From Excel to AI Agents: A Practical Framework for Automating Finance Processes.
Over the last twenty years I've held six roles across Deloitte, KPMG, HSBC, Barclays and Avanade – and the question I keep coming back to is which one AI is reshaping the most. The answer is all of them: every role came down to messy data, a few rules, some judgement, and something people can trust and act on. This session shows that through Excel – a custom agent skill in Claude in Excel that runs like a VBA macro, written in plain English instead of code.
What you'll see
The Showdown: Me vs AI
A live Excel demo - a four-entity reconciliation and a three-statement model, built twice: once by hand in Excel and Copilot, once by Claude in Excel. Same task, two very different ways of getting there.
Powerful, but is it enough?
Why AI is fundamentally probabilistic - and what "scope creep" looks like in practice, when the agent races ahead of the brief and drifts from what was actually asked.
Determinism through context, not prompts
Context engineering in practice: how Agent Skills - written as plain markdown files - give an agent the same consistent, repeatable instructions every time, instead of relying on the perfect prompt.
Packaging skills into deployable enterprise architecture
The framework that makes this reusable across a team: Agent = Model + Harness. How to move from one clever demo to something your organisation can actually govern and deploy.
Watch full session
Free with LDI membership
Join LDI free to watch the full session. Takes about 60 seconds - sign in with your Microsoft or Google account.
Build your own custom skill
Grab the skill from GitHub
Download the Agent Skill used in the session - the same markdown file, ready to install.
Install it in Claude
Add the skill to Claude so it's available whenever you're working in Excel.
Walk the workbook
Open the before-state Excel file used in the demo and get familiar with the reconciliation and modelling task.
Generate a plan with Claude in Excel
Ask Claude to propose a plan against the skill - see it reason through the task before it touches a single cell.
Build and verify
Run the plan, check the outputs against the after-state file, and confirm the reconciliation ties out.
Turn it into a reusable skill
Package what you built into a skill of your own - so the next person on your team gets the same repeatable result.
Build your own Excel Agent
Tip: click the square icon to view full screen.
Free with LDI membership
Join LDI free to try the interactive tutorial. Takes about 60 seconds - sign in with your Microsoft or Google account.