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Join for freePosted: Mon 26th Oct 2026
Tried AI tools but came away unsure how to get anything useful out of them?
In this workshop, AI consultant Charlotte Boundy shows you how to set Claude up for your business and get it working on the tasks that eat up your week.
Through demos and hands-on exercises, Charlotte walks you through building as you go, using your own business as the example.
Come away with Claude set up for your business, a set of tried and tested prompts you can use straight away, and a clear plan for the first three tasks you’ll hand over to AI.
Where Claude fits: What it's great at, where it isn't, and how it compares to ChatGPT
Setting Claude up: Projects, instructions and giving it context about your business
Prompting that works: A simple framework, with live examples
Hands-on: Write and test a prompt for a task from your own business
Skills: Getting Claude to handle repeatable tasks the same way every time
Finding your quick wins: Picking the first three tasks to hand over
Charlotte has over 12 years of experience in operations in fast-growing businesses and six additional years running Bright Spark Collective, an agency supplying the UK's best PAs and EAs to founders on a flexible basis.
Three years ago, she moved into AI consulting and has worked with companies from one to 200 headcount, auditing and building AI workflows, helping them to three times their revenue and demystifying AI for their teams.
Charlotte is a keynote speaker and has taught AI to over 1000 people in the UK this year alone.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona O'Connor: Hi everyone, and welcome to today's Claude hands-on lab. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. Thank you all for joining us – it's great to see so many people here.
Whether you're completely new to AI or already experimenting with it in your business, today's session is designed to be practical, interactive and packed with actionable takeaways. Over the next hour, you'll learn how to use Claude to save time, improve productivity and support day-to-day business tasks.
The aim is that you'll leave with a clearer understanding of what Claude can do, plus some practical prompts and workflows that you can start using straight away. We're delighted to be joined today by Charlotte Boundy, an AI consultant and trainer who helps businesses adopt AI tools.
As this is a hands-on and interactive session, please feel free to turn your cameras on and get involved if you're comfortable doing so. You can also use the chat throughout the session to ask any questions you might have.
Just a quick bit of housekeeping before we begin: I'd be grateful if everyone could keep themselves muted for now so that we can minimise any background noise. And with that, I'll hand over to Charlotte. Enjoy the session, everyone.
Charlotte Boundy: Thank you, everyone. It's really good to have you here. My name is Charlotte Boundy, and I'm the founder of Bright Spark Collective.
Part of that agency is a personal assistant agency providing assistants to founders and entrepreneurs. The other half of the agency is me as a consultant, going into businesses with my knowledge of operations from the last 12 years and figuring out where we can use automation and AI to help their business run quicker, smoother and faster – and hopefully, in some cases, make or save a bunch of money.
I'm going to try and make this workshop as interactive as possible. The first bit might be a bit less so, but there's going to be a lot of time for questions and answers at the end for sure.
As mentioned, I've got 12 years' experience in operations, I run my agency, and I've taught well over 1,000 people how to use AI this year, which is very exciting. That's everything from leadership teams right across all of the other teams within businesses, from companies of one and solopreneurs right up to a headcount of 250 now.
But what I will say is that I'm not an AI expert, and anyone who tells you they're an AI expert is lying, because AI is moving so quickly. It's frankly impossible to know everything about everything, but I do know quite a bit and, hopefully, I can impart some of that knowledge to all of you today.
I'd love to know quickly in the chat where you're all joining me from. I'm based in sunny Southend – well, it's actually raining today, but apparently it's one of the sunniest places in the UK.
We've got London and Sawbridgeworth – I've never heard of that place before. Dorset – oh, I love Dorset, my nan lived there and I spent many childhood holidays there.
Devon – I'm all about those cream teas – plus Sheffield, Dorset, St Albans and Chatham. Wow, we've got a pretty wide breadth of where everyone's joining from, and that's the best thing about having an online session: you can join from anywhere. So welcome, and thanks for coming today.
Today, we're going to be covering where Claude fits and how it compares to ChatGPT, because I constantly get asked how it compares and which one I prefer. We're going to cover setting Claude up, because how you set it up when you first open it is a step that a lot of people miss.
We're going to cover prompting that works, using the SCALA framework, which I'll go over in a minute. I'm just going to pin my video because I think I'm popping around. There we go – that's better.
We're going to cover connectors, using Claude in your browser, Claude Design and a little Claude Code. We're also going to cover Claude skills and your first quick wins this week. This is going to be packed full of information, so I hope you have your notetakers or notepads out, and off we go.
Some of you might recall that I asked everyone to fill out a short survey before the session, because I wanted to make sure that I crafted this session around you. There are a lot of sessions at the moment that are very out of the box – "this is how Claude works" – and I wanted to make sure today's session was specifically crafted around the people attending.
Interestingly, 80% of you have tried ChatGPT or similar, but not Claude. 12% use Claude occasionally, and 8% use Claude regularly, so I'm hoping that after this workshop those figures might change slightly.
So where does Claude fit? Claude is fantastic at writing in your voice if you program it to do so, working through long documents, and doing various tasks across all of your tools.
What it's not so great at is image generation. If you ever ask Claude to draw something, it's quite amusing what comes back. I asked it to draw what it thought it looked like the other day, and it basically gave me a potato head with some symmetrical lines.
