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Prompts are instructions that guide your AI Agent on how to process and analyze your data. This page will explain the basics of Prompts including defining output types, attaching files, and advanced usage like chaining Prompts together and performing complex math.

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Output Types

Each Prompt has an output type. This type specifies the format of the response you expect. When creating a Prompt, Kolena will intelligently guess the output type based on your instructions, but you can also select the desired output type from the dropdown menu. Click to expand each output type for more details:
Text Prompts are the most flexible output type. They allow the Agent to generate free-form text responses based on the Prompt instructions.Text output can also be formatted using Markdown syntax. This is useful for creating structured documents with headings, lists, links, and other formatting elements.
Table Prompts enable structured data representation. It is useful for extracting and organizing information in a tabular format. When Table is selected, you must define the columns that the Agent should fill in. Accuracy will be highest when your Prompt includes clear instructions on what data should go into each column as well as instructions for when to create a row.You can use Table Prompts to directly extract tabular data from documents, such as a rent roll from a PDF, or to organize unstructured information into a table, such as gathering a list of all critical dates within a legal document. The number of rows returned by the Agent will depend on the content of the input document and your Prompt instructions.
Accuracy of Table Prompts will decrease with very large (20+) numbers of columns or when each row requires many paragraphs of text to be extracted. Recommendation: if the number of columns becomes too large, split your instruction into multiple Prompts.
Form Prompts return a set of predefined field/value pairs. Each field in the Form corresponds to a specific piece of information that the Agent is expected to extract or infer. When Form is selected, you must define the field that the Agent should fill in. Accuracy will be highest when your Prompt includes clear instructions on what data should go into each field.Form Prompts are very efficient because they allow you to group multiple outputs into a single Prompt. You can use Form prompts to extract many different pieces of information such as key details from a contract (e.g., parties involved, dates, amounts) by section.
Accuracy of Form Prompts will decrease with large (20+) numbers of fields. Recommendation: if the number of fields becomes too large, split your instruction into multiple Prompts.
Number Prompts should be used when the expected response is a single numeric value.
True/False (Boolean) Prompts should be used when the expected response is a true or false answer.
Classification Prompts are a special form of Text Prompt where the Agent is required to choose from a predefined set of categories. This is useful for tasks like sentiment analysis, topic categorization, or any scenario where the response must belong to a specific set of options.

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Inputs to Your Prompts

In addition to the text instructions, you can provide additional information to your Prompts using file attachments or even the results of other Prompts.

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Attaching Files

Attaching a file to your Prompt allows to provide longer context that may be impractical to include directly in the Prompt instructions. You can attach files of various types including PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and more. Some examples of useful attachments include:
  • CSVs of lookup tables or reference data
  • Guidelines or policy documents you want the Agent to follow
When attaching files, consider the following best practices:
  • Ensure the attached files are relevant to the Prompt and contain information that will help the Agent generate accurate responses.
  • If the file is large or complex, provide additional instructions in the Prompt to guide the Agent on which sections to focus on.
  • Use clear and concise language in your Prompt to specify how the Agent should utilize the information from the attached files.

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Connecting Cloud Documents

If you wish to attach a document stored in a cloud service (e.g. Google Drive), you can do so by first adding an integration for that service in the Integrations section of the Agent, then clicking that integration from the Prompt and selecting the file.

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Prompt Inputs (Chaining)

Sometimes a task is too complex to be handled reliably by a single Prompt. Kolena allows you to define and chain multiple Prompts together, where the output of one Prompt can serve as the input to another. This can be used in combination with other tools, for example:
  1. Use a Table Prompt to extract structured data from a document.
  2. Use a Data Analysis tool-enabled Prompt to perform calculations or analysis on the extracted data.
To use another Prompt as the input to your current Prompt, simply select it from the Prompt Inputs dropdown item or use the hotkey @ when editing the Prompt text.

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Tools

Advanced tools can be enabled on your Prompts to enhance their capabilities. Each tool is designed to overcome a natural limitation of state of the art AI models by leveraging specialized techniques or services.

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Data Analysis

This is available on the Professional Plan. Contact Kolena if you’re not on an Professional plan but would like to try this feature.
Certain operations, such as mathematical calculations are best handled by specialized tools rather than relying solely on AI models’ pattern matching capabilities. Selecting Data Analysis for your Prompt will have the Agent write a piece of code which is then executed to produce the final output. This is especially powerful for tasks involving numerical data or complex calculations on tabular data. When You Should Use Data Analysis:
  • When you want to perform calculations, aggregations, or statistical analysis on data extracted from tabular data.
How Data Analysis Works:
  1. The Agent will analyze any input document(s) and your Prompt and write a piece of code.
  2. This code will be executed and the results returned as the final output of the Prompt.
When Data Analysis Is Not Suitable:
  • When you require natural language analysis. Recommendation: perform the task using two Prompts chained together, the first to extract the data and the second to analyze it using natural language.

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Enhanced Vision

State of the art AI models excel in many vision tasks. However, for a specific subset of tasks, such as accurately reading checkbox states from documents, specialized vision models will provide superior accuracy. When You Should Use Enhanced Vision:
  • Prompts which require correctly reading checkbox states
How Enhanced Vision Works:
  1. The Agent will identify the regions of interest in the document or image based on your Prompt instructions.
  2. These regions are then processed using specialized vision models to extract the required information.
When Enhanced Vision Is Not Suitable:
  • When checkboxes exist on many pages for extraction (5+ pages)
This is available on the Professional Plan. Contact Kolena if you’re not on an Professional plan but would like to try this feature.
Web Search allows your Agents to find information from the internet to answer questions with verified references. When You Should Use Web Search:
  • When your Prompt requires current information from the web or verification of facts.
  • When the information needed is likely to be found on publicly accessible web pages through a search engine.
How Web Search Works:
  1. Based on your Prompt, the Agent will decide if searching the internet is necessary.
  2. If so, the Agent will construct a search engine query to find relevant web pages.
  3. The Agent will then extract and analyze content from the most relevant results to answer your Prompt (up to 10 web pages).
  4. The final response will use any documents plus these search results to generate a comprehensive answer with citations.
When Web Search Is Not Suitable:
  • Web Search cannot access private or paywalled content, nor can it download files like PDFs or images
  • Web Search will not crawl a website; it relies on search engine results directly.
Effective Web Search PromptsCraft your Prompts to steer the Agent’s search for information by:
  • Asking for current information (e.g., “What are the latest developments at Kolena in 2025?” instead of “What’s Kolena doing?”)
  • Using time-sensitive language like “latest,” “in the past decade,” “breaking news,” or specific time periods.
  • Requesting verification and fact-checking (e.g., “Verify the current stock price of Company-Name and cite your sources.”)
  • Hinting at specific sources or types of sources (e.g., “Search for information on Zillow about property prices in NYC” or “Find recent news articles about Topic-Name”)

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Advanced Settings

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Inline Citations

Embed document and page references directly within the output text, showing which sources were used for each part of the response. Use this when: You need to trace the source of specific information or when compliance requires detailed source attribution. Note: Inline citations are only available for Text, Table, and Form output types, where Inline Citations are enabled by default.

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Only use Prompt Inputs (Chained Results)

By default, all documents in a run are included in the context. When enabled, only the explicitly referenced prompt results will be used as input for this prompt. Use this when: You want a Prompt to only get results based on other Prompt results.