The Analyst's AI Prompt Playbook
If you’re already using AI in your investigations, you’ve probably felt it: generic prompts, inconsistent answers, and that nagging worry: “What did it just make up?” The Analyst’s AI Prompt Playbook was built to fix exactly that. It’s a practical, operations-ready handbook that shows analysts how to use AI as an accurate, defensible, and ethical force multiplier for OSINT and not as an unreliable oracle.
This playbook provides a comprehensive framework for conducting serious analytical work. You’ll start with core skills: how to structure prompts with clear roles, objectives, constraints, and output formats; how to practice “prompt hygiene” to reduce bias and speculation; and how to systematically request uncertainty levels, evidence chains, and alternative explanations. You’ll also learn how to bake in safety guardrails, so every prompt reinforces legality, privacy, and professional responsibility, instead of quietly drifting over red lines.
From there, the playbook transitions into real-world OSINT domains, providing prompts and examples that you can copy, adapt, and integrate directly into your workflow. You’ll get targeted patterns for AI detection (text and media), image intelligence, Telegram/social/messaging threat actors, metadata extraction and reconstruction, PII brainstorming and identifier mapping, trend and demographic resource discovery, data cleaning and deduplication, threat assessments, corporate research, risk analysis, and building better queries for tools like Google, Shodan, and Censys. Every domain includes “analyst considerations,” so you understand not just what to ask the AI, but how to interpret and verify what it gives you.
For teams and advanced practitioners, the playbook includes specialized modules that go beyond basic prompting. Learn how to approach cross-platform identity resolution in a way that focuses on indicators rather than guesses. Utilize AI to summarize dark web ecosystems using only lawful, publicly available sources. Build multilingual and cross-cultural workflows with explicit uncertainty limits. Red-team your own prompts to expose hallucination risk and bias. Design automation-friendly prompt chains for repeated tasks, all while keeping human verification at the center of every decision.
The Analyst’s AI Prompt Playbook also supports the unglamorous, but absolutely critical, parts of intelligence work: documentation, reporting, and compliance. You’ll get ready-made prompt formats for intelligence reports, case summaries, timelines, comparison tables, metadata sheets, corporate profiles, lead maps, and more. Appendix A provides output format templates to ensure your AI responses are presented in investigation-ready structures, rather than messy paragraphs. Appendix B adds a practical compliance and legal checklist, pre-prompt, post-output, and organizational alignment, so your AI use remains defensible in audits, courtrooms, and internal reviews.
Whether you’re a solo analyst, part of a corporate risk or threat intel team, or responsible for training and standardizing workflows, The Analyst’s AI Prompt Playbook gives you a shared language and toolkit for using AI safely and effectively. It doesn’t promise “push-button intelligence.” Instead, it acknowledges reality: AI is powerful, fallible, and here to stay. This handbook shows you how to harness that power within solid OSINT tradecraft, elevating human judgment, reducing blind spots, and making your investigations faster, sharper, and more resilient.