So it's not great at drawing or images, but it's fantastic at basically everything else. ChatGPT, however, is brilliant at images, and it's also not too bad at writing and looking at documents across your computer. But to be honest, my favourite is Claude.
So how do we set Claude up? The first thing you want to make sure you do is sign up to one of the paid plans. I say this because it unlocks a lot more of the tools and features – without it, you're going to be blocked from certain tools and features.
Also, I predict the more you use it, the more you're going to want to use it, so you may want to pay for a tier that has some decent usage limits. Initially, if you're brand new to Claude, the first tier is fine. I think it's £18 a month, and that will last you well while you're first starting out.
The other thing I want to say is that any free version of a large language model account has a box automatically ticked that says "help improve our AI models". If this box is ticked, Claude can use the data and information you've put in your chats to train from.
So if you have worries about GDPR, data sharing or security, I would strongly suggest that you toggle this off so that your information stays with you and isn't going to sit in Silicon Valley for someone to look through all your conversations. You can find it in Settings, then Privacy, and you just toggle it off.
The second thing I'm going to say with Claude is please, please, please download the desktop version if you're going to use it. I do lots of Claude presentations, and there's always somebody at the end who comes back to me and says, "It's not working – I can't get it to do anything that you said, and I don't understand."
And I think, why is that? That's really odd. Then as soon as I see their laptop, I realise they haven't downloaded the desktop version of Claude.
So please, if you're going to use Claude, download the desktop version – hopefully this image of Batman will remind you to do that. You just go to claude.ai/download, and that's where you should be using Claude from, not in your browser.
The next thing that's good to do is to give it some instructions. This is a step that a lot of people miss, and it's where you get Claude to help you. If you go into your Settings and then Account, you'll see a box that says "Instructions for Claude", and this is where you can tell Claude who you are and how it can help you.
You might want to put things in there like your name, where you're from, the business you run or are involved in, what your role is, who you like to work with, how you like to work and how you like to be spoken to. Some people come back to me and say they got really annoyed because Claude kept arguing with them – well, this is where you can tell it to talk to you the way you want to be spoken to.
I have ADHD, so I've put that in this box because I'd like it to bear that in mind when it's dealing with me, so it knows what my strengths and weaknesses are going to be. Humans are inherently terrible at writing and following instructions, so to figure out what to write in this box, the best thing you can do is open a new chat in Claude and ask it to help you write the instructions.
You can say something like, "Hey Claude, can you help me write my instructions for Claude so you can help me better? Ask me questions about my business, my role, what I do and who my ideal client is, and once you have enough, write the section for me to copy and paste into this box in my settings."
That's a really good way to get Claude to know who you are – to help you help it to help you, if that makes sense.
One of the biggest things that a lot of people don't realise is that Claude has a really good memory now. Its memory has got much, much better with the most recent launch of Opus 5.5, which is one of the operating systems you can select once you're inside Claude. I'll talk about that later.
One of the best things I ever did was getting Claude to remember my ideal customer profile, because that means anything it does for me – especially if it's external facing – bears in mind who I want to attract to my business. And I'm going to admit, I was actually very naive: I thought I knew who my ideal customer was.
Recently, I asked it to look at all of the contracts I've had with clients over the last three years for the PA side of my business and find out what my ideal customer profile actually is. It found out who was a customer, what their company headcount was, what their industry was, how long they've stayed with me and how much profit we've made from them.
It compiled a four-page document of what my ideal customer profile is, and it was very different to what I thought, which made me feel very naive as a business owner. So it's definitely worthwhile taking the time to write that ideal customer profile document.
If you're not sure what goes into it, give it a few examples of customers you've enjoyed working with who have been profitable for your business. Include where you found them, whether they were referred, and whether they came from a particular event or a post you did on social media, because that will help it really hone in on that data.
This is actually a prompt I designed, so feel free to take a screenshot or write it down to get Claude to figure out your ICP. I said, "Ask me about my best clients one question at a time, push back if I'm too broad, and read my past emails with those clients."
I feel safe putting that in because I have an enterprise-level account with Claude and I've unticked that training box. I've asked it to look at what they asked for and the words they used, then to write my ICP up – who they are, what their problems are, what they want.
Once I've approved it, I've said, "Can you save my ICP to your memory?" Then it will remember that forever, which is so helpful. I've probably spent too long on this slide, but I think it's the most helpful thing I've ever done.
So let's talk a little bit about prompting. In the survey, I put in a question for you to have a go at writing a prompt, and the results were interesting.
100% of you said what you wanted – good start. It's always good to tell Claude or ChatGPT what you want. 69% of you gave some background, so that's some context, which was good.
54% named the audience it was going to, 31% pointed it towards the sources or files you wanted it to work from, and 23% of you set a length. 0% of you asked the AI to ask you questions, and 0% of you said, "Don't make anything up." I'm going to come to why that's relevant in a minute.
Generally, whenever I'm prompting, I try to use the SCALA framework. We've got Source, which is what to work from – what files, notes or emails you want it to look at to produce the thing you want. Then we've got Context, so who you are and what the background of the situation is.
