Happy Thursday,

AI isn’t slowing down—and neither should we. This newsletter is your shortcut to practical ideas and smarter strategies to grow, lead, and adapt as tech reshapes our industry.

To take it one step further, I’ve launched a new YouTube series. Each month, I’m sharing quick, tactical videos showing how advisors can use tools like ChatGPT to save time, think better, and scale more efficiently—starting with the work you're already doing.

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The AI Edge

AI Application:

Claude Design

Overview

Claude Design is a canvas-based design environment built directly into Claude — accessible through the web browser (not the desktop app). Think of it as a design studio where Claude does the building while you direct the vision. You bring a document, describe what you want, and watch it turn raw data into a visual presentation.

It seems like a Canva alternative.

What separates this from just asking Claude to make slides is the interface itself. There's a chat panel on one side and a live canvas on the other. Claude can read your uploaded files, reason through the content, and generate a structured, designed deck — speaker notes included. It sets up its own to-do list before it starts building, works through each section methodically, and checks its own accuracy against the source material. The whole thing runs in the background while you're doing something else.

It's not finished software. There are formatting quirks and a few moments where it does something you didn't ask for. But the core output — a polished, client-ready presentation built from a financial plan spreadsheet — is genuinely impressive for a first pass.

How to apply Claude Design to the business today:

• Convert financial plan output into client-facing decks. Drop in a multi-tab spreadsheet from your planning software and let Claude translate it into a presentation your clients can actually follow. Less time in PowerPoint, more time in front of clients.

• Generate speaker notes automatically. Every slide comes with talking points built from the underlying data. Good scaffolding for newer advisors or for prep before a review meeting.

• Visualize retirement income sequencing. Claude interpreted the planning data and built a multi-stage chart showing portfolio withdrawals, pension income, and Social Security layering over time — without being asked. That's a conversation that's hard to have with a spreadsheet.

• Use as a review meeting prep tool. Build a draft deck a day before the meeting, refine the pieces that need work, and present directly from the browser. No export-import cycle required.

Advanced:

• Brand it. Claude Design supports uploading brand files. With a few style guidelines, you can push it toward your firm's visual identity instead of the default design system.

• Build templates from strong outputs. When you get a deck you're happy with, use it as a reference prompt for future builds. Tell Claude to follow the same structure and visual logic for the next client.

• Pair with Cowork for end-to-end planning workflows. Build the financial plan in Claude Cowork, hand the output directly to Claude Design, and go from analysis to presentation inside one ecosystem without moving files between platforms.

• Iterate client communication formats. The same underlying plan can generate a full review deck, a one-page summary, or a section-specific visual — just by re-prompting with a different output instruction.

What could this application mean for the future of our business?

There's a version of this that becomes a normal part of how advisors communicate with clients, not because the slides are perfect, but because the friction of producing them drops low enough that they actually get made.

Right now, a lot of the visual work in client communication gets skipped. Not because advisors don't see the value, but because building it takes time that usually doesn't exist. A tool that turns a planning spreadsheet into a 16-slide presentation in 12 minutes, while you're checking email, changes that math.

The more interesting thing is what Claude chose to visualize without being told. The retirement income sequencing chart, showing how different income sources layer in across stages of retirement, that's not a simple data translation. That's interpretation. Claude read the plan, understood the narrative, and made a design decision about how to tell that story.

That suggests something worth paying attention to: the work is shifting from "can I make a good-looking slide" to "can I direct an AI that already has good design instincts." The advisor's job in this workflow is judgment, knowing when the output is right and when to push for something different. That's a skill set worth developing now, before the tools get much better than they already are.

See Claude Design in action:

I'd never actually used Claude Design before this video — I'd seen it, but never run it myself. So what you're watching is a genuine first pass: uploading a fake financial plan, describing what I wanted, and seeing what came back 12 minutes later.

What surprised me wasn't just that it built a 16-slide deck with speaker notes. It was a specific chart it created without prompting — breaking down retirement income in three stages. That's something I explain to families all the time, and Claude just... built it from the spreadsheet data.

There are rough edges. I'll show you those too. But watch the video to see what "good enough to present from" looks like when you've done exactly zero design work yourself.

-Matt