A Big Mac is fried for 37 seconds
A 16-year-old starting at McDonalds has never fried a burger before. But the burger they make is the same as one made by a 20-year pro.
They don't hire chefs. They hire beginners. Then they give them a manual that spells out every step. Fry time: 37 seconds. Weight: 1.6 ounces. Even the words to greet you.
Why should a CFO care in 2026? Because AI is the same as a beginner hire.
Think about your month-end close. One person knows the order and the quirks. The "ignore that line, it's always wrong." But none of it is on paper yet. So when they go on holiday, the knowledge goes too. Which means you can't hand it to a junior, or AI.
How you reconcile the intercompany balances might make sense to you.
But when you give it to AI, you’re asking it to make a perfect burger without a recipe.
Creating Your Agent Operating Procedure
The tech world has a name for this now. They call the AI-ready version "Agent Operating Procedures." Write it so a beginner, human or machine, can just follow it.
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By the end of this, you can have your tasks written down well enough to give to AI. Or to a new hire.
1. Pick an easy manual task.
Choose one job you repeat every month. Not the hard one. The dull one. The one that eats 30+ minutes and feels beneath you. Start small. That's how you build trust with no risk.
2. Record yourself doing it
Open a Teams or Gemini meeting with just you in it. Share your screen. Say what you click, and why. Doing it in Copilot in Teams (or Gemini) keeps the video and the transcript inside your company. No sensitive data goes to an outside tool. And no need for a fancy tool.
You can also do this with your regular meetings if they contain context, or instructions for doing things.
Just make sure you have recording and transcription enabled.
3. Turn the transcript into a clear guide.
Paste it into your AI. Use my CSI + FBI recipes (you can find the detailed Prompting 101 guide here).
Give it the setting, the exact job, and the output you want. Ask for the steps, the key points for each, and the why. The why is really useful in AI understanding context.
Here's how I do it personally.
- I keep a Project that already knows my company and my team, so I never waste time re-explaining who does what. This is my digital twin, and you can learn more about creating one here.
- I narrate the task out loud using voice capture. I drop in a screenshot only where words aren't enough. And get AI to give me a first draft.
- Then I go through it point by point and give feedback: "no, not like that – like this." And, in ten minutes, I’m done.
One warning: keep it short. A good SOP is clear and simple. If you let AI respond unchecked, you will get pages and pages of text that is unnecessary.
4. Hand it off
Save it as a Skill so AI can run it.
A Skill is a saved set of instructions that you can create in Claude or ChatGPT. You build it once. AI runs it again and again, the same way each time. You can learn more about how to build skills here.
You can also save it as a one-page SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for a person. Then test it once. Check the work like you would a junior team member. Then improve it. Don’t just accept the first output.
But, before you give any tasks to AI or a person, run it through this quick check.
The AI Task Decision Matrix
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The rule of thumb: hand off the low-risk, easy-to-check tasks first. Prove the concept there. Then move up to more complicated tasks.
Plus, it’s even ok for tasks to be half done by AI.
For example, we get a lot of emails. And a lot of them are the same questions. So I ask AI to review a batch of e-mails we’ve replied to, and then create an FAQ. The AI can then answer automatically based on this FAQ, so we can get back to our audience really fast.
But, we don’t do this for client e-mails, or partner e-mails where the e-mail is not transactional. Any conversion that requires more advanced communication and relationship building is still a human.
This is why using your judgement is still really important.
The One Thing To Remember
You don’t always need a bigger hiring budget.
You just need your processes documented clearly enough for any person, or any AI, to be able to follow them.
The future is a mix of human and AI skills.
And you’ll scale much faster with a clear process that makes the most of both of them 😉
Best,
Your AI Finance Expert,
– Nicolas
P.S – The best way to learn from me directly is to join my weekly masterclasses. 60-mins + Q&A where I’ll get all your AI in Finance questions answered. Join me here.
P.P.S – Documented your SOP? Here's how to turn it into a Claude Skill → How To Use Claude Skills For Finance Like a PRO (2026)