We've got Aims, so what you want to achieve and what it should look like. Then we've got Length, which is how long it should be. Sometimes you type in a question, and it gives you an essay back when you just wanted a one-word answer, which is really annoying, so always tell it the length.
What format are you looking for – a PowerPoint, an Excel sheet, a Word document, an email? And then your Audience, so who it's for and what the tone should be.
That's a really good way to ensure that the first thing you get back is 90% of the way there. It's also a good way to save on tokens and to save the environment, which we like doing.
To give you an example, this was one of the prompts that was written out: "Write me a reminder email for this client outlining the need for them to choose their images. I've asked them three times now." I've done a little bit of work on editing that with the SCALA framework.
So I've said: "Source – use my last three emails to Jo [name made up], attached. Context – I can't finish the job until she picks her images, and I've asked her three times."
"Aims – get her choices by Friday without sounding cross." That's always good to put – without sounding cross.
"Length – under 120 words. Audience – a busy client who we want to keep, so warm but firm." It's a really good example of improving a little bit on that prompt to get exactly what you want at the end.
Another example of a prompt I saw in the survey was, "Help me write a B2B customer case study." Something that's good to do is get Claude to ask questions to clarify its understanding.
Sometimes it's quite hard to sit down and think, "OK, SCALA – what do I want, step by step?" And sometimes, I'll admit, even I just write a really short sentence like this one.
So to get it to help me further, I'll say something like, "Can you ask me questions to clarify what you think I'm thinking?" or, "Can you ask me questions about how you're going to get the result?" Then you can ping-pong your ideas with Claude until you've got closer to a refined idea or activity for it to do.
It's also good because getting Claude to ask you questions makes sure that it's not going to make things up, hallucinate, say something that's completely false or do something in a way that you wouldn't do it. So getting Claude to ask you clarifying questions after a prompt is a really, really smart thing to do.
Speaking of making things up, it is quite good at making things up if you don't keep tabs on it. There have been a few famous cases – one notably where a couple of solicitors asked ChatGPT, on this occasion, to help them fight their case in court.
It made up a bunch of court cases that didn't exist as examples, and they submitted them to the judge. They got a very strong rap on the knuckles for that and were in lots of trouble.
So to prevent it from hallucinating, it's always good to ask it to provide the sources of where it got the information from. Paul, I'm going to come to you in just a second.
Ask it where it got its stats from, and double-check those links and sources to make sure it's not some 15-year-old in his bedroom who's written a Reddit post that Claude has found – or, worse still, something that's just made up. That's a really good way to keep tabs on hallucinations.
Then we've got bias. If you think about all the people who've made these LLMs, a lot of them sit in Silicon Valley, which is a very specific type of person across most of the organisations, I think you'd argue. So all of these LLMs inherently have bias built into them, and you want to stop that happening.
So, again, sometimes you might want to say, "What am I missing? Can you give me the argument from the other side of this? My audience is this, so we need to make sure we're thinking from their point of view."
"Can you make sure, again, that you're not making anything up, and that you've kept my vision and my company mission in mind?" That's a really good way to prevent bias.
Just before I go on to the next section – Paul, I think you had a question?
Paul: Yes, it was me who put the question in about the case studies. I thought about putting in an existing case study as a way of training it. Would that also be a way of doing it?
Charlotte: Yes, absolutely. As long as you've toggled that privacy button so it's not being sent anywhere else, that's a really good way of training it.
You can put case studies in and say, "This is something that we did before. Can you please remember this format or this example?" That's a great way to train it and give it further context.
So let's talk about going beyond the chat. One of the things I find out from people when they say they use Claude or ChatGPT or Copilot all the time is that they just use the chat, or use it as a fancy Google, or just use it to draft emails, which is an example we've looked at.
But Claude is capable of so much more, which is why it's my favourite at the moment. That could change in six months – who knows? The rat race is on with the other LLMs.
So I'm going to talk through some of those things with you now. One of the things it can do is connect to thousands of different platforms that Claude has built in as partnerships.
To do that, you hit the plus button in the chat, go to Connectors, then Add connector, and you'll get a whole list of all the connectors it can possibly connect to. You choose one, and it will take you through the steps to connect it.
What do I mean by connector? I mean that you can connect it to a tool or software that you've got, and it can then take actions inside that tool or software on your behalf.
As you can see from my list, I've got Apollo connected, which, for anyone who doesn't know, is an email finder. Often when you go on LinkedIn, people's emails are completely incorrect, and Apollo is basically a database of lots of people's emails at different companies.
It's very helpful if you're trying to do lead finding, because I could ask Claude for someone's email and it would go and find it and bring it back to me. I've also got Asana plugged in, so I can type in a prompt that says, "Can you tell me what's outstanding on the Asana project board and who's overdue on their projects?" and it will come back to me with a list.
Or I can say, "We've just come off this call, and we've got this project to do – can you create a project board on Asana with all of the points from the call?" It just does it, which is very helpful. You can also connect it to Canva so it can create things in Canva with you for your branding.
I've connected my Gmail. That's a choice that's up to you to make, because it does mean you're sharing your Gmail with a third party, which is Claude. However, I believe that as long as you've ticked that privacy box, that should cover you.
If you want to be even safer, you might want to sign up for an enterprise-level membership, where you actually have a data protection agreement in place with Claude. So it's super-duper locked and safe.
