Last year it was 1 in 4 – If you don't have these skills in 2026, you're already being filtered out.
Join me tomorrow for a free 60-min Masterclass where you will:
- Discover the 5 criteria every finance pro must use before AI works properly.
- Learn how build a 5-year plan with 3 scenarios (without losing your weekend to Excel)
- See the Excel feature most don't know exist (it cleaned 80 messy files in 69 seconds)
You'll walk away with the exact AI uses cases that are now showing up on $400K+ finance job descriptions – and the confidence to start using them straight away.
So. If you want to be the AI champion in your finance team (instead of the one left behind), reserve your seat now.
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The main skill I’m asked for has nothing to do with finance
Do you want to know what one of the most common AI skill I’m asked for is?
It’s not “Can we use AI for our variance commentary?”
It’s not “Can we use AI to clean up our messy data?”
It’s not “Can we use AI to reduce month end a day?”
These are all great use cases (and I teach them all to my community of 2,678 CFOs, and in my masterclasses).
No – it’s “How do we keep our documents on brand when using AI?”
Let me ask you this…
How long do you spend reformatting AI outputs, just to make them look like company documents?
You give AI examples, the font, the PowerPoint master, but you still don’t get a consistent output?
Well, let me show you how you can fix this.
Have it your way
A Claude Skill is a folder of instructions that Claude loads automatically when it's relevant to what you're working on.
So, when you say “Create me a document on [xyz]” it recognizes the word ‘document’ from the chat, and it loads the .docx skill and uses it to create the output.
The problem is that’s Claude’s way of producing a document. Not your way.
But, the good news is that it’s super easy to create custom skills to train Claude your exact way of working.
In the masterclass I gave on financial presentations with Claude (only available to my AI Finance Club community), I showed this live.
My branding guidelines were saved as a Skill. I uploaded a plain PowerPoint, requested the Skill, and Claude went through every slide and reformatted it to match my brand. Font, colour palette, logo, everything. The content didn't change, just the style. In minutes, not an hour.
Here's how you can build it:
Build Your Brand Skill in 5 Steps
Here's how you build a Brand Guidelines Skill this afternoon.
Step 1: Enable Skill Creator.
In Claude, go to Settings → Customize → Skills, and see whether the Skill Creator skill is there (it should be by default).
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This is a pre-built skill by Anthropic that writes skills for you. This saves you having to know the technical side of creating a skill. You just describe the skills and it creates what it needs in the background.
If you can’t see the skill. Click ‘+’ at the top of the screen. Click ‘browse skills’, then click the ‘Anthropic and Partners’ tab, and it should appear at the top.
Step 2: Gather two inputs.
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- One approved on-brand deliverable (a past PowerPoint, a signed-off Word template, or a PDF).
- Your brand guide, if you have one.
If you don’t have a brand guide, the deliverable on its own works. Claude will try to reverse engineer it.
Pro tip – Take a screenshot of the documents as well and add this as context too. Claude cannot ‘see' in the same way we do from simply uploading a document. Sometimes it needs some extra help.
Step 3: Let Claude interview you.
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Start a new chat and paste:
Answer Claude’s questions then save it (you can still update it later).
Step 4: Test on two deliverables.
Don't trust the Skill until you've tested it. Run two parallel tests.
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1. Word. Ask Claude to draft a one-page variance commentary for October, using nothing but the Skill. Check the headings, header and footer are displaying as they should.
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2. PowerPoint. Ask Claude to draft a three-slide board update. Check the font, chart colors, logo position, first-slide styling, and whether budget vs actual follows your color logic.
Tell Claude whether anything is wrong.
Step 5: Refine with "never do" rules.
Most people fill Skills with positive instructions ("always use Arial").
The best Skills also have what not to do also.
So make sure to feed back what still isn’t right:
Additional Tip – Ask Claude: "Any other questions you have for me before we finalize this Skill?" This is the fastest way to find the brand rules you forgot to mention because you take them for granted.
Then, ask Claude to update or save the Skill.
Now every time you ask to generate a doc or deck, Claude will run the skill. And you’ve just saved yourself an hour of formatting.
Bigger than branding
Once you’ve started using Skills, it will blow your mind as you will start thinking about all of the other ways you can use them to improve your work.
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Plus, you can also run multiple skills in one chat.
Imagine you are doing month-end reporting.
You open Claude, and in the same chat you can:
- Use a Skill to analyse your data and produce a standardised variance commentary
- Use a Skill to produce a live HTML dashboard visualising the changes
- Use a Skill to produce the Word Doc and PowerPoint that you share / present to the team
All in line with your company policies.
It’s crazy how quickly some really big companies have adopted skills too.
In February, PwC announced an enterprise alliance with Anthropic and built their whole setup around this idea.
They're building PwC's own Skills on top of Claude. One Skill for how PwC does liquidity forecasting. One for scenario modelling. One for capital markets intelligence. Claude stays the general brain. The Skills just plug in depending on the job.
When a PwC consultant opens Claude, they don't have to explain the PwC way every time. Every output that comes out looks and sounds like PwC by default, because the Skills are trained on their company way of doing things.
That's exactly what you're building, on a smaller scale, for your team.
The One Thing to Remember
Once you’ve done your brand skill. Start listing every repeatable output you do in your job and start turning them into skills one by one.
The more skills you build, the more you’ll feel like you have your own virtual assistant.
And remember – In six months, the finance pros who built a Skill this week won't remember the last time they manually changed a font.
But, the rest will still be changing headings and colours at 18:17 on a Friday night.
Don't let this be you 😉
Best,
Your AI Finance Expert,
– Nicolas
P.S. – Are you using Claude Skills in your workflow yet? Hit reply and let me know (I read all replies)
P.P.S. – Want to learn more on how to use Claude in PowerPoint? Check out one of my latest video on how to Create PowerPoint Presentations With Claude for Finance (The RIGHT Way).
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