The singular best class
Imagine you open your laptop on a Tuesday morning and most of the boring work is already done.
Finance don’t realize how much of their painful work can be automated. So most finance pros are cooked unless they start leading this transformation.
In my masterclasses, I show a skill that reads my Google Drive files and my email on its own and builds my daily cockpit before I even sit down. Theres no manual pulling figures out of four systems, and no managing e-mails that stop you starting your day until 10-11AM.
My AI clone does the work that usually takes hours.
Jeff, a Head of FP&A, built his own version in one of my sessions and called it "the singular best class" he had taken. He uses it now for the memos he sends his boss. Other members, Romy and Marcin say it saves them more than two hours a day, and that's two hours you get back for the kids, or the gym, or the strategy work nobody ever has time for.
I'm a finance guy first. I never coded in my life, and this thing still runs in the morning without me.
Ray Dalio cloned his judgment 40 years before ChatGPT existed
Around 40 years ago, Ray Dalio started writing down his own criteria for taking a trading decision, as explicit rules, in a form a computer could run. Then he did something super smart.
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He kept making his own call, let the machine make its call, and compared the two to see which one was better. He has since called it "a great partnership”.
He did not ask the computer what to think. He wrote down what he already thought, handed it over, and then audited it against himself.
Since a long time we in finance have done the opposite with our own judgment. We keep it in our head, and we repeat it to our team every month.
Plus, AI is now so good, you don’t need to make your own call as much, because AI is much better at following your rules.
This does not mean you don’t check for accuracy, but it does mean you can get AI to do a lot more of the low value work, so you can stop working overtime.
Here’s how.
3 Steps to Creating an AI Clone in Claude
Here’s how you can make a start on creating your own AI clone. Right now.
Step 1. Create a Claude Project
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At the beginning I was doing exactly this, a fresh chat every time and my context pasted in again. If that's you, you are using maybe 30% of what Claude can do for you.
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A Project is a dedicated workspace for one subject, like your business operations or one client. You drop the files, the context and the instructions in once, and every conversation inside it starts from there.
On top, with memory switched on, it also learns from the discussions you have inside it.
So step 1 is to go into a Claude, create a project, and start uploading files with your business context. Your LinkedIn profile, your org chart, your team SOPs or checklists, your most used reports. Everything you reference on your virtual desk on a daily basis.
Step 2. Enable Connectors
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A connector lets Claude see your files directly and go and get the information itself. That is the difference between a task you do once and something that can run automatically.
Last week I did exactly this on camera. I asked Claude to pull a corporate card spend sheet straight from my connected Google Drive and turn it into an HTML dashboard, and I uploaded nothing at all. It went and fetched the file.
Start with Drive, because that is where your figures live, and get it working before you add anything else.
After you can start connecting to Gmail, Calendars etc.
Plus most tools also connect with Outlook and OneDrive as well.
Step 3. Say "Make this a skill"
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Think about it like a new junior analyst. The first month you explain everything twice, and then one day you write the procedure down and they just do it, the same way, every month. A skill is that written procedure. So do the work once, get the output exactly how you want it, then ask Claude to turn it into a skill. Then ask Claude to run that skill as part of your project instructions.
And on top, once you have a few of them, you can chain them into one. Upload a raw file and it runs the data cleaning, then builds the dashboard, then produces the branded PowerPoint, in that fixed order, from a single prompt.
Faster and better than the version you would have created last thing on a Friday when you were tired and not concentrating.
What you end up with
- A single project with all of your finance context
- A skill, or series of skills, run automatically to create reports and tasks in a consistent accurate format
- A single cockpit with all your most important info, e-mails and tasks, ready to set you up for your day
The One Thing to Remember
Either you keep everything in your head and carry out the same painful low-value tasks every day.
Or, you spend one afternoon writing it down once. Building it into Claude (or ChatGPT which also has projects and connectors).
Then watch it run every morning so you start every day super efficiently.
Best,
Your AI Finance Expert,
– Nicolas
P.S – To see me build this live, join me next week for my 90-min masterclass, where I also answer all of your questions (it’s the best way to get my time for free).
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