I've shared my calendar too. Sometimes if I'm rushing to the car, which happens all the time because of my ADHD, I suddenly remember I haven't sent someone an invite, so I can voice note Claude on my phone.
I can say, "Can you check that email from Jonathan? We're supposed to meet, and he suggested some times, so can you check my calendar, see when I'm free, set an invite up and then send a confirmation email to him? Thanks, bye."
Then I get in my car and drive, and Claude does that for me in the background, which is amazing and so helpful.
Then I've got my Granola connector, which is my favourite note-taking tool. I highly recommend Granola – it's very, very good, and it's also ISO certified, if anyone's curious.
Having your connectors in there is so useful because that's where Claude can really go and act on things on your behalf, and I just love it. There are thousands of connectors you can add – this is just a list of the ones I have connected.
The other thing that most people don't know is that Claude can actually go into your browser, and I don't mean in a search kind of way. It can physically open the browser on your desktop, and it will have a little red line around it when it does that – or beige, or orange, or whatever colour you'd call Claude.
It can actually carry out tasks for you, which I love: I can set up a task in the browser, walk off and have a cup of tea, and come back to find it's all done for me. For that, I would quite literally type in the instructions: "Hey Claude, can you open the browser and do this thing?" Troy, did you have a question?
Troy: Just one question on the connector side of it – sorry, I was a bit slow.
One of the problems I have is that I've got different email accounts with different client companies. If I was to connect up Outlook and Gmail, would this allow me to create one calendar? Because that is, without a shadow of a doubt, my biggest frustration.
Charlotte: This is a question I get asked a lot and, as you probably know, Google and Microsoft don't like speaking to each other. You can connect both your Outlook and your Gmail calendars in here, and you can ask it to check both of them before it puts an appointment in.
It wouldn't connect them in a way that you can see both at the same time, but it will connect them in a way that it can go off and check both at the same time – I believe so, yes. Having said that, Microsoft is a bit cagey about the access it gives to Claude.
When you click on the Google connector, you'll see it's got a million actions it can do on your behalf, but when you click on the Microsoft one, there are about 10 actions it can do. So don't quote me on that, but maybe have a look and a play and see what you think. Alicia?
Alicia: Hi, I just wanted to touch on connectors and skills as well, if that's alright. I've got connectors set up, and I'm starting to scratch the surface of skills.
But I've found that when you open up to look for skills that might be useful for you, there's such a huge array that I really struggle to understand which ones are credible and which ones I should be avoiding. Do you have any top tips around that?
Charlotte: Yes. If it's OK by you, I might come back to that when I get to the skills section, but that's a very good point.
I would agree that suddenly Claude has got reams of skills when you hit that skills button, which it didn't used to have. So I will come back to that – please remind me if I don't, because of ADHD.
Here you can see I've given an example of where you might use a web search. This is a very basic example, but at the end of my prompt I've added, "Can you open my browser and find three to four suggestions for coffee shops in and around Covent Garden that are good places for a business meeting?"
Sometimes I use it for things like, "This is a list of 100 leads. Can you open the browser, research the leads on LinkedIn using my browser tool, find these pieces of information and then populate this spreadsheet for me?" It will then open my browser and do that in real time for me, which is very helpful, and there's a whole bunch of things you can get it to do on your behalf by opening the browser.
Just a quick note: sometimes people get stuck with the browser because the first time you ever do it, it will probably come back and say, "I don't have the browser tool." So you need to go to claude.com/chrome and download the browser tool.
Once you've downloaded it – it's a plug-in – you'll see it appear in the top right-hand corner of Chrome. You need to click into it and log in, and that's the only time you'll ever have to do that. It's just to give it access to your Chrome.
I'm going to move on now to talk about Claude Design briefly, because Claude Design is amazing. Lots of people have tried creating PDFs and bits and bobs within Claude, and it works OK, but what's very exciting now is that there's a separate section for Claude Design.
In Claude Design, you can create anything from leaflets to PDFs to proposals to blogs to websites to apps. It can create absolutely anything, and all you have to do is plug in the branding you want it to use.
If you've got brand guidelines, you can share them with it. If you don't have those but you have a website, you can just share your website, and it will take all of the assets from your website and put them in this branded thing.
It's very useful, I love it, and it really pays attention to design principles. Alicia?
Alicia: Sorry. I've got mine connected to Canva, and I just wondered – if I've already got my brand kit built into Canva, can I take that from Canva and use it?
Charlotte: Yes, it can. You can either use the connector in the normal chat, or you can create some stuff in Claude Design and then select the option to hand it over.
If you just bear with me a moment, I'm going to share my screen to show you where Design is. This is where your normal chat is, and Design is on the left-hand side.
It is actually moving in November or December to be in the main screen here, so you could just type in, "Can you use Claude Design to..." and I believe it will also be here as well. But for now, I'm going to show you where it currently is, which is where I prefer to use it.
You can go to Visit standalone home page, and you'll see a prompt box where you can drag and drop your branding. You can type in something like any of these examples – make a pitch deck, describe an app idea or whatever – and it will create the things you need.
