As AI-powered tools become increasingly prevalent, prompt engineering is becoming a skill that developers need to master. Large language models (LLMs) and other generative foundation models require contextual, specific, and tailored natural language instructions to generate the desired output. This means that developers need to write prompts that are clear, concise, and informative. 

In this blog, we will explore six best practices that will make you a more efficient prompt engineer. By following our advice, you can begin creating more personalized, accurate, and contextually aware applications. So let’s get started!

Tip #1: Know the model’s strengths and weaknesses

As AI models evolve and become more complex, it is essential for developers to comprehend their capabilities and limitations. Understanding these strengths and weaknesses can help you, as a developer, avoid making mistakes and create safer, more reliable applications.

For example, an AI model that is trained to recognize images of blueberries may not be able to recognize images of strawberries. Why? Because the model was only trained on a dataset of blueberry images. If a developer uses this model to build an application that is supposed to recognize both blueberries and strawberries, the application would likely make mistakes, leading to an ineffective outcome, and poor user experience.

It’s important to note that AI models have the ability to be biased. This is due to AI models being trained on data that is collected from the real world, and so it can reflect the inequitable power dynamics inherently rooted in our social hierarchy. If the data that is used to train an AI model is biased, then the model will also be biased. This can lead to problems if the model is used to make decisions that affect people by reinforcing societal biases. Addressing these biases is important to ensure that data is fair, promoting equality, and ensuring the responsibility of AI technology. Prompt engineers should be aware of training limitations or biases so they can craft prompts more effectively and understand what kind of prompting is even possible for a given model.

Tip #2: Be as specific as possible

AI models have the ability to comprehend a variety of prompts. For instance Google’s PaLM 2 can understand natural language prompts, multilingual text, and even programming codes like Python and JavaScript. Although AI models can be very knowledgeable, they are still imperfect, and have the ability to misinterpret prompts that are not specific enough. In order for AI models to navigate ambiguity, it is important to tailor your prompts specifically to your desired outcome. 

Let’s say you would like your AI model to generate a recipe for 50 vegan blueberry muffins. If you prompt the model with “what is a recipe for blueberry muffins?”, the model does not know that you need to make 50 muffins. It is thus unlikely to list the larger volume of ingredients you’ll need or include tips to help you more efficiently bake such a large number of muffins. The model can only go off the context that is provided. A more effective prompt would be “I am hosting 50 guests. Generate a recipe for 50 blueberry muffins.” The model is more likely to generate a response that is relevant to your request and meets your specific requirements.

Tip #3: Utilize contextual prompts

Utilize contextual information in your prompts to help the model gain an in-depth understanding of your requests. Contextual prompts can include the specific task you want the model to perform, a replica of the output you’re looking for, or a persona to emulate, from a marketer or engineer to a high school teacher. Defining a tone and perspective for an AI model gives it a blueprint of the tone, style, and focused expertise you’re looking for to improve the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your output. 

In the case of the blueberry muffins, it is important to prompt the model using the context of the situation. The model might need more context than generating a recipe for 50 people. If it needs to be aware that the recipe must be vegan friendly, you might prompt the model by asking it to answer by emulating a skilled vegan chef. 

By providing contextual prompts, you can help ensure that your AI interactions are as seamless and efficient as possible. The model will be able to more quickly understand your request and it will be able to generate more accurate and relevant responses.

Tip #4: Provide AI models with examples 

When creating prompts for AI models, it is helpful to provide examples. This is because prompts act as instructions for the model, and examples can help the model to understand what you are asking for. Providing a prompt with an example looks something like this: “here are several recipes I like – create a new recipe based on the ones I provided.” The model can now understand the your ability and needs in order to make this pastry,

Tip #5: Experiment with prompts and personas

The way you construct your prompt impacts the model’s output. By creatively exploring different requests, you will soon have an understanding of how the model weighs its answers, and what happens when you interfuse your domain knowledge, expertise, and lived experience with the power of a multi-billion parameter large language model. 

Try experimenting with different keywords, sentence structures, and prompt lengths to discover the perfect formula. Allow yourself to step into the shoes of various personas, from work personas such as “product engineer” or “customer service representatives,” to parental figures or celebrities such as your grandmother, a celebrity chef, and explore everything from cooking to coding!

