Microsoft ‘Promptions’ fix AI prompts failing to deliver
Microsoft’s Promptions is an open-source UI framework designed to address a growing frustration in human AI interaction: users repeatedly refining prompts because AI responses fail to match their true intent. This trial-and-error loop drains time and energy, turning AI from a productivity booster into a cognitive burden for knowledge workers.
While much public discussion focuses on AI generating text or images, Microsoft highlights that a major enterprise use case is comprehension asking AI to explain, clarify, or teach complex material. Different users often need entirely different explanations of the same content depending on their role, expertise, and goals, yet traditional chat interfaces struggle to capture this nuance. As a result, users must write long, carefully engineered prompts just to get a usable answer.
Promptions (prompt + options) shifts AI interaction from free-form text to guided intent selection . Instead of typing detailed instructions, users are presented with dynamic, clickable options such as explanation depth, tone, learning objective, or response format generated in real time based on conversation history. This middleware approach helps align AI responses more closely with what users actually want, reducing friction and misunderstanding.
Microsoft’s research shows that these dynamic controls significantly reduce the effort of prompt engineering and allow users to focus more on understanding content rather than managing how they ask questions. Participants found that the interface encouraged clearer thinking about goals and improved efficiency across tasks.
However, the system introduces trade-offs. While flexible and powerful, some users found the controls harder to interpret, noting that the effect of a selected option wasn’t always obvious until after the response appeared. This highlights a key challenge in human–AI design: balancing adaptability with transparency and minimizing the learning curve.
From a technical and governance perspective, Promptions is intentionally lightweight and stateless, meaning it doesn’t store data between sessions. This simplifies implementation and reduces security and data governance risks, making it attractive for enterprise environments.
Overall, Promptions represents a shift from “prompt engineering” to “prompt selection”, offering a new design pattern for more consistent, reliable, and scalable AI use across organisations. Microsoft does not position it as a complete fix for AI shortcomings, but as a framework to improve trust, clarity, and efficiency in ongoing human AI relationships .
