Find where your budget contradicts your strategy.

What the AI will do

• Establish strategic priorities and resource allocations, then compare funding and capacity with what those goals require.
• Identify consequential mismatches and, if you choose, work through a proposed reallocation.

What you can provide

• Strategy and budget material you have; rough notes or an explanation of priorities, staffing, and spending can work too.
• Answers to consequential gaps after the AI checks supplied and connected sources. It organizes the information and does the calculations.

Where you'll take part

• Resolve ambiguous priorities and review and correct the mismatch report before accepting it.
• Choose whether to explore a reallocation and work through constraints and tradeoffs; personnel and spending decisions remain yours.

What you'll get

A clear comparison of priorities, resource needs, allocations, and apparent gaps, plus an optional proposed adjustment with estimates and constraints made explicit.

Activity context

Your strategy describes what you hope to accomplish. Your budget shows where the resources go. Have AI put the two beside each other and find where they disagree.

For the user

Share a strategy document and budget if you have them, then paste the prompt below. Rough notes or a spoken explanation also work: the AI can interview you about priorities, staffing, and spending.

You’ll review the comparison and correct missing priorities or misunderstood spending. Once you agree on the mismatch, you can choose to have the AI work through a proposed reallocation.

Guidance for the AI

These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.

Start with the activity and the user's context

Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.

Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.

Check the capabilities needed for this work

Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.

When useful access is missing:

• Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
• Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
• If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
• Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.

Ask focused questions and respect the answers

Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.

Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.

Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct

Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.

Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:

• Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
• Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
• Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.

Produce, check, and revise the result

Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.

Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.

Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.

Your AI prompt

Compare my strategy with my budget and identify overinvestment and underinvestment relative to strategic importance. Ask one focused question at a time when you need my input.

1. Establish the strategy and resources.

Read supplied documents or notes. Check and try relevant connected sources for strategy, budgets, staffing plans, and spending records before asking me to reconstruct missing information. Establish the business, department, or initiative, time period, currency, and whether figures are planned or actual spending. Align strategy and budget to the same scope and period.

Build on what those sources establish. If strategy or budget information remains incomplete, interview me to reconstruct only the remaining gaps. Invite broad terms: positions doing particular work, contractors, rough travel spending, software and other tools, and other allocations. Do the organizing and calculations yourself. For missing tool prices that matter, search current public pricing, cite the source and date, and label estimates; actual enterprise contracts may differ.

Keep positions or staff time visible even when monetary costs are unknown.

2. Translate strategy into resource needs.

Break the strategy into priorities and intended outcomes. For each, identify capabilities and resources that would plausibly support it: people and their time, staffing or contractors, tools, travel, and other spending. Explain how each supports the outcome. Separate explicit strategy from your interpretation. Resolve material ambiguity with me and establish relative priorities rather than inventing precise ideal budgets.

3. Map allocations and compare.

• Map budget lines and staffing allocations to those priorities.

• Identify shared resources, baseline operating needs, and commitments supporting several goals.

• Explain allocations and avoid double counting.

• Keep unexplained spending visible.

• Compare the support each priority needs with what it receives, accounting for investment timing and work needed to keep the business operating.

• Find apparent overinvestment where resources exceed an area's strategic contribution, and underinvestment where important outcomes lack capacity or funding.

• Explain which goal and resource, the amount or share where known, and the likely consequence.

• Mark conclusions dependent on estimates or unresolved assumptions.

• Do not treat every cost absent from a strategy document as waste.

4. Present the mismatch and check it with me.

Show a clear comparison of strategic priorities, resource needs, actual allocations, and apparent gaps. Lead with consequential discrepancies and explain estimates or missing information that could change the conclusions. Ask whether the report captures the discrepancy accurately. Wait for my response and correct it before moving on.

5. Offer to work through a better allocation.

Once I accept the report, offer to help adjust the budget to meet strategic goals. If I accept, establish material constraints, such as a fixed total, committed costs, and planning horizon. Propose what to reduce, stop, expand, or shift. Identify roles or work that may need to be eliminated or reassigned, contractor changes, and tool or travel changes where supported. Explain what each change enables and what work would cease.

Reconcile totals where figures permit and show estimates, transition costs, or timing that materially affects the proposal. Walk me through the choices and revise the proposal; personnel and spending decisions remain mine.

Done when

You have a clear comparison of strategy and resources, with consequential overinvestment and underinvestment identified. If you choose, you also have a proposed adjustment tied to strategic goals.

These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.