You can also create a design system, which means you don't have to keep repeating yourself every time you come back here. To do that, you click into Design system, then click Create design system, and click Create here.
It will then take you through the steps to create that design system, and you just need to describe what you want it to be. Maybe it's a design system for your website, your PDFs or your proposals, because I'm sure whenever you send a proposal it always looks similar – it's just the information that changes.
Then you can drag and drop example files into this box, along with any fonts, logos or assets. You can probably ignore these top three unless you're into your coding, as that's when those come into play. For now, you probably just need to upload here, give it any other notes and then save.
Once that's saved, the next time you come back and want to use it again, pick your design system, and it will be saved here. You can decide which one you want and then tell it what you want to make, which is very, very useful.
I won't show any examples because, unfortunately, most of my examples relate to clients and are confidential, but you get the idea. I'm just going to go back to my PowerPoint – I've just lost it, where's it gone? Here we go.
So Claude Design is amazing, I love it and it's fantastic. What I didn't show you just then was where the Canva button is, which I'll do quickly now.
If you're in Design – let's choose this one – you go to Share and Export, and there's a button to export it to Canva just there. So that's Claude Design, and it's very, very helpful.
Let's talk about Claude skills now. Oh my gosh, this time is going so fast, everyone – sorry.
When you first get Claude, you want to think of it – I don't know if any of you have seen Up, but there's a scout in it called Russell who rings the doorbell and says a lot of information very quickly. That's what I imagine Claude is like as a person.
It knows the encyclopaedia of the world, it's got access to the internet, it knows everything, and it's really eager to tell you all of the information at once. So it's up to you to teach it how to work in the way you want it to work. It's a bit like having an intern on their first day.
If they come in and you turn around and say, "Can you go and do my invoicing, please? Thanks, bye," they're going to look at you and think, "Is it in Xero? Is it in Sage? I don't know how to do that."
So on their first day, you would sit with them and explain, "When we do the invoicing, this is how we do it," and you'd give them those steps. Then the next time you say, "Can you do the invoicing?" they're going to turn around and say, "Yes, I've got it – you go and do what you need to do."
That's where you want Claude to get to, to save you time, but to get there you need to teach it how to do those things. That's where skills come in.
Skills are basically a list of instructions to teach it the recipe or formula for how you'd like to do things. Hopefully you appreciate my IKEA instructions here, and hopefully it's easier to put together than IKEA furniture is.
Humans are, as mentioned, really bad at taking and giving instructions, so the solution is to get Claude to help you write those instructions for itself. This is where you find skills: you go to Plus, hit Skills, and they'll come up there.
You can also type a forward slash, and it will bring up all of the skills. Recently, it's been bringing up many, many skills, which I'll go through in a minute on the screen share to show you how to know which ones you should be selecting or not.
This is basically where the skills live, and if you ever want to update a skill, you can hit Manage skills and select the one you want. So this is generally how I get it to help me write a skill.
Instead of trying to sit there and think up the exact instructions from A to Z, I'll give it a brief. I'll say, "Hey Claude, can you help me write a skill for whatever the thing is? To do this thing, I normally do these things."
I'll give it some instructions, and then I'll say, "Ask me questions before writing the skill, and do not guess or presume anything." Those parts are really important, because you don't want it to guess anything at all – you want it to do exactly what you've said.
You definitely want it to ask you questions, because we might think we've given really clear instructions, but often we humans miss out bits that we just assume someone knows. Getting it to ask you questions is a really smart way to develop that skill into something it can actually use.
Sometimes it will ask me questions that make me think, "Oh, I didn't even think of that – thank you for asking," which is great. Once you've answered all its questions, it will pop up and say, "Great, I've written the skill. Here it is," and there'll be a little grey box that says Save skill, which you just hit.
It will also tell you what it's named the skill, and if you want to change the name, that's fine – just tell it. The next time you want to use it, it should either detect automatically that that's what you want to use, which it's sometimes very good at, or, if it forgets, just type a forward slash and find the name of the skill you created.
I'm going to give you a practical example of a skill now, and this is one you'll all love: "Hey Claude, can you help me write a skill for getting better at sales calls? I want you to read my transcripts any time I ask and give me feedback on how I can improve."
Great, we all type that in, and we're all going to become sales experts overnight, right? Unfortunately not – if that was the case, I'd be a millionaire, and sadly I'm not yet.
That's quite a generic prompt for a skill, because there are so many advisers in the sales space. I'm sure some of you have heard of Alex Hormozi, and some of you might have heard of Sheila Bella. There are sales books, sales frameworks – there's everything.
Claude isn't going to know from this prompt whose framework you want to follow to get better at sales. Who says – is it Jimmy down the road, Sabri Suby or Alex Hormozi?
So this is where your prompts need to get better, and you need to figure out who you're going to reference. A better prompt might be something like this.
For those of you who don't know, Sheila Bella is on Instagram as "the real Sheila Bella". She's a services sales coach, and she's fantastic, so I've asked it to use her framework.
I said, "Hey, can you help me write a skill for getting better at sales calls? At the start of the week, I want you to check my calendar for sales calls I had last week, then read my transcripts from those calls and give me feedback on how I can improve this week."
