Best practices for building a prompt library

As many employees use GenAI platforms to find the right answers to tech and business conundrums, some of their colleagues see value in collecting the right questions.

Three IT professionals shared what they learned after implementing prompt libraries for their organizations. Whether adding 50 new prompts in one month like West Monroe’s Reva Busby, or stopping at around five like PR-firm pro Emily Koehn, a collection of go-to chatbot inputs offers a helpful head start for a variety of tasks within an organization.

“I think a prompt library is important because it allows the use of AI to scale faster,” Busby, director of the commercial growth team at business and technology consulting firm West Monroe, told IT Brew. “You are getting pre-built and well-engineered prompts that you can use right off the bat, without having to have all that knowledge about building a prompt yourself.”

For consultants. In 2023, West Monroe introduced Nigel, an internal chat platform assisting the company’s 2,000 employees with tasks like drafting emails, writing code, and analyzing datasets.

The platform holds a library of 278 prompts, and has about 12,000 all-time uses (and 8,000 just in 2025), according to data shared by WM.

While Busby did not reveal exact prompts, the director said one prompt for generating a sales email includes case-specific factors for the user to input, including: background information about a client, tone, and output format.

While some prompts may be a sentence long, Busby said, others related to sales or consultant teams are “robust” and may require lots of extra details “because you’re trying to execute a very specific workflow in the context of some repeatable service.”

Busby uses a specific prompt when organizing notes after a candidate interview—one that pulls data like job role, notes, and feedback into desired table formats.

For marketers. For Koehn, PR account director at Crackle PR, the prompt library is a smaller guide for the nine or so full-time employees using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. Prompts exist for main categories like:

• Writing press releases
• Collecting interview questions
• Writing blogs or articles
• Research and summarizing

For prompts, Koehn relies on a “RACE” framework from analytics consulting firm Trust Insights, which factors role, action, context, and execution into the prompts. One helpful prompt for Koehn, she said, pulls the most headline-worthy findings from an uploaded client report.

“Now that gives me a fantastic starting point in minutes,” Koehn said. “Do I still go through every single tab of data and verify that AI didn’t hallucinate? Absolutely. Do I still look at the data to make sure that AI didn’t miss any things that are really significant or interesting? Absolutely.”

Who’s in? A report from the US Chamber of Commerce, which polled over 3,800 businesses in June 2025, found that 58% of small businesses (250 or fewer employees) use GenAI—up from 40% in 2024 and more than double compared to 2023 (23%).

Generative AI is also popular with the companies who are investing heavily in creating it. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed some favorite prompts recently on LinkedIn, including “Based on my prior interactions with [/person], give me 5 things likely top of mind for our next meeting.”

Recommendation #1. Stay organized.

West Monroe’s library, built “from scratch,” according to Busby, organizes prompts by topics (productivity and performance management, for example) and job role (like sales). A search bar gives employees suggestions for helpful inputs, and prompts can also be ranked and sorted by usage and popularity, Reva said; employees can pin their favorites.

“You need to be able to narrow down quickly to what’s relevant to you,” Busby said.

Recommendation #2. Get everyone involved.

When West Monroe’s Nigel came online, the team noticed a trend: a few people were writing all the prompts. Busby stressed the importance of letting employees “cocreate” on prompts; the firm has even recently offered a prompt-building “wizard” for the non-experts.

As long as a prompt doesn’t include a restricted topic like financials and compensation, Busby noted in a follow-up email to IT Brew, it will appear in the library, and employees can offer ideas and commentary to the prompt author. (The company also highlights standout prompts each month on the company’s homepage, Busby told us.)

How to deal with imperfect prompts. Brady Lewis, senior director of AI innovation at marketing consultancy Marketri, has led the refinement of a prompt library that he says has reached 150 full prompts.

Lewis also meets every Monday with a six-person, cross-department AI council to investigate any problems with deployment, and to review new prompts for vague or otherwise troubling results.

And some prompts require…more prompts. Lewis advises employees with frustrating results to copy the output that does work and try a new LLM (or start over with the same one) “to reframe the question.”

Lewis also has a collection—a small library if you will—of 10 or so prompt blocks. These little promptlets can aid in the construction of new prompts: “I want this formatted specifically in a CSV table format,” for example.

It’s a challenge, Lewis admits—balancing continuous education while not trying to “bombard the employees” with hours of training.

“We can’t control every single aspect of what every single employee does at all times. We’re trying to provide as many guardrails and make things as easy as possible,” Lewis said.