Week of July 20, 2026
Long-tail prompts beat out templates by a longshot
Marketing is already the leading business function for AI adoption
53%
We categorized nearly 10k prompts people sent Active Intelligence and no single template-friendly category comes close to "unique, complex requests." The highest-value AI behavior is long-tail questioning, not canned suggestions.
Source: Analysis of Active Intelligence prompt data
“Long-tail prompts show people are not only getting comfortable, but starting to see the value of giving Active Intelligence (and other AI tools) more context. More intricate asks, more trust in return. This is a strong signal we are on the right track.”
Perry Tinoco, Sr. Lifecycle Marketing Manager, ActiveCampaign
Analysis
What the numbers actually mean.
People bring their own questions, they don’t pick from a menu.
More than half of everything typed into Active Intelligence is a unique, complex request, while every template-friendly category combined barely moves the chart. That tracks with the largest study of consumer AI use to date, where OpenAI found nearly half of all ChatGPT messages are people asking for answers and judgment rather than running a canned task.
Templates solve for the average prompt, and the average prompt is rare.
Report requests, short prompts, and recommendations each sit under 5%, so a tool built around pre-set buttons would be optimizing for behavior almost nobody exhibits. The value lives in the long tail, in the specific, one-off questions no template could have anticipated.
The skill that matters is asking a better question.
If the highest-value behavior is custom questioning, then what separates strong AI users is the quality of the question they bring. Marketers who get specific about their actual problem pull far more from the same tool than anyone clicking through canned suggestions.
Subscribe to the newsletter to be alerted when new tools drop
Related
More data from the AI Lab.
