I got a confession to make, Debs. I actually hate PowerPoint.

We've been really putting it to the test over recent episodes, seeing if it rises to the challenge of modeling in Excel.

But now we're going to give it a new challenge.

We're going to use it for PowerPoint.

When I was using Opus to pull these slides together, honestly, they look like crap. So I'm really hopeful that Fable is going to tackle this problem here.

I think this is a superb use of AI in investment banking workflow.

Today, we're going to continue on our theme of testing out AI in finance, and we're going to put Claude to the work in PowerPoint today instead of Excel and just start simple and see how well it does building a simple company overview.

Oh, I love it. We've been really putting it to the test over recent episodes, seeing if it rises to the challenge of modeling in Excel.

But now we're going to give it a new challenge.

We're going to use it for PowerPoint.

What skill are we going to challenge it with? We're going to start easy today.

In proper format, we're going to give Claude a template and we're going to say, "Hey, just produce a company overview on a company of our choice." I think we're going to choose NVIDIA. We've been talking about AI a lot, so it makes sense for Claude to produce a company overview for a company involved in that space.

So let's put it to the work, or let's put it to the test rather, and see how we go.

Excellent. Now, experience tells me we should dive in, build the prompt, and get it running, and then maybe we can chat a little bit about company overviews whilst we're waiting for Claude to do its work.

Exactly.

Having a look in your screen, I can see you're using Fable 5.

It's still your preferred model, is it, in Claude? It has become my preferred model for everything.

I haven't tried it in PowerPoint yet, and while it's building, we'll talk about some of the issues I've had with other models in PowerPoint, because I have used them quite a bit recently. So I am really, really hoping that Fable does a nicer job than Opus and some of the other ones just because thus far it hasn't been great.

So I'm curious to see how well this works.

I'm curious. Just to confirm, we've done no test runs.

We have no idea what it's going to show us, so looking forward to this. Okay, so nice, simple prompt that you're creating there.

All right. Literally said, "Build an investment banking style company overview for NVIDIA. Keep this to one page and use the template provided." Excellent.

Okay, let's go.

Right. Okay. So why are we doing this challenge? How important in your view is this as an element of investment banking, creating a company overview? Well, let's talk about creating a company overview and also just using PowerPoint more generally to put together, whether it's pitch books or investment committee memos.

You know what? I'm actually going to say people probably continue using PowerPoint longer than they use Excel, just in terms of editing investment committee memos, that kind of thing, because once you become a VP or ED, whatever the kind of title is at your firm, you stop using Excel as much day to day, but you always tinker with and make changes to IC memos.

So PowerPoint as a skill in finance is generally a pretty important one.

Now, admittedly, when you're a junior banker, you spend a lot of time making everything look absolutely perfect, and that's one of the things that I remember about late nights at Lehman Brothers or early days of Ares, putting IC memos together, just making sure everything was perfectly lined up. I don't know.

I think this was probably from literally "Industry" season one, where that investment banking analyst...

I'm not saying I was working this hard, but that investment banking analyst literally dropped dead at his desk, but one of the scenes before was him lining up charts on the page, and I'm like, that scene stuck out in my mind because I'm like, I used to spend so much time doing that stuff when I was a first-year analyst.

So the fact that we've potentially got tools to take some of that kind of pain out of the job, I think is a really interesting thing.

Absolutely. When you said "Industry" season one, I was thinking, "Where's Graham going with this?" I mean, there's some really interesting scenes- ... throughout all of the seasons. But yeah, completely.

I think we've all had kind of late-night moments where we've been struggling to meet a deadline.

And yeah, PowerPoint kind of is your friend in terms of helping communicate with clients, with investors. It kind of helps us to bring all of our analysis together.

As you say, it's kind of almost the tool that you use more when you become a little bit more senior because you're no longer doing all the Excel calculations, but you are then responsible for sharing ideas with the client- Exactly ... be it investment recommendations or an M&A transaction, a private equity transaction, and summarizing your views in a way that the client or investor can understand. And that's a skill in itself, the communication skill.

And I really like what you said there about this almost probably being more enduring as a skill than Excel, because we still need to have those conversations. We still need to be able to communicate with our clients, even if there's a lot of automation in the underlying calculations.

Yeah.

But yeah, great if Claude could do some of the heavy lifting on the actual PowerPoint, because I don't know about you, but trying to align text, trying to align boxes in PowerPoint, I feel like I'm definitely done with that, particularly late at night when you've got a deadline to try and meet.

I got a confession to make, Debs. I actually hate PowerPoint.

Oh, yes. I think we all do.

There's something kind of, I think, fun and interesting about the analytical skill set you build in Excel, but I don't derive any pleasure at all from using PowerPoint.

And Admittedly, there have been a few times recently where I've been pulling materials together. I had this class that came together very late in the day and was pretty new.

So I was pulling PowerPoint slides together, and I was trying to use Claude as a really helpful resource to do that.

