Artificial intelligence has become part of everyday business operations. Yet while much of the conversation focuses on the capabilities of AI models themselves, the quality of the results often depends on something far simpler: asking the right questions.
At Diligencia, we are expanding our use of AI through structured prompt engineering techniques that help us generate clearer, safer and more consistent outputs. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for expertise, we use it as an accelerator for our specialists - helping them analyse information faster, expand our database coverage, enhance quality control and deliver greater value to our clients.
Table of contents
Prompt engineering: A practical approach
Better AI starts with better instructions
Delivering practical benefits across the business
Better economics, better governance
AI that supports expertise
Prompt engineering is the process of designing clear instructions that enable AI tools to produce reliable and useful responses. Effective prompts go beyond asking a simple question. They provide the AI with context, define the objective, specify constraints, and describe exactly what a successful outcome should look like.
At Diligencia, our teams work to a straightforward framework:
Define the task.
Provide the necessary context.
Specify the required output.
This simple structure significantly improves the consistency and quality of AI-assisted work. Whether planning technical work, reviewing product issues or analysing complex business information, structured prompting reduces ambiguity and produces more dependable first drafts.
Our prompt engineering approach focuses on three core principles
1. Clearer direction
The more context AI receives, the better the outcome.
Our prompts include relevant business background, examples, priorities, formatting requirements and audience expectations.
2. Safer decision-making
Many of the activities supported by Diligencia involve commercial risk, regulatory considerations and enable customer decision-making.
For these scenarios, our prompts encourage AI to distinguish between facts and assumptions, identify missing information, highlight potential risks, and explain areas of uncertainty before proposing conclusions.
This creates an additional layer of quality control and helps ensure that AI supports informed judgement rather than replacing it.
3. Repeatable workflows
One of the greatest benefits of prompt engineering is repeatability.
Rather than creating prompts from scratch every time, we are developing reusable workflows for common activities, including:
Prompt engineering is already improving several areas of Diligencia's operations and I’ve included some examples below:
Faster technical deliveryInfrastructure improvements that previously required lengthy planning exercises can now be assessed far more quickly, allowing engineers to focus on implementation while maintaining appropriate technical oversight.
For example, when planning an upgrade to a more scalable architecture, AI tools helped the team rapidly assess design options, identify likely bottlenecks, highlight migration risks and shape a practical implementation approach. With engineers remaining in control of the final decisions, this human-in-the-loop process enabled the infrastructure upgrade to be assessed, validated and progressed within one hour.
Operational and cloud cost optimisation
Structured prompts also support more effective reviews of cloud infrastructure, operational efficiency and spend management.
As a cloud-first organisation, our product and data teams rely on cloud infrastructure to deliver scalable, resilient services. AI-assisted reviews help us analyse resource utilisation across our environments and identify where capacity should be increased to meet demand, where unused or underused resources can be safely reduced, and where costs can be improved through reserved capacity commitments, better resource grouping, automated scaling policies and more efficient workload configurations.
This gives teams clearer evidence for infrastructure decisions, helping us maintain performance and reliability while keeping technology investments efficient as our platforms continue to grow.
Improving data quality
High-quality data is fundamental to Diligencia’s products and to the confidence our customers place in our intelligence.
AI-assisted analysis helps our Product and Data teams monitor large volumes of entity data more effectively, identifying anomalies, inconsistencies and potential quality issues that would be difficult to detect manually.
Examples include detecting duplicate organisation and person records, identifying incomplete or incorrect entity matches, highlighting missing or inconsistent attributes, and flagging unusual processing patterns or validation failures.
By surfacing these issues earlier, AI enables teams to apply targeted data fixes, improve matching accuracy and maintain a more complete, trusted dataset for customers.
Structured prompt engineering also improves the economics of AI adoption.
Higher-quality prompts reduce unnecessary retries, minimise wasted AI usage and improve consistency between teams.
At the same time, reducing unnecessary AI interactions lowers computational demand, contributing to more responsible technology use through lower execution time and reduced energy consumption.
Equally important, structured prompting supports stronger governance by making AI-assisted processes more transparent, repeatable and easier to review.
For Diligencia, AI is not about replacing people or automating judgement.
It is about enabling our experts to work more effectively by combining trusted human expertise with carefully designed AI workflows.
Prompt engineering helps our teams spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time applying their knowledge to solving customer challenges, improving products and delivering meaningful business insight.
As AI technologies continue to evolve, Diligencia will continue investing in practical, responsible approaches that strengthen product development, enhance operational efficiency and deliver better outcomes for our clients.
Due diligence and corporate intelligence in MEA
Diligencia helps customers from around the world to find essential information on organisations registered in Africa and the wider Middle East, drawing on primary sources that are otherwise hard to find. Using our curated data, we enable our clients to effectively manage their compliance obligations, allowing them to continuously monitor their suppliers and counterparty risks in the MEA region. Its proprietary database, available via ClarifiedBy and API, provides instant access to trusted legal entity data across MEA.