3.2 – Using CustomGPTs to craft instructions Lesson

Lesson Overview

Developing effective instructions is central to building an AI chatbot that behaves as intended and provides accurate, relevant answers. Manually writing these guidelines can be time-consuming, especially if you’re new to the process or not sure what to include. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to streamline the task using CustomGPTs within ChatGPT. CustomGPTs act as specialized versions of ChatGPT configured for a niche purpose, just like the custom bots you’re building.

This lesson introduces a shortcut: letting a CustomGPT interview you to collect chatbot goals, audience, fallback strategies, and tone preferences, then automatically drafting a ready-to-edit set of instructions. This flexible approach is useful for website owners, business professionals, or anyone working on chatbot projects who wants to save time and reduce errors. Even if you’re not familiar with CustomGPTs, the process is simple to follow, and the generated material can be adjusted to fit your own chatbot.

Using this method reduces the guesswork, helps you avoid missing key elements, and provides a repeatable process for future projects. Realistically, businesses or educators launching support bots, AI tutors, or resource finders on their website often need nuanced control over how their bot responds—this method makes that setup easier.

Who This Is For

If you’re looking to build effective AI chatbots faster and with less trial-and-error, this lesson is likely for you.

• Business owners who want to launch support chatbots on their website
• Marketers aiming to create interactive product assistants
• Educators building AI tutors with tailored subject coverage
• Anyone with a paid ChatGPT plan who wants to make use of CustomGPTs
• Professionals seeking shortcuts for chatbot setup and instruction writing
• Content creators managing chat-based knowledge or FAQ bots
  

Where This Fits in a Workflow

This technique is best used early in the chatbot development process, right after you decide what your chatbot should do and before you start configuring its technical details. For example, if you want an AI tutor for your course library, you can use CustomGPTs to quickly generate structured instructions—then copy these instructions directly to your main chatbot builder. Similarly, a marketing team could draft conversational guidelines for a product advisor bot this way, then paste the results into their website integration tool.

By placing this step before implementation, you reduce the time spent editing and revising instructions in later stages, and set a solid behavioral foundation for your chatbot project.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditionally, writing chatbot instructions requires scripting each rule and response style by hand. This manual approach is easy to overlook details, and changes can be tedious. With the method shown in this lesson, you use a CustomGPT as an “instruction generator”: it interviews you interactively and auto-creates a detailed, organized set of instructions based on best practices. This reduces cognitive load and error, lets you focus more on purpose and tone, and decreases the risk of missing important settings like fallback replies or allowed topics.

Teams using chatbots for support, lead generation, or internal documentation find this approach speeds up onboarding new bots and ensures consistency in behavior and tone. For example, creating an AI tutor or customer service helper can go from hours of drafting to just minutes—giving you more time to test, refine, and improve the actual chatbot experience.

Practice Exercise

Choose a specific chatbot idea you want to build—a support bot for your product, an AI tutor for your online course, or a FAQ bot for your company website.

1. Open ChatGPT (with a paid plan), access the CustomGPT creation section, and begin a new CustomGPT.
2. Use the prompt structuring approach from the lesson: describe your chatbot’s intended purpose, main topics, intended audience, tone (e.g., friendly, formal), and what the bot should do if it can’t answer a question.
3. Review the instruction set generated by ChatGPT, copy it, and consider what changes you might make if you transfer this to your production chatbot.

Question: How did using a CustomGPT speed up the instruction-building process compared to writing guidelines from scratch?

Course Context Recap

This lesson is part of the core instruction-building phase of the Build and Launch An AI Chatbot On Your Website course. Previously, you learned about the importance of clear guidelines and foundational setup. Here, you explored a fast-track method for generating chatbot instructions using CustomGPTs. In upcoming lessons, you’ll see more specific real-world examples, along with ready-to-use instruction templates for various chatbot types. Continue through the course to put your new instructions into action and further refine your deployed chatbot.