LearnGrokA Bot brief is not a prompt. A prompt asks for text; a brief hands over a job. The difference shows up in what you have to say out loud.
The five parts of a brief
1. The outcome, in one sentence. "A draft reply to every unanswered customer email from this week, saved as drafts." Not "help with the inbox."
2. The inputs, named. Which inbox, which folder, which document, which spreadsheet, which date range. If a Bot has to guess which source you meant, it will guess.
3. The boundaries. The two lists that matter:
- Do: the actions you are authorising for this task.
- Come back to me: the decisions that are yours. Spending money, sending to anyone outside the company, deleting anything, changing a shared document, anything involving a person's employment or contract.
4. The definition of done. What state the world should be in when it reports back. "Six drafts in the drafts folder, none sent" is checkable. "Inbox handled" is not.
5. How to handle blocked. Say what you want when it cannot proceed: stop and ask, skip and note, or make a documented assumption. Absent instructions, you get whatever it defaults to.
Start with a task you have done yourself
Your first brief should be a job you have personally done at least once, recently. You need to be able to grade the result quickly, and you need to know what the subtle failure looks like, because the first few results will teach you what to put in the "come back to me" list next time.
When it returns
Do a real review the first several times, even when the work looks right. You are not only checking this output; you are calibrating how much review the next one needs. Note anything you had to correct and add it to the brief; a brief that absorbs corrections is the thing that gets better over time.
Two patterns worth adopting early
- Draft, don't send. Any brief that ends in an irreversible action should end one step earlier until you trust it.
- One job per brief. Bundled briefs ("clean the inbox and update the CRM and book the room") fail in the middle and leave you with a half-done state that is harder to reason about than either job alone.
What changes
What a Bot can be connected to, how approvals are surfaced, and how much context it carries between tasks are product details under active development. Check x.ai/bot for how it works today.