"Please mark me according to the framework of the real Sheila Bella, as if she would mark it, and provide honest feedback. Do not sugarcoat it." That's a much better prompt for writing that skill, because I've given it a lot more reference for what I actually want to achieve and whose framework to follow.
You can apply that across the board – to marketing, to logistics, to operations. I'm sure we've all read books or blogs or followed industry leaders who are really good at one thing.
They're the people you probably want to be basing your skills or instructions on, because they're successful. That's down to you to decide who to follow, but I hope that helps with skills.
One thing I am going to say, though, is about your voice. One of the biggest complaints I hear is, "I tried ChatGPT and I tried Claude, and it just sounds like AI and I don't like it," or, "I keep receiving these AI emails and it's really made me worried about using AI." That's totally understandable.
To solve that, we have to program a tone of voice skill. That means that any time I'm getting it to write something, it's going to refer to my tone of voice skill, which helps it to not use overused AI phrases or words.
We've all seen those LinkedIn posts that say, "This really hits home," or, "That generates real leverage" – insert generic, non-opinionated comment here. We've all seen them, and they make my skin crawl.
The way to stop that is to program your tone of voice, and again, to do that, you're going to ask Claude to ask you questions. So I've put, "Can you help me create a tone of voice skill? Please ask me questions and do not assume anything."
"I'm also keen to avoid em dashes" – ugh, when there are 10 of them in one paragraph – "and words like 'leverage', and sentences such as 'This hits home'. No jargon, no fluff." You can make yourself a dictionary of the things you see that you never want it to use.
You can even Google what the current overused AI phrases are, because those will change as well – in six months' time, there'll be different overused phrases. So it's something you want to keep updating, but this will help you form that tone of voice skill.
For context, my tone of voice skill is five pages long. I've spent a lot of time refining it and getting it to not use those AI-isms – AI slop-isms. So I'd definitely advise taking your time over the tone of voice skill.
Some other things you might want to experiment with creating skills for are weekly socials: "Can you create a series of social media posts based on the information I upload, my best-performing posts and my ICP, which you've already programmed in?" Or, "Can you help me research and prepare prospect briefings so I know who I'm going to speak to?"
There was one prompt that came in on the survey that was, "I need to set up a PA system to help me do daily tasks like invoice filing and email checking." That's definitely something you could get a skill created for and get it to interview you.
You can make a skill for anything, and I would advise using them when it's something you do on a repetitive basis that you don't want to keep having to program every single time you come back to it. As an example here, somebody asked for it to create carousel posts.
For this, I'd say, "Can you read my past posts and work out which performed best and why? Look at the hooks, the structure and the tone. Use the ideal customer profile from your memory – who my ideal client is and what they struggle with."
"For each carousel, write five hook options and copy for seven slides, using 25 words each." Then I've put, "Use my Canva connector and Claude Design to create the visuals in my brand, and then ask me any questions before you write the skill. Do not guess or presume."
That's a good way to get it to help you create a skill for your social media posts. Alicia, you've got your hand up – is it because I forgot to talk about which skills to select?
Alicia: No, it was actually about the last slide, but this one's relevant too. You said, "Read my past posts", but from my understanding – because I've tried really hard to find a solution for this – trying to read posts from social platforms seems to be blocked.
Do you have any tips if there's a way around this, or how to optimise it? One of my key admin areas is tracking content performance and identifying trends and hooks that work consistently, to develop that skill around content creation.
Charlotte: This is an issue I come across a lot, and usually that's when I'll say, "Can you use my browser to read those past posts?" It will then open them up and look through all of them in real time in your browser.
That's the only shortcut I've found because you're right – it does seem to block it when you try and get it to read posts without that browser tool. I don't know if you've tried that already, but hopefully that helps.
Alicia: I have, yes. I suppose my question is whether it breaches those social platforms' agreements, because as I understand the terms, you're in breach if you're using automated access. Would the browser class as that?
Charlotte: It could, but it doesn't tend to pick it up. I think the risk is really where people use it to scan 100 posts every hour, every day – that's when it's going to think, "Is this a bot?"
But because it's in the browser and it's physically moving the mouse around, if you set a limit – say, "Look at the past 50 posts I did and pick the three best performing" – that's normally fine. Anything past that, maybe be a bit more careful.
If you just do small amounts, it's normally fine. I've been fine so far, and I do it quite a lot – I don't know if I should say that on the recording.
Alicia: Can I follow up on that? You have to have your desktop open to do that – you can't do it through your mobile, right?
Charlotte: Yes, exactly. Valeria?
Valeria: Hi. I put it in the chat, but I work with people with learning disabilities, and it's all around AI and data protection.
The local authority and the CQC all tend to prefer Copilot, but somebody said that Claude is in Copilot. I have a licence for Microsoft and Copilot, so how do you access Claude through that, or is there a link between them?
Charlotte: What a lot of people don't realise is that Copilot is actually a wrapper, and in the back end it runs on [ChatGPT – unclear in recording] and Claude. But that doesn't mean it has the same functions as if you were using Claude as a whole.
That's because lots of organisations feel that getting a tool to use your browser freely is risky, and therefore they don't allow it, which is also why Copilot doesn't allow that yet. So yes, they are linked, but only in terms of Claude being one of the engines that powers the back end of Copilot.
