A Restaurant Owner Took Free AI Courses. Now She Prompts Gemini Like A Pro. The Rest Of You Are Still Typing "Help Me."
Mary Nguyen Aregoni, owner of Saigon Sisters in Chicago's West Loop, adopted Google's Gemini AI tool earlier this year. She learned prompting through free online AI courses and a webinar from Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program. Her takeaway, which I could have told you at the start: the tool is intuitive, but you have to know how to ask the right questions.
This illustrates what I call the prompt literacy gap. The tool is not the moat. The skill of querying the tool is the moat. A restaurant owner with no engineering background outperformed presumably educated people who never bothered to learn proper prompting technique. The mental model here is that AI is a knowledgeable but literal assistant. Garbage in, garbage out. The underlying principle is that prompt quality determines output quality. Always has. Always will.
Mary Nguyen Aregoni, owner of Saigon Sisters restaurant in West Loop, Chicago. She used Google's Gemini after training through Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses program and reported finding it intuitive once she learned proper prompting.
- Go to gemini.google.com and sign in with a free Google account. You now have access to Google's Gemini AI assistant.
- Instead of typing a vague request like "help with marketing," type a specific prompt: "Write three Instagram caption ideas for a Vietnamese restaurant promoting its weekend pho special, targeting Chicago foodies, under 100 characters each." Note the difference in output quality.
- Take the free AI fundamentals course at grow.google or search for Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses free webinars. Spend fifteen minutes learning one prompting framework like context-action-format. Apply it to your next Gemini query and observe the improvement.