AI × YOU: Why Prompt Literacy Is the New Digital Literacy
The skill gap no one warned you about
The AI Is Here — But the Human Still Matters
2024 marked the year AI agents started scheduling meetings, writing code, and reasoning on their own — all from natural language prompts. Many individuals and corporations alike have implemented AI into their day-to-day lives. Some have even become ‘dependent’ on the technology. This trend will only continue to grow in the future. But what if I told you most people weren’t using AI to its full potential? Especially LLMs like ChatGPT.
Current LLMs are capable of providing answers and solutions to most prompts, even the bad ones. You would generally want to provide as much context to an AI Chatbot to get the highest quality outputs. Since AI relies on pattern recognition and semantic grounding (how it interprets what you mean), providing rich context to your prompts results in the best quality, relevant, and accurate output. Enter: prompt engineering.
What Is Prompt Engineering, Really?
Prompt engineering refers to guiding generative AI through refining and optimizing AI inputs, questions, or instructions to encourage generative AI to produce desired outputs. There’s also a job title called Prompt Engineering, a rapidly growing career field.
Prompt engineers train an AI by coding or writing text prompts to generate desired outputs. Their primary responsibilities include:
Testing and iterating prompts, analyzing the AI responses, and refining the prompts to improve the performance
Monitoring AI performance metrics such as accuracy/relevance, and consistency
Identifying and selling issues related to AI behavior or prompt effectiveness
Staying up to date with the latest AI tools
Most prompt engineers have degrees in computer science, linguistics, and cognitive psychology. Some also have online certification. If you’re interested in prompt engineering, having demonstrated ability to work with AI models and experience working in multidisciplinary teams to integrate AI solutions on your resume would boost your application.
Why Everyone Needs Training(Not Just Techies)
AI Literacy is the next digital fluency. It is already integrated into different aspects of our lives, and it will continue to be further embedded into the fabric of our society. Not being competent in AI literacy would be like texting with gloves on—technically possible, but frustrating and ineffective.
Once upon a time, spreadsheets and Google searches required a learning curve. Spreadsheet required people to learn enigmatic formulas, functions, and data organization. Google search requires people to know how to phrase their inquiries to get the correct search results; now, in 2025, these tools are second nature to most millennials and Gen Zers.
Here is a YouTube video showcasing Anthropic engineers doing a prompt engineering deep dive:
The Rise of AI Agents
With the rise of AI Agents, being AI-fluent is a necessity. To use AI agents well, people must know how to instruct and delegate tasks with better prompt writing. I explored this further in my article on agentic AI- check it out here.
Learning prompt engineering is a smart move for anyone hoping to unlock the potential for AI. In particular, AI agents require users to be adept at prompt engineering. AI agents don’t “infer”, so users have to be clear and concise with their prompts, and since they usually perform complex tasks that require multiple steps, that’s all the more reason to avoid vague prompts. One should focus on three skills in particular: clarity, interactive design, and adaptability when trying to up their prompting game.
How to Start Training Yourself
The main idea behind improving one’s prompt is to add more details to the prompt, such as task definition, defining the context, defining who the chatbot should emulate, specifying the desired tone, and example output format.
Here’s a YouTube video providing a prompt formula for ChatGPT
Final Thought — It’s AI × YOU, Not AI vs. You
You don’t need to be a prompt engineer to learn prompt engineering. Furthermore, bad prompting can lead to issues such as inaccurate/irrelevant responses, misinformation, and user frustration. This communication barrier between humans and AI can be overcome with AI-prompting education. If there’s anything you should take away from this article, it’s this: to level up your AI prompting game, add rich contextual details to your prompts and provide examples of expected outputs.