And when I was using Opus to pull these slides together, honestly, they look like crap. So I'm really hopeful that Fable is going to tackle this problem here because I just don't want to be doing PowerPoint myself anymore. I don't know about you.

Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. We used PowerPoint in a slightly different context. In research, we were using it to come up with a slide deck that summarized our investment thesis and our view on stocks so that we could then use that to turn the pages with clients.

So it's similar in the sense that you're trying to aggregate all your analysis into a nice digestible format. And we definitely had the same issues in terms of trying to make sure that everything was well formatted, all the numbers were consistent, and when you change a number in your analysis, you're changing it in your slide deck as well. All of that felt very clunky.

I know that- Yeah ... you can link numbers in PowerPoint to Excel, which helps improve it, but ultimately, accuracy and layout is really key in PowerPoint. So we'll see how Claude gets on.

Like you, I'm a little bit anxious to see how it copes.

So far, my experiences haven't been amazing in PowerPoint compared to Excel.

But yeah, let's see how Fable gets on. What's it showing on the screen now, Greg? This thus far is at least looking more professional than the stuff I was looking at literally just a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

Whether anything on the page is actually correct or not, we'll see in a sec.

But in terms of the structure and layout, it's doing an okay job. Yeah. So we got a few main sections on the page.

We got company overview, key facts, recent developments, summary financials. Let's see, world's leading accelerated computing company providing full stack infrastructure powering AI at data center scale. As a one-line overview about what NVIDIA does, that is pretty impactful, right? We've got just- Yeah ... the high-level company facts, ticker, where it's founded, headquarters, the CEO, some recent news, and summary financials. We've got, let's see, 2024, 2025, and 2026 actual.

I don't know if we have-- One thing that I would appreciate here, okay, fiscal year end, last Sunday of January.

Because I see 2026 actual, and of course, my first thought is what date is this as of? Is this actually an actual, or is it looked at some kind of one-year forecast? Yeah.

But so far, this looks right. Got revenue growth trajectory. We've got some numbers on bar charts. It would be helpful to have a revenue CAGR here.

But that's- Yeah, I guess from my- That's something that you can just, with a simple prompt, just say, "Add a revenue CAGR to the top of this bar chart." And it's not- ...

done, so maybe that's still coming.

Maybe it's still coming. I guess a high-level bit of feedback from me, we usually see the company overview as four quadrants and try and use that to highlight different aspects that altogether provide a really comprehensive view of what the company does and how it's performing at the moment. The left-hand side, we've got recent developments and an overview.

That's fine, but we often squish that into one quadrant to allow a little bit more narrative about maybe there's partners that it works with, some of the key customers. We usually see that.

On the right-hand side, yeah, with the financials for a public company, we would definitely want to include forecast numbers as well as actuals.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And that chart at the bottom, it's doing nothing for me at the moment because it's just literally showing your revenue line from the table in a bar chart.

What I'd really like to see is some kind of segment analysis, get an idea of the relative contributions that those segments provide to the total revenue numbers. And even if they had that as a stacked bar, it provides a little bit more information than it is in the table.

I always think you only need to use the real estate once on a slide.

You're basically duplicating information there.

You're not adding anything new with that bar chart.

So- Yeah ... I have to say that at the moment, has it finished its thought process? I think it has.

As a first cut, it's okay, but it's lacking the color that you really want to get a sense of NVIDIA's business, particularly the segments.

And we know that NVIDIA is hugely important in terms of, or it's selling a lot into data centers.

That's a key segment for it. I think about 90% of their revenues are selling the chips for data centers. And we can't see any of that, at least in numerical analysis on that slide.

Yeah, I think that's all fair and valid. My take here is on the basis of a-- We didn't ask for any of that upfront, right? We just said- No ... "Produce a company overview." Actually, compared to some of the output I was seeing literally with this same template a few weeks ago, I was seeing-- Just zooming out for a second and thinking about this from a structural perspective and some of the work that I think makes PowerPoint really annoying, just in terms of making everything look good, not just lining things up, but just having things being visually balanced with font sizes and sizes of- Mm ... tables and white space on a page, that kind of thing.

That's where I was seeing real issues before. And if I just zoom out and look at the page here in terms of how it's used the space, actually, I think this is pretty decent, because a part of this job, or part of the PowerPoint job anyway, is making stuff look nice and look professional.

Mm-hmm.

The fact that I think we've delivered a lot more with this here compared to a few weeks ago, I think is a really good step in the right direction. And I have no doubt if we did a couple of things, we could get this in a much better shape.

And one of those things for me would be, this is probably an argument where if you're producing something like this on a repeating basis, you produce some kind of Claude skill, and it says, "All right.

Here's the company overview template for my preference, for my firm," whatever the case may be. And to your point, you're going to include forward estimates. You're going to include some kind of segmental revenue breakdown for companies where that's appropriate and whatever other stuff that you're looking to pull on the page. That way, when you produce a simple prompt, saying, "Produce this one pager on NVIDIA," it's already got that skill to hand and goes through and builds correctly.

