Before you draft yours, let me flag the most common mistakes so you do not have to discover them the slow way.
The first is being too brief. Too much detail is almost never the problem with a context document. Too little is. Vague descriptions produce vague output.
“Professional tone” means nothing to AI because it means different things to different people. “Warm but confident, like a trusted expert friend giving advice rather than a corporate brochure” is something AI can actually work with.
The second is describing your tone in adjectives without backing them up with an example. Adjectives are interpretable. An actual sentence you have written is not. Where you can, show AI what your voice looks like rather than just telling it what your voice is.
The third is forgetting to include what you do not do. If you do not work with budget travellers, say so. If you do not service group bookings, say so. If there are destinations you do not cover, say so. AI has no idea what falls outside your practice unless you tell it.
The fourth, and this is important, is including sensitive client information. Your context document describes the type of client you work with, not specific clients. No names, no booking details, no personal data. This document may be saved in a third-party platform and it must contain only what you would be comfortable with in that context.
Here is something that catches people by surprise, and it is one of my favourite things to show advisors who are new to this. You do not have to sit down and write your context document from scratch. You can use AI to help you build it.
The most effective method is to open a new conversation on your chosen platform and give it a single instruction: “I want to create a personal context document that I will use to brief AI tools on who I am, how I work, and what I need from them. Please ask me the questions I need to answer to build it. Ask me one or two questions at a time, wait for my answers, and continue until you have enough to draft the full document.”
What happens next is, for most advisors, a genuinely useful experience. The tool asks you about your background, your specialist focus, your client profile, your communication style, your common tasks. It asks follow-up questions based on your answers. It draws out detail you would not necessarily have thought to include if you had been staring at a blank page. And when you have answered enough, you ask it to draft the document from everything you have discussed.
You can see what the tool has done with the answers. It has shaped them into the five categories we covered earlier, in language that already reflects how you described yourself. This is your first draft. It will need editing: you will read it back and find things that are not quite right, phrasing that does not sound like you, a detail that is missing or one that needs more precision. That editing process is both quick and valuable, because you are refining something rather than composing from nothing, and the act of refining it is what makes it yours.
There is a second technique worth knowing, particularly if you already have material you have written about yourself or your practice. A biography on your website. An about page. A supplier introduction document. An email you wrote to a new client that captures how you describe what you do particularly well. Paste any of that into a new conversation and ask the tool to use it as the basis for a context document, structured around the five categories. It will extract what is relevant, organise it into the right shape, and flag where it needs more information from you. Again, you edit the output: but the starting point is already closer to finished than anything you would produce from a blank page.
Either method gets you to a first draft in under ten minutes. The document you produce today will not be the final version: it will improve every time you notice something in the output that is not quite right and trace it back to something missing or imprecise in the brief. But a first draft that exists is infinitely more useful than a perfect document you have not written yet.
Once you have that draft, here is how you put it to work.
