How to actually use AI: the five prompts a Swiss SME needs
Forget prompt engineering courses. Five patterns cover almost everything an SME does, and each one is a sentence you can write on a card.
Most people use a language model the way they use a search engine: a short question, a disappointing answer, a conclusion that the tool is overrated. The gap is almost never the model. It is that the request contained none of what the model needed.
Five patterns cover the great majority of SME work. None of them require training.
1. Reformulate
« Rewrite this for a customer who is already annoyed. Keep it factual, three short paragraphs, no apology in the first sentence. »
The most-used and least-appreciated pattern. Give it your own draft. A model rewriting your text is on firm ground; a model inventing the content is not.
2. Extract
« From this contract, list every date, every deadline and every amount, as a table, with the clause number. If something is unclear, say so instead of guessing. »
Turning a document into a structure. Reliable, checkable, and it saves the most time per use of anything on this list.
3. Compare
« Here are our standard terms and the customer’s. List only the points where they differ, and mark which differences create an obligation for us. »
Where reasoning models earn their price. This is the task worth a premium seat.
4. Argue against
« This is my plan. Give me the five strongest reasons it fails, ordered by likelihood, and do not soften them. »
The most underused pattern in a small company, where the owner often has nobody to disagree with them. A model is a free, tireless, unoffended sceptic.
5. Explain like I have to decide
« Explain this to me as a managing director with no technical background who has to make a decision this week. What do I need to know, what can I ignore? »
The one habit behind all five
Say who the answer is for and what you will do with it. Almost every disappointing output traces back to a request that omitted both.
Write the five on a card and put it next to the screens of the people who will use this. That is the entire training programme, and it works better than a course.