Stop Writing Long Prompts. Research Now Shows Shorter Ones Are Getting Better Results

Andrew Miles Davis returns to his training insights series, covering two patterns he keeps encountering when working with corporate teams across the UK. The first is the persistent belief that longer prompts always produce better outputs, which research is beginning to contradict, with shorter and more specifically structured prompts increasingly outperforming lengthy brain dumps. He connects this directly to how people write emails and argues the real skill is knowing when to go deep and when to stay concise. The second pattern is people defaulting to AI for low-value tasks like summarising meetings and drafting routine emails while avoiding the harder, more strategic work where AI could genuinely save hours rather than minutes. Andrew argues this often comes down to a trust gap rather than laziness, and that closing that gap is fundamentally about workflow design, structured prompting, and building confidence through use. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes built around what actually happens when real people use AI at work.