Second Edition · Now Available in Paperback
Talking to AI
The Subtle Art of Prompting Any AI
AI is everywhere. Great results are not. The difference between a mediocre AI response and a brilliant one is not the AI. It is the prompt.
This book gives you the exact techniques, templates, and patterns to get dramatically better results from any AI tool you use, whether you are drafting an email, building a product, planning a lesson, or creating something new.
Why this book exists
When I wrote the first edition of Talking to AI in 2023, most people had not heard the phrase “prompt engineering.” By 2026, everyone is using AI. But most are barely scratching the surface of what it can do.
The gap between a mediocre AI response and a brilliant one is not about the tool. It is about the prompt. And prompting is a skill. Not a complicated one, but a real one. And like any skill, there is a way to learn it fast, a way that works, and a way that gets you better results almost immediately.
That is what this book teaches you.
What is inside
14 chapters across 4 parts. Every chapter has real prompts you can try and real AI responses you can compare against.
Part 1 · The World Now
- The Current AI Landscape. Where AI actually is today, what changed in three years, and why prompting matters more than ever.
- How AI Actually Thinks. Tokens, context windows, temperature, hallucinations, context compression. The only technical chapter in the book, and the one that makes everything else click.
Part 2 · Prompting That Works
- The Anatomy of a Great Prompt. The five building blocks that underlie every named framework you will ever encounter.
- Techniques That Actually Make a Difference. Chain-of-thought, few-shot prompting, meta-prompting, self-verification, structured outputs, and more.
- Prompting Different Types of AI. Image generation, code, voice, video, and multimodal prompting.
Part 3 · How People Are Actually Using AI
- AI for Your Career and Daily Life. Emails, summarisation, personal learning, interview prep, professional communication.
- Building AI into Your Daily Workflow. The three-phase rhythm that power users follow every day.
- AI for Business and Making Money. Solopreneurs, small and medium businesses, marketing, customer support, growth.
- AI for Students, Teachers, and Lifelong Learners. Socratic tutoring, lesson planning, study strategies, avoiding the pitfalls.
- AI for Creative Work. Writers, artists, designers, musicians, and the craft of using AI as a collaborator without losing your voice.
Part 4 · The Edge
- Agents and Agentic AI. The next frontier. What makes an agent different from a chatbot, and how to actually get value from them.
- Prompt Security. Injections, jailbreaks, and how to defend your AI when it connects to your tools, data, and credentials.
- The Token Economy. Why prompts have economics, how output tokens can cost 4 to 10 times more than input, and how to cut your AI bill by 70 to 80 percent.
- The Road Ahead. What is coming next in AI, and how to stay ahead of it.
Who this book is for
- Professionals who want to multiply their productivity without becoming programmers.
- Students and teachers who want AI as a tutor, a research partner, or a lesson planner.
- Entrepreneurs and founders who need AI to compete with much larger teams.
- Creative professionals, writers, artists, designers, musicians, who want AI as a genuine collaborator rather than a replacement.
- Anyone tired of generic AI responses who wants to actually unlock what these tools can do.
No computer science background is required. No hand-holding on “what is AI” either.
What makes this book different
- Practical over theoretical. Every concept is demonstrated with a real prompt and a real AI response.
- 80+ copy-paste prompt templates you can use immediately, covering career, business, learning, and creative work.
- Covers every AI modality, not just text. Image generation, code, voice, video, and multimodal prompting.
- Prompt security included. Most prompting books ignore defenses. This one does not.
- Companion prompt library built into this website. Every chapter ends with a QR code. Scan it, and you get every prompt from that chapter ready to copy.
- Written for a global and especially Indian audience. Real examples, real contexts, and costs in both rupees and dollars.
Companion resources
Every chapter of the book ends with a QR code that takes you to a chapter-specific page on this site. Scan it, and you get every prompt from that chapter with a copy-to-clipboard button next to it. No typing, no mistakes, no reformatting.
Ready to stop guessing?
Talking to AI, Second Edition is available in paperback.