The Adoption of AI Prompting Trends as a Digital Business Communication Strategy among Student Business Content Managers

Abstract

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has created new opportunities for content management and digital business communication strategies, including among students who operate businesses through social media. However, the growing use of AI has not been fully accompanied by students’ ability to understand and optimally adopt prompting techniques. This study analyzes the stages of adopting AI prompting trends as a digital business communication strategy among Communication Science students at Universitas Teuku Umar who manage business content. A descriptive qualitative approach with a phenomenological paradigm was employed. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, non-participant observation, and documentation involving four purposively selected students. The analysis followed Rogers’ five stages of innovation adoption: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. The findings show that all informants were familiar with and had used AI, although most did not understand the concept of prompting terminologically. At the persuasion stage, informants acknowledged AI’s benefits in accelerating tasks, generating ideas, and supporting creative processes, while also considering risks related to originality, creativity, output suitability, and consumer trust. At the decision stage, only one informant consistently adopted AI, whereas the other three had not adopted it for business content production. The adopter subsequently reached the implementation and confirmation stages by using prompts to generate content ideas and captions, reporting improved content organization and audience engagement. Thus, AI prompt adoption is not automatic but is influenced by knowledge, needs, experience, and perceptions of technological benefits and risks