But also I'm sure if we prompted here and said, "Hey, provide this revenue on a segmental basis," it would just do it. Right? Yeah.

So as a starting point, I'm getting happier with this, and I wish a few weeks ago I had more Fable credits in my token bank because I just didn't.

So it was a lot more manual fine-tuning to get stuff looking the way I want it to. But from my perspective, at least on the PowerPoint pain points, just getting stuff looking nice- Mm-hmm ... and well formatted, that's one of the areas where I think these tools, at least today, I hope can be really helpful, and it feels like we're moving in that direction.

And Graeme, one thing that you mentioned there I think really important is the use of skills, which in my view are kind of pre-prepared prompts almost that you can then recycle.

Because we're now teaching a lot with AI in the classroom.

Yeah.

We're introducing how AI is used in key workflows across investment banking, and we know that efficiency's important, and it's not just about efficiency in terms of getting AI to do some of the key work, but it's also about how you prompt in an efficient way. And I know in all of our episodes so far, we've kept our prompts really simple. But when you're at your desk, you can't go through all of these iterations that we have been experiencing during some of our episodes where you go back and say, "Actually, can you change this? Can you improve this?" That you really want the first attempt, the first cut to be really robust. And having a skill- Yeah ... a pre-prepared prompt that you then save into your skill bank, you can then keep reusing that. So every time you come back to your company overview, you have that pre-prepared, and you save yourself that time.

And this is what we're seeing is being used in investment banks, isn't it? The use of these skills already is, and you share them with your team.

It's not just you- Yeah ... that hosts those skills, is it? Yeah, exactly.

And I think as we explore this topic deeper, and as we explore how to use these tools properly, and for everyone's benefit in upcoming episodes, we'll start putting out some content on actually not just what do you get from this prompt, but how do you use these tools to their fullest potential and get the best result? So that's both from an Excel modeling perspective, from a PowerPoint perspective. Stay tuned because, in the coming weeks, we're going to start actually showing people how to use these tools in a way that's going to get the job done the best.

Okay. So I think we've kind of put it to the test here with a very simple prompt.

Obviously, there would be some improvements that we could make, but I know what we've done previously is we've graded Claude's.

How do you think Claude has done this week? Give it a mark.

Okay. I'm going to split my grades into two components here. I'm going to give a- Okay ... formatting grade and then a content grade.

Formatting, I think I actually give this an A. It looks clean. It looks tidy.

Everything is lined up. It doesn't look crazy.

It looks much better than the stuff I've seen before.

In terms of content, I'll give kind of a B-plus.

It's all there. It's all right, but I agree with you. It lacks some of the important detail and context.

Yeah. I'm complete with you on the formatting and kind of included in that, not really formatting, but things like labeling stuff, having your sourcing at the bottom, your units in your tables.

They've done all of that, the basics, which so many analysts when they're starting out, they forget to include. It's essential.

Yeah.

If you've got a revenue figure, it doesn't just float 300.

It doesn't just float as a number. You actually have a unit and a currency there.

Exactly.

So it's done all of those basics, and as you say, it's not too cluttered.

The other thing we often see with company overviews is someone thought, "Oh, but I've got a bit more information. I'll just add another chart, another line." And then you almost don't know where to look because there's so much information.

So from a formatting perspective, I agree, an A, very solid A for me. But the content, I always am a bit more, I don't know, punishing in my grades. I give it a C.

I think this is a bit of a boring one.

Ooh, okay. Fair.

Well, it's a public company.

Maybe it's a B, not a B-plus. I mean- Yeah ... yeah, it lacks...

Is it crazy to say it lacks some emotion? I don't know.

It's just- Oh my gosh. That's beautiful, Graeme. It's beautiful.

It's just a bit generic, but you know what? It is.

But it's fine. It's fine is what it is.

It's fine. And the reality is, so two things.

First of all, we sometimes do see company overviews which are a bit basic, particularly if you're looking at a private company, if you work on the banking side, until you've got information on that private company, the information is going to be quite limited, okay? For a public company, it's usually a bit richer in data.

So a little bit basic, given that NVIDIA is public.

But bearing in mind that bankers can be producing a number of these.

If you're proposing an M&A transaction, there might be five potential targets that you need to produce company overviews for.

This is a bit of a pain, is a nice way to say it, for you to produce when you're working for a client. It's far and away the least exciting bit, I think, of a lot of the work that you do as an investment banker.

Yeah.

So if we have got a situation where we have a skill that can automate a lot of that process, great.

I think this is a superb use of AI in investment banking workflow.

Agreed.

Fantastic. Okay. Well, I think that's it for this week.

A nice short and sweet episode on using AI for creating company overviews, which, as we said, is a core skill in investment banking.

I hope our listeners have enjoyed learning a little bit about Claude's performance here, and we'll keep revisiting this topic.

And as Graeme said, we'll start to look at some of the ways we can optimize our use of AI for some of those workflows.

That's it from me this week, and over to Graeme.

Indeed. Stay tuned for more. It's been fun this week, and we'll see everyone same time here next week.