By crafting unique, and innovative, requests replete with your expertise and experience, you can learn which prompts provide you with your ideal output. Further refining your prompts, known as ‘tuning,’ allows the model to have a greater understanding and framework for your next output.

Tip #6: Try chain-of-thought prompting

Chain of thought prompting is a technique for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). It works by breaking down a complex problem into smaller steps, and then prompting the LLM to provide intermediate reasoning for each step. This helps the LLM to understand the problem more deeply, and to generate more accurate and informative answers. This will help you to understand the answer better and to make sure that the LLM is actually understanding the problem. 

Conclusion

Prompt engineering is a skill that all workers, across industries and organizations, will need as AI-powered tools are becoming more prevalent. Remember to incorporate these five essential tips the next time you communicate with an AI model, so you can generate the accurate outputs that you desire. AI will forever continue to develop, constantly refining itself as we use it, so I encourage you to remember that learning, for mind and machine, is a never ending journey. Happy Prompting!

At Arpeely, we’ve developed some of the world’s most advanced advertising technology. Our machine learning (ML) media acquisition platform and “win-win” business model enables customers to bring highly intentful users to their offerings with precision, peace of mind and minimal overhead.

Real-time bidding is a dynamic and intricate process that involves buying and selling ad impressions in milliseconds. Each time a user opens an app or website, advertisers or ad-tech companies acting on behalf of advertisers have milliseconds to bid on ad spaces in real-time auctions, and the highest bidder wins the opportunity to display their ad. This is where Arpeely comes in, leveraging advanced algorithms, innovative UX and funnels to optimize the bidding process and maximize performance for advertisers.

At Arpeely, we use various signals often not used by traditional competitors to outperform the market and zero-down on high-intent and soon-to-be loyal users. For example, in advertising a mobile app, we predict, based on real-time conditions and user context, the user’s likelihood to make an in-app purchase many weeks into the future.

As for the ads themselves, gone are the days of simple banners; today’s ads are “mini products” that captivate and engage users. We employ a wide range of ad formats that go beyond industry standards. Our ads can be immersive videos, compelling messages, interactive experiences like mini-games or mini-apps, or even a multi-step mixture of all of the above. By integrating logic and interactivity, Arpeely enables users to engage with the ad content seamlessly and gauge user intent without leaving their main activity.

Our business model dictates that we don’t get paid if our advertiser doesn’t get paid. We like to say that our algorithms, like water, can trickle into hidden market opportunities missed by the rest of the industry that uses less granular tools. These and other capabilities make Arpeely a strategic partner in the challenging space of media and user acquisition.

Innovation at the edges of data science and engineering

Today, we handle millions of impressions per second and over a billion ML predictions daily. We are directly connected to seven of the world’s largest real-time bidding exchanges, including Google AdX. We also work very closely with our clients, ranging from prominent startups to companies in the S&P Top 20.

Daily, we tackle complex engineering and data challenges on multiple fronts. On the engineering side, we ensure that every real-time auction receives a lightning-fast response within a strict 150ms timeframe. On the data side, we fire multiple ML predictions per auction and ingest TBs of data daily. On the user-serving front, we serve A/B-tested assets across a long tail of geos and devices, with even the slightest fluctuations in load speeds affecting business dramatically.

Right from the start, we knew we couldn’t do it alone when it came to building our technology stack. When you look at available platforms, it’s clear Google Cloud has a robust architecture that is easy to manage, use and scale, especially for our use cases. They also have reliability and feature completeness which are critical in our line of business.

Under the hood

Building upon Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we run multiple services that handle our main bidding flows. We utilize Golang for services that run at a large scale and Python for when we prioritize development speed, community and readability. All of these can reach an immensely high scale, which is managed and monitored automatically in GKE. Communication between these services and our Redis (our Google Cloud partner) cluster happens in sub-millisecond latency over Google Cloud’s strong network infrastructure and enables us to run complex real-time logic for every impression.

Once we have tackled the actual bidding, we are left with the challenge of streaming our data into BigQuery for analytics and model training. We utilize a mix of Cloud Pub/Sub, Memorystore and Cloud Storage to create a mechanism capable of ingesting many TBs per day in near real-time without compromising on cost. Real-time data is critical for a company like Arpeely to test and reiterate at a fast pace.

