Two people open the same artificial intelligence (AI) assistant to tackle the same task. The first types, “help me with my budget”. Back comes a generic lecture about tracking expenses that could have been written for anyone, anywhere. The second types a paragraph — who the AI should be, what numbers it’s looking at, and exactly what they want back — and 90 seconds later has a board-ready variance commentary with the three biggest drivers named and quantified.

Same tool. Same subscription. The gap between them is not the technology. It is the prompt.

Over the last three weeks this column has shown what AI can build for you — formulas, a cash-flow forecast, a clickable dashboard. This week is about the skill underneath all of it: how to ask. Get this right and every tool you already pay for — ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot — gets several times more useful overnight. Get it wrong and you’ll keep concluding, unfairly, that “AI isn’t that impressive”.