An interview with Ian Clark, our Director of Operations, to discuss Differly's popular proprietary AI tool Prompt Throwdown. Currently in beta, Prompt Throwdown is part of our Fundamentals of AI workshop, and we plan to expand Prompt Throwdown into further utility for teams in 2026.
Q. Can you start by explaining to me in the simplest terms what a Prompt Throwdown is?
A. Prompt Throwdown is a fun group challenge where everyone can practice their prompting skills* to win. The Prompt Throwdown challenges come in different flavours, but usually they involve generating images because this is more likely to result in hilarity while also providing everyone with clear feedback on what is effective or ineffective about their prompts. The most basic Prompt Throwdown involves everyone trying to reproduce an example image. This requires detailed prompting of content, style, composition, and ‘negative prompting’ like what you don’t want to see in the image. It teaches the basic best practices of AI prompting: clarity, specificity, context, and constraints.
*Prompting skills refer to writing for an LLM, or ‘prompting’ the platform in order to get it to complete a task for you.
Q. What do you think the benefits of doing a Prompt Throwdown with your team are?
Firstly, I have to say it’s quite fun, so regardless of the AI learning opportunity, it’s simply a great team exercise. The other main benefit is the opportunity to practice using AI in a setting where you can experiment and learn from others without any pressure.
The saying goes, “you have to use AI to get good at using AI”. We find that typically 20%to 30% of staff in an organization use AI regularly enough to have developed skills and experience to use it effectively. This means not only knowing best practices, but much more importantly developing intuitions about when AI may be useful for a problem, what approaches may work well, what approaches probably won’t work well, how to fix an AI conversation that has gone off the rails, and, very importantly, how to anticipate and handle mistakes or hallucinations.
These are skills that come with regular, repeated experience. It’s the difference between studying the rules of a game and actually playing the game a few times per week. All indications suggest that the successful teams of tomorrow will have to be good at using AI, and playing the game is a great beginning.
Q. Do you need to know anything about AI before doing a Prompt Throwdown? What about the person who is administering the Prompt Throwdown?
Not at all! For most challenges, all you have to do is describe what you want to create. If you have limited experience (which is still most people), you will learn very quickly what works well and what doesn’t work well. You can see how other people are getting better results than you, discuss how they did it, and learn very rapidly. It’s an excellent tool for going from “zero” to “capable” in a short period of time.
The host doesn’t necessarily need to know anything about AI, but it’s best if they are familiar with prompting basics to at least be able to facilitate a group discussion about why certain approaches may be working better than others.
Q. Prompt Throwdown is typically used as part of our Fundamentals of AI workshop. Could you give me an example of how it could live alone outside the workshop?
The best use is to have a quick Prompt Throwdown at the start of a regular meeting to break the ice, have some laughs and encourage a bit of practice. You could also have a regular drop-in session online: it works equally well in a virtual meeting as it does in-person. I would also try to host one asynchronously: start a throwdown at the beginning of the day, let people submit throughout the day, and then move on to the results at the end of the day. You can use an internal chat channel to coordinate.
Q. What kind of functional utility can a team gain from doing a Prompt Throwdown?
At Differly we talk about the Fundamental Five: Planning, Problem Solving, Findings, Creating and Converting. Most of the asks that can be extremely helpful to people in technical, administrative, or leadership roles fit into these five categories.
Even the most regular AI users in an organization are typically only doing one or two of these at most. Participating in Prompt Throwdowns not only gets everyone up to a basic level of skill in using AI assistants, but we also have Throwdowns in development that will allow people to practice tasks across all of these categories.
Functionally this means teams that are faster and more effective at planning future initiatives, getting past problems that they are stuck on, finding the information they need, creating work outputs, and not wasting time manually processing data when there are faster options available.
Q. What could you expect if you were a participant of a Prompt Throwdown?
You can expect a fun, creative and low-pressure challenge that results in much hilarity and even more “ah-ha!” moments as you develop both your skills in prompting and your intuitions about working effectively with AI tools.
Q. How can I use Prompt Throwdown?
Right now, Prompt Throwdown is only available to members of our full and half-day workshops on the Fundamentals of AI. Prompt Throwdown can be used in a few different iterations during the workshop. Differly is planning on expanding Prompt Throwdown to be used for teams and workplaces outside the Fundamentals of AI workshop. Stay tuned!
Holly is a seasoned marketing, digital and business strategist with 20 years of experience. With strong roots in the sports industry and business, she has helped many organizations increase their ability to leverage digital strategies and technology to greatly improve customer/fan experience and operational efficiency.
She has worked with notable clients such as the Tour de France, IRONMAN, lululemon, Backroads, and United Way, as well as with national and international sports federations.Holly also has deep roots and experience helping founders with their go-to-market plans and preparing to scale. She has worked with startups in the Cannabis, Psilocybin, CPG and tech industries working on growth, customer experience and business planning.
Holly sits on the board of Biathlon Alberta as the PR and Marketing lead. She also holds a BPE from the University of Alberta in Sport Management.
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