BigQuery is our data warehouse for operational analysis and is an essential part of our business. We use it both as a warehouse, for large-scale computations and in an operational capacity that closes the loop between production, data, and ML retraining. A team of two or three people can manage petabytes at scale with minimal maintenance.

On top of these, we’ve built a state-of-the-art in-house model pipeline suited specifically for ad-tech industry purposes. It allows us to effectively deploy complex solutions — on-the-fly calibration, flexible conversion steps, sampling of heavily imbalanced data sets, adjusting weights, and A/B-tested model deployment and more.

Google Cloud also offers us an entry point for several very useful built-in products that have become deeply embedded in our daily stack and routine. Among them are Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver), Cloud Profiler, Cloud Storage, Cloud CDN, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Cloud Scheduler, Error Reporting, and more.

In addition to all the technology, there’s also a human touch. Google’s skilled Customer Success team possesses a unique blend of technical expertise and business acumen, acting as strategic advertisers and opening doors we did not know existed.

Opening the door to the future of advertising

Standardizing on Google Cloud enables us to focus our resources on innovation and growth. Instead of having to research business solutions and invest time integrating disparate technologies, we can tap into a wide range of Google Cloud tools as needed. Thus, it is crucial that we set up a good technological foundation and prepare for future growth of the business.

Google Cloud enables us to focus our resources on innovation rather than our infrastructure. This means we can put more effort into finding ways to match clients with high-value customers and grow their revenues. Even though online advertising has been around for over 20 years and pioneered by Google itself, Google Cloud gives us the impetus to disrupt the market and deliver greater levels of value to our customers today and in the future. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Check out the Redis listing on Google Cloud Marketplace. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Enterprises are struggling to make high quality data easily discoverable and accessible for analytics, across multiple silos, to a growing number of people and tools within their organization. They are often forced to make tradeoffs—to move and duplicate data across silos to enable diverse analytics use cases or leave their data distributed but limit the agility of decisions.  

Today we are excited to announce Dataplex, an intelligent data fabric that provides a way to centrally manage, monitor, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools.  

Dataplex provides an integrated analytics experience, bringing together the best of Google Cloud and open source tools, so you can rapidly curate, secure, integrate, and analyze data at scale. With built-in data intelligence using Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities and a flexible consumption model, you can now spend less time wrestling with infrastructure and more time focused on driving business outcomes.

Dataplex enables you to:

• Achieve freedom of choice to store data wherever you want for the right price/performance and choose the best analytics tools for the job, including Google Cloud and open source analytics technologies such as Apache Spark and Presto.
• Enforce consistent controls across your data to ensure unified security and governance
• Take advantage of the built-in data intelligence using Google’s best in class AI/ML capabilities to automate much of the manual toil around data management and get access to higher quality data.

Early customers like Equifax, Loblaw, and ANZ are excited about using Dataplex to address data management complexity.

“Dataplex will greatly simplify the existing analytics workflows within Equifax with its unified data fabric and single interface for policy management and governance across all our analytics data. Its built-in data discovery and data quality features will ensure that our data scientists and analysts always have access to high quality data that they can trust. Dataplex aligns well with our enterprise data strategy and we are excited to partner with Google Cloud on this.”
—Kumar Menon, SVP, Data Fabric & Decision Science Technology, Equifax.

“Loblaw is Canada’s food and pharmacy leader, and we are excited to be an early adopter of Dataplex. We could significantly benefit from Dataplex as it provides a single pane of glass for end-to-end data management and governance. We are particularly interested in improving platform resilience and data quality by detecting anomalies as early as possible in the data pipeline with the help of Dataplex.”
—Elton Martins, Senior Director of Data Insights & Analytics, Loblaw

“We are undergoing a major data transformation at ANZ, bringing together our various data assets and building a cohesive data ecosystem for customer benefit. Dataplex’s vision and capabilities align well with our current data strategy to build a unified data fabric for all our analytics and AI/ML use cases. We are excited to partner with GCP on Dataplex and test the product in private preview.”
—Ashish Shekhar, Head of Technology – Enterprise Analytics & Applied AI, ANZ 

Dataplex is built for distributed data. We are starting with data stored in Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery, with support for other data sources coming soon. It provides a workflow-driven experience helping you build an open data platform and make data easily accessible to your end users while ensuring your policies and best practices are consistently enforced.

