingly dress like a kindergarten craft project. Felt shamrocks, glitter beards, suspenders with tiny leprechauns doing calisthenics. And, somewhere a marketing team decided novelty hats were the natural evolution of Celtic history.

Then there’s the leprechaun mythology. A tiny man guarding gold at the end of a rainbow ... basically the original financial influencer. “Trust me,” he says. The treasure is definitely there. Just keep chasing it.”

Meanwhile bars are full by noon. Green cocktails with names like “Shamrock Slammer” or “Leprechaun's Kiss.” People shouting “Slainte!” with the confidence of someone who hadn't learned the word 45 seconds ago from a bartender.

And the “authentic Irish celebration” includes “Irish nachos,” which appear to be regular nachos having an identity crisis because someone replaced the chips with potatoes.

Somewhere behind all this is the real history: centuries of Irish storytelling, politics, music. Complicated, fascinating stuff.

But what we ended up with is green bagels ... the cultural equivalent of putting sunglasses on a historical statue and saying, “Look how fun history is now.”

I’m not against celebration. I’m not even against absurdity. Absurdity can be wonderful. Humanity has always loved costumes and loud gatherings and an excuse to yell in public without filing paperwork.

What fascinates me is how quickly culture becomes a product.

You take a holiday with real history, run it through three marketing departments, add food coloring, and suddenly the meaning dissolves like sugar in soda.

But maybe that’s the real modern tradition: turning complicated human stories into something you can sell in bulk near the seasonal aisle.

Anyway, pass the soda bread ... preferably a loaf that has survived the marketing department and avoided the green dye.

Contractions

When I read marketing copy without contractions, I feel like I’ve wandered into “Pride and Prejudice” and someone’s about to discuss the price of lace.

“We are pleased to announce…” No one talks like that unless there’s a fainting couch nearby.

Just say it like a person. It’s, don’t, you’ll, can’t. Real words for real mouths in the real world (where we’re buying toothpaste on line while watching TV).

Formal isn’t trustworthy, it’s just distant. And distance is an ineffective way to have a conversation with a prospect. 

What happened to creative marketing?

No, creativity isn’t dead. But, in advertising and marketing, it has been evicted.

It’s been shoved out to the edges, crowded off the table by consolidation decks, metric dashboards, automation pipelines, KPIs with more decimals than soul, and the cult of “efficiency” that believes faster is automatically better. Creativity didn’t disappear. It just got buried under a landslide of well-intentioned optimization.

But here’s the thing no spreadsheet, no matter how color-coded or cleverly pivot-tabled, can keep underground:

Ideas still matter.
Taste still matters.
Craft still matters.
Human judgment (messy, instinctive, gloriously unquantifiable) still matters.

We don’t create great work by worshipping the frictionless. We create it by wrestling with the unpredictable, the subjective, the inconvenient spark that refuses to be reduced to a metric.

Efficiency can ship a product. But only creativity can make someone care that it exists.

And that’s something no dashboard can automate, consolidate, or KPI its way around.