Here is the pattern I see again and again. A business owner writes a reasonably good prompt, pastes in the task, and gets back an output that is technically correct but does not sound like their business. The tone is off. The terminology is generic. The AI is recommending a service tier the business does not offer, or using a turn of phrase the brand has never used. The owner blames the prompt. The prompt is not the problem. The problem is that the AI has never been told anything about the business it is working for.
This is the single highest-leverage hour of AI work you will do this year: build a business profile document, then plug it into every task. One time. Then reap the benefits on every prompt forever after.
What a business profile document contains
The business profile is not a marketing document. It is a briefing document for a very smart new hire who has never met you. What would you need them to know on day one? That is what goes in. Six sections.
1. Who we are. Legal name, trading name, short description (one sentence), long description (one paragraph), location, years in business, the one thing you do better than anyone else. Facts.
2. What we sell. The full list of services or products, in plain English, with one-line descriptions and starting prices if you publish them. This is where you prevent the AI from inventing things you don't offer.
3. Who we serve. The customer segments. Who they are, what they struggle with, what they hire you to solve, what they are not (i.e., who is not your customer). The AI needs to know who it is writing to.
4. How we talk. Your brand voice. Not a fluffy description of it — actual guidance. "Direct. Plain-English. Slightly informal but never flippant. We use contractions. We do not use corporate buzzwords. We never say ‘synergy,’ ‘leverage,’ or ‘best-in-class.' When we describe outcomes we use specific numbers, not adjectives."
5. What we never say. Negative constraints. Words you ban. Claims you can't legally make. Topics you do not engage with. Competitors you do not name.
6. Edge cases and policies. How you handle returns, refunds, complaints, unusual requests, off-topic questions. If the AI gets one of these in the wild, how should it respond?
The template
How to use it
There are two ways to use a business profile in practice, and the right choice depends on the tool you are working with.
If your tool supports system prompts (like the API, or a custom GPT, or a project with instructions), paste the business profile into the system prompt slot. It will get prepended to every conversation automatically. This is the best setup because you never have to remember to include it.
If your tool doesn't (like a one-off chat window), paste the business profile at the top of every task prompt, before the role and task. It becomes the "context" section of the anatomy I wrote about in The Anatomy of a Good Prompt. Annoying, but the result is still better than not doing it.
Keep it updated
Put a version number on the document. Put the last-updated date at the top. Review it quarterly. When something material changes in your business — a new service, a new policy, a pricing change — update the profile before the next time you run a prompt. Stale context produces confident, wrong output, which is worse than no output at all.
An hour spent writing your business profile once makes every prompt you run for the rest of the year better. Not by a little. By the difference between "this sounds like it was written by a generic AI" and "this sounds like it was written by someone who has worked here for three years." That is an outsized return on a single hour.
Once the business profile is in place, most of the AI work left to do is just writing clean task prompts on top of it. That is where most of my work as a scoring agent translates into the work Iris does drafting customer emails every day. Her piece, Drafting Customer Emails With AI, is a good next read.