Organizing and curating your data

One of the core tenets of Dataplex is letting you organize and manage your data in a way that makes sense for your business, without data movement or duplication. For that, we are providing logical constructs like lakes, data zones and assets. Those constructs enable you to abstract away the underlying storage systems and become the foundation for setting policies around data access, security, lifecycle management, and so on. 

For example, you can create a lake per department within your organization (Retail, Sales, Finance, etc.) and create data zones that map to data readiness and usage (landing, raw, curated_data_analytics, curated_data_science, etc.). 

Once you have your lakes and zones setup, you can now attach data to these zones as assets. You can add data from different types of storage (e.g. GCS Bucket and BigQuery dataset) under the same zone. You can also attach data across multiple projects under the same zone.

You can ingest data into your lakes and zones using the tools of your choice including services such as Dataflow, Data Fusion, Dataproc, Pub/Sub or choose from one of our partner products. Dataplex provides built-in 1-click templates for common data management tasks. 

Securing your data 

Dataplex enables you to define and enforce consistent policies across your data, irrespective of where it physically resides. Data owners can easily set up policies for specific data domains based on business needs, without thinking about where the data is stored while data stewards get global visibility into governance policies and permissions across their data. 

You can apply security and governance policies for your entire lake, a specific zone, or an asset. Dataplex maps the policies to the underlying storage and pushes down permissions to the storage layer to provide end-to-end secure data access. Additionally, you can secure not just data but also related artifacts like notebooks, scripts, and models using the same set of access policies.

Making high quality data available for analytics and data science

One of the biggest differentiators for Dataplex is our data intelligence capabilities using Google’s best in class AI/ML technologies.  As you bring the data under management, Dataplex will automatically harvest the metadata for both structured and unstructured data, with built-in data quality checks. All of the metadata is automatically registered in a unified metastore, and made available for search and discovery. It is also published to Bigquery, Dataproc Metastore, and Data Catalog – ensuring that you have the same consistent data context and access across your tools.

For example, when you write parquet files to a Google Cloud Storage bucket – Dataplex will automatically extract metadata of these files, detect a tabular schema, including hive-style partitions, run data quality checks, and make this data queryable in BigQuery as an external table and from any open source or partner application – with the same consistent security and access policies you defined at the logical data layer. 

Your data scientists and analysts now have secured access to this data that meets your quality bar and governance rules via the tools of their choice, without needing any additional processing.

One-click access to collaborative analytics

Dataplex provides fully managed, one-click analytics environments enabling you to use the power of Apache Spark and BigQuery with support for other engines coming in the future. 

As data administrators, you now have the flexibility to pre-configure these environments with the right cost and financial governance measures without taking on the overhead of managing and maintaining the infrastructure required to power these environments. You can easily configure different environments for different types of workloads and share it with multiple users using their IAM credentials. Dataplex manages the provisioning, monitoring, scaling, and shutdown of these environments. 

As data scientists, analysts, and engineers, you now have a turn-key experience to run your analysis using notebooks and a SQL workbench. You can search for notebooks and scripts alongside data, save and share your work with other users, and schedule your notebooks or scripts for recurring workloads – all using the same integrated experience within Dataplex.

Building an open platform with industry leaders

We are partnering with industry leaders such as Accenture, Collibra, Confluent, Informatica, HCL, Starburst, NVIDIA, Trifacta, and others to build an open platform to power analytics at scale. Our partners are excited about the capabilities that Dataplex will provide:

“Collibra is excited to partner with Dataplex to provide data governance and data quality for consistent controls across distributed data. Pairing Collibra’s multi-cloud and hybrid solution with Dataplex allows enterprises to securely open up access to more, higher quality data for users and analytics using a single unified view.”
—Jim Cushman, Chief Product Officer, Collibra

