Two Part Series: To unlock AI’s real power, you need a strategy that refines and improves results through iteration. That’s exactly what this two-part article series will show you.

📌 Part 1: Going DEEP with AI—Learn how small businesses can get high-impact AI results using the DEEP method (Define, Expand, Evolve, Perfect). Discover real-world examples of how AI can improve sales, customer service, marketing, and research through structured prompting. Read here

📌 Part 2: Backstage of Going DEEP with AI—Go behind the scenes and see exactly how we built the first article using AI, including the precise prompts, refinements, and lessons learned. – This Article.

Series Index can be found at: Why Your AI Isn’t Delivering the Results You Need—And How to Fix It (2-Part Series) – ITProGuru Blog

Why I Used AI to Write “Going DEEP with AI”

AI is a powerful tool—but only if you know how to use it effectively. To prove just how impactful iterative AI prompting can be, I created the entire ‘Going DEEP with AI’ article using AI. This article pulls back the curtain on that process, showing step-by-step how AI refined my ideas into a polished, high-value resource.

For contrast, this behind-the-scenes breakdown was written without AI to highlight how human oversight and strategic guidance make AI-generated content significantly better.

Step 1: Teaching AI About Me and My Business

Before creating the article, I made sure ChatGPT had extensive knowledge of my business and writing style. Since I use a professional ChatGPT profile, it already “knows” a lot about me because I’ve trained it over time. When I ask “Please show me what you know about me and my business and writing style,” it generates pages of detailed information.

This iterative coaching process has led AI to understand:

• Personal and business information
• Projects I am working on/have worked on, including domains associated with each project
• Business offerings and costs
• Discounts I offer (e.g., veteran-owned businesses get 10%, woman-owned businesses get 10%, and startups get 30%)
• My communication & interaction style:
  • Team-oriented and collaborative (prefers “we” over “I”)
  • Coaching-oriented approach, providing guidance, mentorship, and strategic insights
  • Prioritizes grammar accuracy, clarity, and simplicity
  • Empowering clients through a mentorship-driven communication style

I like to think of AI as a new team of employees—a diverse and knowledgeable workforce that can assist in research, writing, strategy, and more. The more I coach my AI team, the better it supports my business.

Step 2: The Prompts That Built the Article

Here are the exact prompts I used to create ‘Going DEEP with AI’ and how they evolved over time:

1. Define Opening Prompt
   “Article Going DEEP with AI for small businesses and individuals. It is a two-page spot, approximately 1000 words. Could you help me draft an article that would be interesting and teach small businesses about using iterative AI prompts and the power of improving outcomes through iterations? Start with a pain point on getting less than desirable results from AI. Include a call to action and contact information for helping their business get started or improve customer or employee satisfaction using AI.”
2. Expand
   “In the call to action, add points: consulting on how AI can help your business, training on how to leverage AI for you as a professional, training your team to collectively experience the power of AI.”
3. Evolve
   “Please provide more examples. Include using AI for Research. Please add employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and more context to ROI.”
4. Expand
   “Please provide more examples. Include using AI for Research and creating a sales plan. Add an example of creating a sales plan for a small business, provide what initial prompts might be and how to drill down to make them more impactful. Show how setting key factors about the target market, location, products, and services can greatly improve the results. Please add employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and more context to ROI.”
5. Evolve:
   “Please add a section before ‘Ready’… Prompts to create this article, and show the prompts used to create this article.”
   OOPS! AI did not understand this request the way I intended, so I got no meaningful information back. Instead of iterating, I decided to write this breakdown manually. I have used this approach in the past, and it worked, but I didn’t want to keep iterating since I already had the prompts from the conversation.
6. Perfect:
   “Please create a somewhat polished image for the article.”
   OOPS! AI often fails miserably on the first attempt at an image. However, for this article, the first image it gave me was the one I used. I share this as an “oops” because it is not the norm. Perhaps AI is learning what I want? Or maybe including the word “polished” made a difference?
7. Publish:
   I then copied the article into Microsoft Word, tweaked the formatting to add H1 and H2 headers, and inserted the image where I wanted it.

AI Challenges and Lessons Learned

Throughout this process, I encountered a few AI quirks:

• AI misunderstood my request to list the prompts—I had to manually document them instead.
• The AI-generated image worked on the first attempt, which is rare—usually, it takes multiple refinements.
• AI can be unpredictable—sometimes small wording changes (like “polished image”) significantly impact results.

The key takeaway? AI is only as powerful as the guidance it receives.

What This Means for You

This process proves that AI isn’t a one-shot tool—it’s a team of digital collaborators. By using iterative prompting and refining AI’s outputs, small businesses can dramatically improve:

• Marketing & content creation
• Customer service responses
• Research & competitive analysis
• Sales strategies
• Employee productivity & satisfaction

If you’re struggling with AI-generated responses, don’t settle—expand, evolve, perfect through iteration! Keep refining your prompts, add details, and treat AI as a collaborative team rather than a simple tool.

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Index of the series can be found at: Why Your AI Isn’t Delivering the Results You Need—And How to Fix It (2-Part Series) – ITProGuru Blog

Free AI Training: Struggling to get meaningful results from AI? Join our FREE online training on April 16 at 3:00 PM EDT and learn how to refine AI outputs for maximum impact. Don’t miss this opportunity to take your AI skills to the next level! In this training we will walk through the creation of this post via AI.
📅 Reserve your spot now: Register here

Dan Stolts Chief Innovation Officer – jIT Solutions
📱 Office: 508-947-1478 🌐 jitsolutionsit.com

If you’re ready to master AI for your business, let’s talk! We offer:

• Consulting on how AI can help your business
• Training on how to leverage AI as a professional
• Training your team to collectively experience the power of AI