PMI guidance on prompts and prompt engineering states that prompts "supply the system with context and guidance as well as constraints," and that the value of a GenAI system "can only be realized through the instructions provided to it." PMI further explains that while an AI system can respond to very short inputs,
"the less specific a prompt, the more likely the results will be vague or unhelpful," explicitly linking insufficient specificity/context to degraded usefulness. In PMI's recommended "diverge and converge" prompt approach, teams begin broad, then progressively refine, adding details such as industry, region, project type, intended use, and examples-because "the granularity of the input will be directly proportional to the utility of the output received." Therefore, if the team provides insufficient context, the model must "guess" what is intended, which most directly manifests as answers that are not aligned to the actual task needs (i.e., lacking relevance), rather than being more accurate or more efficient.