Move Beyond Chain-of-Thought with Chain-of-Draft on Amazon Bedrock

As organizations scale their generative AI implementations, the critical challenge of balancing quality, cost, and latency becomes increasingly complex. With inference costs dominating 70–90% of large language model (LLM) operational expenses, and verbose prompting strategies inflating token volume by 3–5x, organizations are actively seeking more efficient approaches to model interaction. Traditional prompting methods, while effective, often create unnecessary overhead that impacts both cost efficiency and response times.

This post explores Chain-of-Draft (CoD), an innovative prompting technique introduced in a Zoom AI Research paper Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less, that revolutionizes how models approach reasoning tasks. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been the go-to method for enhancing model reasoning, CoD offers a more efficient alternative that mirrors human problem-solving patterns—using concise, high-signal thinking steps rather than verbose explanations.

Using Amazon Bedrock and AWS Lambda, we demonstrate a practical implementation of CoD that can achieve remarkable ...