If your organisation prefers you to use Copilot only, I definitely suggest sticking to that. Copilot is fantastic in its own way and has lots of its own capabilities, but I won't go through them all now because we're on the Claude session.
Again, it's about really getting to grips with how to use it and where things are, to get the most from it. Martin?
Martin: Hi. I was just going to add, when the question came up about using Chrome to do the social media stuff – I have been slapped on the wrist a couple of times for it.
But I also made sure that my Claude acted like a human, took time between each click, didn't click the button in the same place many times, and so on. So it can be done.
Charlotte: So you got stuff flagged, then you made those changes, and it's been OK since then?
Martin: Yes, only because Claude went a little bit silly and opened 40 profiles in about five minutes.
Charlotte: Yes, no one's ever going to do that. You've definitely got to include that prompt to say, "Act like a human and space these things out."
I've got a client who uses Claude to draft his daily comments, and then he approves and posts them. He was worried about that, but we set it up so that it does it at various points in the day, slowly and a few at a time, and it changes the time and the number of posts every day.
Martin: I'd love to talk about that, because I do the drafting and then post manually, but it's a bind keeping up with everything, that's for sure.
Charlotte: Absolutely. We can chat after, and I can show you how it works.
So we've just talked about this: it's using your tone of voice skill for the carousel, your ICP in its memory and your best prompts. I'm conscious of time, but we're nearly at the end anyway, so that's fine.
Somebody asked about getting Claude to act as your PA, and I think that's such a great example of how you could use a skill. So feel free to copy this – I've done a little example of what you could put in as a skill.
Actually, this is a scheduled task. When you're creating a skill, you can ask it to make this thing happen at the same time every day, week or month. To do that, you can either go into Scheduled tasks in the top left of Claude, or while you're writing the skill, you can just say, "I want this to happen on this cadence."
In this example, I've said, "Every weekday at 8 am, can you check my inbox and flag only the emails that need me today? Can you save new invoices and receipts into my finance folder in Drive and log them?" Or, if you've got Xero connected, you could ask it to save them automatically into Xero as draft invoices.
"Can you draft replies to routine emails for me to approve, but never send anything? Can you give me one short list of what needs me today, what's done for me and what can wait?"
"Then can you ask me any questions before you write the skill? Do not guess or presume anything." That's a really good example of a scheduled skill that can run every day for you.
When you run a business, I think you'd all agree that we wear multiple hats, to the point where sometimes I feel like I've got octopus arms. So there are many skills we could create to help us day-to-day.
I'd love for you to go away after this session and have a think – in fact, let's put it in the chat. Across these areas of your business – sales, operations, finances, social and marketing – what kind of skills can you think of that you might go away and look at creating today?
There are some examples here, but I'd love to see in the chat if you have any ideas for skills that would be helpful in your day-to-day. You don't need to write out the prompt – just write out what you'd like the skill to do.
"Create summaries for meetings" – that's a great one. Martin, you've got some up and running already – fantastic. "Tone of voice" and "Marketing and strategy" – fabulous.
"Really want social-related skills to improve efficiencies for content creation" – fantastic, hopefully you can use some of what we discussed today to plug those in. Jess: "Create a case study to add to my website" – amazing.
"Inbox zero, daily schedule, finances – can I connect it to my credit card statement?" That's a really good question. I guess you could upload your credit card statements if you wanted to, but I'd suggest redacting the sort code, account number and anything sensitive before you do that.
There are also some custom MCPs that you can plug into some banks if you want to. I'm probably not going to advise further on that one because there's a lot to add, but there are custom MCPs you can plug into the back end of the likes of Monzo or Revolut to pull some information through.
"Proposals and quotes" – I use that a lot. "Creating content for website and socials", "Marketing social media content" – so many great ideas.
Oh, I love this one: "Data analyst creating analysis on your SEO and Google reports to see your ranking." That's a really nice one. "ICP finder", "Sales call review", "LinkedIn post drafts" – brilliant.
It sounds like you've got loads of ideas for skills that you're going to go home and create after this, which is very exciting. As mentioned earlier, it will often take you a little while to build a skill.
So for those of you who haven't already got skills working for you, I've built a few for you to download and start using immediately. If you've already got skills up and working, this probably isn't useful to you, but if you don't, you're most welcome to use the ones I've created.
As mentioned, the tone of voice one is fairly intense – it's quite a few pages. All of these skills have been created so that once you download them, they ask you questions to make sure the skill is personalised to you, but the basic bones are there.
What I've done for these skills, just for you especially, is cram in as much of my 12 years of operational knowledge as possible, so I do hope they'll be really useful. If you want them, you can scan this QR code, and it will take you to the site to download them.
If you use this code here, you get 50% off because you're from Enterprise Nation. I'd love to make them free, but they honestly take me too long to work on to make them free. If you'd like to try those skills out, that's where they are.
I'd love to get some questions now. Michelle, I think you've got a question for me.
Michelle: Hi. Obviously I'm paying £20 a month, and I'm wondering, in terms of tokens and usage, what the limit is. Is there a difference between Enterprise and Pro in terms of usage, or is it just that if you use it more, you'll have to increase your tier?
