The boarding gate
Imagine you are standing at the gate. Boarding your flight in 20 minutes.
Your marketing manager is next to you, and she asks you the one question you cannot answer: what happens to us if churn goes up and we push harder on the premium tier?
You have no model to open, because your laptop is under all your clothes in your cabin bag.
So you take out your phone, and you talk to it. You give it two products, standard at $99 per month and premium at $299. You give it base customers at the beginning, then the growth per month, then the churn. And ask it to make a dashboard where you can move all of this variables and see the graphs change.
Before takeoff, you have it.
I built exactly this on my phone, spoken out loud, and what surprised me was not the dashboard. It was what it did to the speed I could decide something.
Let me explain you.
How fighter pilots make fast and accurate decisions
John Boyd was a US Air Force fighter pilot, and he spent years on something strange he saw in Korea: American pilots kept winning engagements they should not have won.
It had nothing to do with the place. It was about the pilot who managed to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster than the other guy. Agility, not raw performance.
We in finance are really really good at the first two.
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We observe: we pull the data, we clean it and we tie it back to the ledger. We orient: we build the analysis, we add a sensitivity tab and we make it look good.
And then the decision gets taken in a meeting we were still preparing for.
So I have this question for you – How long is your loop?
If it takes you three days to answer a churn question, the business already decided without you.
Here are 3 steps to help you Decide and Act faster.
Using just your phone, your voice, and Claude.
Step 1: Describe the business instead of the spreadsheet
In Claude (and most other AI tools) there’s a microphone in the chat view that you can use to dictate. Really helpful if you only have one hand free, and a bag on your shoulder 😉
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What I don’t do when I dictate out loud is name a formula, talk about column structure, or use any template.
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I described the business, just like I would to a team member:
Then I ask:
Finance are wired to try to dictate the mechanics of the model, because since 15 years that's what we do in Excel.
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But you are not building the model anymore. You are briefing someone who will build it. So give the context and the constraints, and let it work.
Step 2: Change the numbers
The dashboard was built. Then I said, let's say I want to change the premium tier, with new customers going from 8 to 27 per month.
And the premium line on the dashboard went up a lot.
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Think about what that is in your normal week. That is a sensitivity analysis. That is the thing you schedule a Thursday for. And it happened now as a sentence inside a conversation, with an intelligent thought partner, with context that you could keep talking to, using your expertise to guide it.
This is the Decide and the Act part of Boyd's loop, and it's the part we almost never reach in time because we’re stuck in the data.
Now super important you don't skip this part. A dashboard you spoke into existence at a gate is good enough to think with. It is not good enough to sign. Nobody is auditing this. So before any number from it goes into a board pack or a commitment to your CEO, you rebuild it properly and you tie it to your actuals.
Step 3: The dashboard becomes a PowerPoint
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From the same conversation on the phone, that dynamic dashboard turns into a presentation you can send to the person standing next to you.
And you can keep going without starting over. I asked it after to also let me edit the price per product, so now pricing is a variable too.
For most of my career the bottleneck was never the thinking. It was the formatting. The analysis was ready days before the PowerPoint was, and by then the question had already moved on.
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So this is your opportunity to speak your expertise into existence.
You can always re-update after you’ve checked the data, but by that point, you’re already the person leading the decision making.
One other thing
Claude Cowork (the more agentic multi-step task executing assistant) now lives on Claude for iOS and Android on Pro, Max and Team plans.
Open the Claude app, tap the sidebar, and choose "Cowork" instead of "Chat", the same than on your laptop.
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- Start on the phone, finish on the laptop. Sessions run in the cloud, so they follow your account across mobile, web and desktop. You pick up the same session where you left it.
- Close the laptop and the work continues. The task keeps running on Anthropic's servers while you are in the air. You come back to a finished output.
- Schedule it and forget it. Type /schedule in a task and it runs on a cadence, in the cloud, with no device online at all.
But remember, anything uses your local files on your computer still needs the desktop app open on your computer.
And Cowork take much more of your usage limit than a normal chat, so use chat for most conversational tasks (and planning) and then move it into Cowork for the multi-step work.
The one thing to remember
The model was never the deliverable. The decision was.
You don't need a defensible spreadsheet before you walk into the room. You need a fast, good-enough model you can stand behind for the next five minutes, and then the discipline to go back and build it properly before anyone signs anything.
Shorten the loop, and you’ll be the one leading the decisions.
So, straight away: what is the boring model you wish you could build in one sentence before your next meeting?
Open up Claude, and start talking 😉
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.S – Want to see a live dashboard with moving variables built from scratch? Here's the full build → How to Build INSANE Live Financial Dashboards With ChatGPT