Prompt attention!

What’s the difference between a prompt and a promptbook?

In the last week or so, I’ve been talking to customers about Copilot for Security. One thing I quickly discovered is that people seem to be using the term “prompt” and “promptbook” interchangeably even though they are two different things.

It reminds me of when we first introduced Microsoft Sentinel and had playbooks and workbooks and notebooks (oh my!).

I’m not sure why as humans we have to come up with fancy new terms for things that already have names (upskilling anyone?). But since I’m unlikely to change this phenomenon, maybe I can help provide some clarity on the prompt vs promptbooks matter.

In the world or artificial intelligence, a prompt is the phrase you input into your AI in order to retrieve the information that you want. This can be a question, a request or a combination of the two.

I’ll use the example of ordering in a restaurant. When the server comes to your table, you can interact with that person in several ways.

You could say:

• “Tell me about today’s specials” – a request

• “Can you tell me if the pasta special contains dairy?” – a question

• “Can you tell me about the specials? If any of them have dairy, please let me know because I’m allergic” – a combination of the two

When we’re talking about Copilot for Security, a promptbook is defined as “a collection of prompts that have been grouped together to accomplish a specific security-related task”.  It’s a series of questions and/or requests that can get you the information that you want.

When you’re working on an incident, you could feed Copilot for Security a series of individual prompts.

• Tell me about incident 1234

• List the alerts in that incident

• Tell me about the accounts listed in that incident

But if you have a system for working an incident that contains a series of steps, wouldn’t it be better and faster to group them all together instead of asking each question individually?

We’re all learning this new language together, so I hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion. More to come soon.