“Dataplex builds on Google Cloud’s commitment to open source by integrating with Apache Kafka®, a leading open source platform for event streaming. We at Confluent, the platform for data in motion that completes Apache Kafka® to be enterprise-ready, are excited to partner with Dataplex to enable customers to bring together distributed, real-time data and build a unified data fabric for end to end analytics.”
—Paul Mac Farland, VP, Head of Customer Solutions and Innovation, Confluent

“We are excited to partner with Google Cloud’s Dataplex team as we look to provide our joint customers an integrated and open data fabric for analytics at scale. Extending Dataplex’s data management and data quality capabilities with Starburst Enterprise will accelerate time to value for enterprises looking to connect distributed data without having to move data.”
—Justin Borgman, CEO and Co-founder, Starburst

Next Steps

Dataplex is now available in preview for a select number of customers. For more information, visit our website or watch the recording. If you would like to sign up, please click here.

With people expecting to access products and services through easy, always-on experiences delivered across channels, transforming approaches to digital services is a must for every business. As a result, business leaders have to strive to provide employees with these same frictionless experiences. 

Sopra Steria is a European leader in consulting, digital services and software development, with 46,000 employees in 25 countries that generated revenue of €4.3 billion in 2020. It provides end-to-end solutions that help customers drive their digital transformation to obtain tangible and sustainable benefits, by combining in-depth knowledge of a wide range of business sectors and innovative technologies.

To accomplish its goals, Sopra Steria planned to use conversational artificial intelligence as part of their strategy and began working closely with Google Cloud, Cisco, and Activeo. It believed that, by building out more advanced Virtual Agents for its customers to use to serve them, it could usher in a new era of frictionless experiences in the End-User support services.

“To address customer demands for office and business applications support services, we looked to integrate a new generation of virtual voice assistant into our platform,” says Xavier Leroux, CTO End User Services at Sopra Steria. “We did this using Google’s proven AI and integrated it with our Cisco Contact Center by Activeo.”

As many companies have learned, the need to provide customers with advanced experiences is directly attached to the services offered to their employees. By providing more contextual information and other forms of digital support to staff, those same team members will be better positioned to serve customers.

Solving a complex problem with ease

Sopra Steria sought to solve several challenges for its customers, enabling them to:

• Provide all their employees with seamless, quick access to IT and business support,
• Offer 24/7 phone support capabilities for employees,
• Make services easily deployable, flexible, agile, and available in multiple languages,
• Reduce costs associated with delivering better support services.

Sopra Steria chose Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI), built by Google Cloud and Cisco, as the best option to achieve its vision. Google Cloud CCAI is currently used in some of the world’s largest call centers, building on Google’s expertise in natural language processing.

Sopra Steria implemented CCAI as its new Virtual Assistant on phone channels managed by a Cisco telephony solution, and used Activeo for its integration and implementation support.

The new Virtual Assistant allows Sopra Steria clients to qualify employee requests and direct them to the right agent based on Natural Language Understanding while offering self-service options for basic requests such as password resets. These Virtual Assistants also fully automate complex incident tickets creation in synchronization within the IT service management system.

Google Cloud CCAI covers three main use cases:

1. Autonomously handles full-length conversations using natural language,
2. Augments operator support through contextual assistance through a desktop application based on live conversation analysis,
3. Semantic analysis of all audio and text conversations processed by customer service through Google Cloud machine learning.

Cisco provides native integration of CCAI within its Cisco Contact Center solution as a part of its global partnership with Google Cloud.

“The work we have done with Google Cloud has allowed Sopra Steria to create innovative and personalized conversational services to enhance both employee satisfaction and operator productivity without sacrificing security,” says Christian Laloy, EMEA Contact Center Sales Specialist at Cisco.

Unlocking new, more powerful contact center experiences

Since standing up the new CCAI solution, Sopra Steria has been able to enhance its service catalog through Virtual Assistants. The offering has generated immense interest among existing and new Sopra Steria clients because it can simultaneously reduce average waiting and handling and resolution times while dramatically decreasing service costs.

“The Virtual Assistant serves both the user and operator alike,” says Xavier Leroux. “The user gets a conversational experience like no other and a seamless journey to resolve their requests. With Google Cloud, Cisco and Activeo, we have increased operator efficiency, so they can focus more on adding value to every business interaction.”