Stop Tuning Prompts. Your Knowledge Base Is the Bottleneck.
Ask an associate for your top ten accounts and a marketing plan, and the answer is only as good as how cleanly the CRM is structured — AI works exactly the same way, matching your question against its knowledge base before it does anything else. Teams pour hours into prompt iteration and almost none into the structure the prompt is reaching into.
Transcript
I want to clarify something that's often missed out in AI that business needs to understand, because it's not a technical problem. It is a business problem.
Say you need a report of your accounts that are the highest-performing accounts, so you can upsell merchandise to them. So you go to your team member and you say, hey, I need this report. Can you get back to me with the top 10 and a marketing plan for these people?
So your associate goes into the CRM, and there's an identified top 10 because they can sort and filter by who has the greatest amount of opportunities, or has transacted the most in the last year. Filters, takes the 10, goes to marketing, and then gets back the marketing plan and agenda. The only way you could succeed at getting the best information from your CRM is if your CRM is structured cleanly, so they can do that quickly and bring you back what you need.
In the same way, when you're talking to AI — I ask a question of AI, and the first thing the AI tries to do is match what I'm asking for against its structured knowledge base information. It looks for the highest level of match, and then it takes that info and tries to get the remainder, which is actually the marketing plan.
So folks spend a ton of time iterating on the prompt and some of the other elements of the AI structure, but they don't spend enough time on making sure their knowledge base is incredibly clean and well structured. If you don't start there — garbage in, garbage out. If you don't start there, you're going to end up spending a ton of time on the other areas of your work.
Start with a clean knowledge base. It'll have a huge impact on your AI. Like this message and share with someone who needs to hear this note.
