Chelsea AI Ventures
Business AI Training Leader Pathway 1 Day Intensive (In-Person, London or Live Online)

Enterprise Prompt Engineering and Active Cognition

Transforming AI from a tool into a reliable strategic asset by mastering professional AI dialogue and building a governed, scalable prompt playbook

Target Audience

The Enterprise Professional

Core Value

Move beyond basic AI interactions to build a standardized, high-impact prompting capability across your team

Key Differentiator

Focus on creating a tangible, governed Prompt Playbook—an operational asset that scales best practices, ensures reliability, and standardizes excellence

Learning Objectives

  • Apply a structured framework to craft precise, context-rich prompts for complex business tasks
  • Build robust, multi-step workflows using advanced reasoning architectures like Structured Decomposition
  • Develop and manage a team-based Prompt Playbook as a version-controlled, operational asset
  • Master modern reasoning techniques like Self-Consistency and Tree-of-Thoughts to improve AI reliability
  • Implement Active Cognition protocols to mitigate the Verification Tax and ensure knowledge retention
  • Implement a governance framework for prompts, including systematic testing and security best practices to mitigate risks

Prerequisites

None. This course is designed for business professionals with no prior technical or programming experience.

Course Structure

Module 1: The Professional Standard—Anatomy of an Enterprise-Grade Prompt: Active Cognition & Strategic Dialogue

Establish the foundations of professional prompt engineering. Learn the key components of a well-structured prompt—Role, Action, Context, and Execution—and the Active Cognition protocols to move from passive consumption to high-impact cognitive scaffolding.

Activities:

  • Hands-on lab: Deconstruct and rebuild prompts for common business scenarios using the Coach Mode framework.
  • Live demonstration: Comparing outputs from basic vs. structured prompts across different AI models.

Module 2: Core Techniques for Business Application: Mastering the Prompting Toolkit

Learn the data-backed techniques that define 2026 engineering standards. Move beyond personas to master Constraint Clarity and benchmarked pattern (Few-Shot Chain-of-Thought). Introduce Chain of Draft (CoD) to drive radical efficiency in high-volume workflows.

Activities:

  • Workshop: Refactoring verbose prompts into Chain of Draft shorthand to cut latency and cost while maintaining accuracy.
  • Team exercise: Applying Constraint Clarity—replacing vague style instructions with rigid output schemas and negative constraints.

Module 3: Advanced Reasoning Architectures for Complex Workflows: Building Verifiable, Multi-Step Solutions

Orchestrate complex workflows while avoiding modern pitfalls. Learn when to use Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) for high-stakes puzzles vs. when to avoid it to prevent reasoning leakage in new reasoning models. Master Structured Decomposition to break down problems into verifiable steps.

Activities:

  • Business Lab: Use Structured Decomposition to solve a complex business problem, such as analyzing customer feedback to identify key themes and suggest product improvements.
  • Integration challenge: Design a prompt chain that takes raw sales data, generates a summary, verifies its key claims, and drafts a client-facing email.

Module 4: The Prompt Playbook—From Asset to Operation (PromptOps): From Individual Skill to Governed Capability

The capstone of the workshop. Learn how to create, manage, and scale a Prompt Playbook — a centralized library of proven prompts. This module introduces the discipline of PromptOps, transforming your playbook from a simple repository into a governed, version-controlled, and systematically tested organizational asset.

Activities:

  • Capstone Project: Each participant will develop and document three role-specific prompts for their team's playbook, including use cases, verification steps, and potential failure modes.
  • Workshop: Implementing PromptOps—Discuss strategies for playbook governance, version control, systematic A/B testing, and security fundamentals like adversarial testing (Red Teaming).

Topics Covered

Structured Prompt Design (Role, Action, Context, Execution)
The Benchmarked Best: Few-Shot Chain-of-Thought
Constraint Clarity & Negative Constraints
Chain of Draft (CoD) for Efficiency
Advanced Reasoning (Decomposition, ToT, Reasoning Leakage)
Workflow Automation & Prompt Chaining
Building & Managing a Prompt Playbook
Introduction to PromptOps (Versioning & Testing)
AI Governance & Security Fundamentals
Managing Hallucinations & Bias
Multi-Tool Prompting (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini)

Capstone Project

Develop a foundational set of five role-specific prompts for your team's Prompt Playbook, complete with documentation on use cases, verification strategies, and refinement notes to solve a real-world business challenge.

Why This Course Matters

A fundamental shift is underway in the corporate world. As global institutions like Citi mandate AI training for their entire workforce, one skill has emerged as a non-negotiable business competency: prompt engineering. This is not a technical skill for a select few; it is the new standard for professional communication and productivity.

An internal memo at Citi put it perfectly: “Just as the right question in a client pitch can reveal clarity and create advantage, a well-crafted prompt can accelerate your work, surface insights and amplify your impact”.

However, speed without retention is a liability. MIT research indicates a 40% retention drop when AI is used passively. This course addresses this Verification Tax head-on. We teach the Active Cognition framework to ensure your team uses AI as a cognitive amplifier, not just a substitute, turning tasks that take hours into work completed in minutes without sacrificing mastery.

What Makes This Course Different

Many courses teach you the theory of prompting. This workshop is different. It is built around a single, powerful concept: transforming individual skill into a scalable and reliable organizational asset. You won’t just learn how to write better prompts; you will learn how to build, manage, and govern a Prompt Playbook for your team.

This playbook becomes a living library of your team’s best practices—a collection of tested, optimized, and reusable prompts tailored to your specific business challenges. It ensures that excellence is standardized, onboarding is accelerated, and the value of your AI investment is maximized across the board. You leave not just with knowledge, but with a tangible framework for sustained, secure, and reliable performance.

Course Philosophy

We believe that professional AI usage requires discipline, not just curiosity. This course moves beyond basic prompting to instill the structured, methodical approach required in an enterprise environment. Our philosophy is built on four pillars:

Precision over Play: We teach you to craft prompts with the clarity and specificity of a technical instruction, ensuring reliable and consistent outputs.

Cognition over Consumption: We prioritize workflows that keep humans in the loop. We use the Active Cognition framework to ensure your team builds skills while using AI, avoiding the trap of cognitive offloading.

Workflows over Widgets: The focus is on integrating AI seamlessly into your existing business processes to solve real problems, not just demonstrating novelty tools.

Reliability through Rigor: We introduce engineering discipline to prompting, focusing on decomposition, verification, and safety to build trustworthy AI systems that your organization can depend on.

Who Should Take This Course

This course is designed for corporate teams and professionals who are tasked with driving productivity and innovation with AI. It is ideal for:

Department Leaders who need to establish a standardized, effective, and safe AI usage policy for their teams.

Project Managers and Analysts who want to accelerate research, data synthesis, and reporting with verifiable accuracy.

Marketing and Sales Professionals seeking to automate content creation, personalize outreach, and analyze campaign data more effectively.

HR and Operations Teams looking to streamline documentation, policy guidance, and internal communications.

Any employee in an organization like Citi, JPMorgan, or Wells Fargo who is now expected to use AI as a core part of their job.

Ready to transform your team?

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