Charlotte: On Enterprise, you could actually still have a basic tier in terms of usage. Enterprise is more for having that data protection agreement in place, or if you have a wider team and want to be able to share chats, information and projects.
In terms of usage, yes – if you run out, you can either do a little top-up or go on to the next tier, and it's just based on how much you're using it. For context, and this is probably because I'm an AI consultant and trainer, I'm on the Max plan, which is about £90 a month, and I never run out.
You can also get one that's £200 a month, so I'm not even on the top one, and I don't run out. I basically use Claude to run my entire life – God forbid it ever disappears.
Michelle: OK, that's great. Thank you.
Charlotte: No problem. Alicia?
Alicia: Sorry, back to the skills question again. I'm creating my own skills, but I appreciate there's a huge repository of skills that already exist that could be leveraged instead of starting from scratch. So it's just about their credibility and how to assess that.
Charlotte: Yes, absolutely. Let me just grab my Claude again.
As I was saying earlier, if you want to bring your skills up, you can hit the forward slash, and as you can see, a whole bunch of skills come up here. All of the ones that come up here should be ones that are Claude-approved already, so those are fine.
But there are also skills and plugins available online. Plugins, for anyone who doesn't know, are usually a combination of several skills at once, and they can be put into Claude Code – you go to the top left here, select Claude Code, and then you'd put it in here.
There's a whole repository online, which I'll show you very quickly. It's up to you whether to trust them or not, but the good thing is that a lot of them are rated.
Claude has also now added a step that checks before you install. So now when I try to install a plugin or a skill I've taken from the internet, it reads through it and makes sure it's safe.
If I was worried, I could also say to Claude, "Can you read through this and make sure it's safe?" I'd probably read through it myself as a human anyway, just to make sure there's nothing in there that's going to steer me off course or that's vulnerable.
I think you'd know pretty quickly when you're reading the plain English stuff. The plugins maybe less so, because some of them are written in code, so if it was a plugin, I would go based on its ratings on the GitHub website.
In a minute, it will find this link for me, and I'll show it on the screen. I hope that answers the question a little bit more. Michelle?
Michelle: I just wanted to point out that the course you gave us is coming up as free when you put the code in.
Charlotte: OK, well, you can have it for free then. I think I made it free for somebody who paid for a more expensive Claude course from me, and then I forgot to change it back. But I guess you can have it for free – never mind.
So this is the GitHub site here, and this is where a lot of the plugins are available. If you go here, you can download the code and plug it in.
Again, that's something where you can check the ratings and make sure it's highly rated. This one has got a lot of stars, so it would be fine, but there are some from lesser-known people that you might want to keep an eye on and not install unless they've got those ratings. Any more questions?
Caitriona: Thank you, Charlotte. If anyone has any final questions, please do ask them now as we're coming towards the end of the session. In the meantime, I've got a question here: looking ahead, what AI skills do you think founders should be developing now to stay ahead of the curve?
Charlotte: I think definitely a base-level understanding of how to write a good prompt, what you should and shouldn't be putting into those prompts in terms of data and governance, and understanding hallucinations and bias. A lot of the other stuff on top of that is just noise or new things that are coming out.
As long as you understand the basics, that's the most important thing, because from there you can make your decisions as a leader on everything else.
Caitriona: Brilliant, thank you. Mark has posted in the chat: "If I've been using Copilot and want to move to Claude, is there a way of migrating Copilot learnings into Claude so I don't have to start from scratch?"
Charlotte: Yes, there are a few videos on YouTube that I'd suggest you follow. I won't go through it all now, but if you hop onto YouTube and search for how to move your data across, there are a few videos that will help you with that.
Caitriona: Brilliant, thank you. Then Chris has asked: "I've been using Claude to build an app designed to support local businesses in an Instagram style. The app is due to be released soon, and I'm trying to get my head around the business side of things – how am I best finding ways to get Claude to help?"
Charlotte: I guess I would just ask it. I'd say, "This is the thing I'm trying to achieve." If you can show it the app, that's even better – give it screenshots, or show it the browser link and get it to open the browser and have a look through it.
Tell it who your ideal customer is going to be, when you're launching, how much money it's cost you and how much money you need to make. Give it as much information as you can, and tell it how you want it to act to help you.
Do you want to get the most out of it financially, in terms of customer happiness, or in terms of how it runs? There are all the different lenses you could look at it through. If you're not sure, ask it to act as a consultant and look through it for you – and specify the type of consultant as well.
Caitriona: Thank you. We've come to the end of the session, but just to summarise today: if attendees could take away just one thing from today's workshop, what would you like it to be?
Charlotte: Download the skills in the next five minutes before I change the code back to 50% off – download them all, they're free. But I would say: just keep curious. That's the main thing.
Keep curious, keep learning, keep questioning, keep asking. You've all done the right thing by turning up to the workshop today, and the only way to learn AI – or anything – is to be curious.
So the biggest thing is just to be curious. If you're doing something repetitive on a daily or weekly basis, always think, "Actually, can AI do this for me?"
Caitriona: Brilliant, thank you so much – that's a great place to leave the session. Could you put the slide back up for the course, please? There you go.
I'll just give everyone a second to scan that, but thank you so much, Charlotte, for your workshop today – it's been absolutely brilliant. Thanks to everyone for joining us today.
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