Prompt

A financial planner is recommending that Keith Brennan move an old personal pension to a new provider. The old provider's reply to the firm's questions runs to four pages. The planner pastes it into the AI product with a request from the firm's shared list of prompts: "Summarise this letter in five bullet points." The bullets cover the transfer value, fund, charges, exit charge and retirement age. Working from them, the planner writes in the draft suitability report that the plan has no guarantees. Before sign-off, compliance finds a guaranteed annuity rate on page three of the letter. The move would have given it up.

The AI did what it was asked. Nothing it was given said the summary was for moving the plan, where a guarantee is one of the first things to look for. That request was a prompt. A prompt is the request a person gives an AI for one piece of work, whether they type it or pick it from a saved list. It joins any documents and the product's standing instructions in the AI's context. Whatever these leave out about the purpose of the work, the AI fills with its own guess at what matters.

The firm's own request to the provider asked about guarantees by name, and a prompt can do the same. The comparison breaks at the answer: the provider answers from the plan's own records, and the AI from its reading of the letter. Even asked by name, the AI can miss a guarantee on page three and say there are none. That wrong answer reads exactly like a right one.