Claude for Investment Banking: Building a One-Pager in PowerPoint with AI

0:00Debs: 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 Babel 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 and finance, and we're going to put Claude to the work in PowerPoint today instead of Excel.

0:38Debs: 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. And we're going to ask Claude to, 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.

1:11Debs: 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, exactly. Having a look on 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.

1:44Debs: 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 than Opus and some of the other ones just because thus far it hasn't been great so I'm I'm curious to see how well this works I'm curious we've 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.

2:25Debs: 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. This is a skill that really, 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, you know, that kind of thing.

3:07Debs: Because once you become, say, 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, perfectly lined up. like I don't know do you remember I think this was probably from like literally industry season one where that investment banking analyst I'm not I'm not saying I was worked this hard but that investment banking analyst literally like dropped dead at his desk but one of the scenes before was him like lining up charts on the on the page and I'm like that that one that scene stuck out in my mind because I'm like I used to spend so much time doing that stuff when I was like a first-year analyst so the fact that we've potentially got tools to take some of that uh some of that kind of pain out of the job i think is really really interesting interesting thing absolutely when you said industry season one i was gonna i think where's graham going with this i mean there's some really interesting scenes throughout all of the seasons but yeah completely completely i think we've all had kind of late night moments where we've been struggling to meet a deadline um and And yeah, PowerPoint kind of is your friend in terms of helping communicate with clients, with investors.

4:51It 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, the investment recommendations or an M &A transaction, 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.

5:30We 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 excel can sorry if claude can 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 um particularly like late at night

5:53Debs: when you've got a deadline to try and meet i got a confession to make devs i actually hate powerpoint oh yes i think we all do there's something 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 actually had this class that came together very, very late in the day and it 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.

6:31Debs: And when I was using Opus to pull these slides together, honestly they look like crap so i'm i'm really i'm really hopeful that fable is going to tackle this problem here because i just i just don't want to be doing powerpoint myself anymore i don't know about you absolutely yeah definitely i mean we used powerpoint in a slightly different context in research we were using it to um sort of 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 sort of aggregate all your analysis into a nice digestible format.

7:08And 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, you know, 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 um like you i'm a little bit anxious to see uh how it copes uh so far my experiences haven't been amazing in powerpoints compared to excel but yeah let's see how fable gets on what's it

7:42Debs: showing on the screen now this thus far is at least looking more professional than the stuff i was i was looking at literally just a few weeks ago so whether whether anything on the page is actually correct or not we'll see in a sec but in terms of the the structure and layout it's 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. It's the world's leading accelerated computing company, providing full-stack infrastructure, powering AI at data center scale. I mean, as a one-line overview about what NVIDIA does, that is pretty impactful.

8:25Debs: We've got just the kind of high-level company facts, ticker where it's founded headquarters the ceo uh some recent you know some recent news and summary financials we've got let's see 2024 2025 and 2026 actual i don't know if we have i mean one thing that i would appreciate here okay fiscal year end last last sunday of january 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? But so far, this looks right. We've got revenue growth trajectory. We've got some numbers on bar charts. It would be helpful to have a revenue kegger here.

9:13Debs: but yeah I mean that's that's from my that's that's something that you can just with a simple prompt just say add a revenue kegger to the top of this bar chart and you know it's not it's not done so maybe maybe that's still coming maybe it's still coming I mean I guess a bit of from a high level bit of feedback from me and we usually see the company overview as four quadrants and try and use that to kind of highlight different aspects that altogether and provide a really comprehensive view of what the company does and how it's performing at the moment. They've kind of, left-hand side, we've got kind of recent developments and an overview.

9:48That's fine, but we often sort of squish that into one quadrant to allow a little bit more narrative about maybe, you know, 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? 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 really like to see is some kind of segment analysis, get an idea of the relative contributions that those segments provide, the total revenue numbers.

10:24And even if they had that as a stacked bar, it provides a little bit more information than 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, So I have to say at the moment, as it finished its thought process, I think it has. As a kind of 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.

10:59That'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.

11:10Debs: Yeah, I think that's all fair and valid. I mean, my take here is on the basis of a... We didn't ask for any of that up front, right? We just said produce a company overview. I'm actually, compared to some of the output I was seeing, literally with this same template a few weeks ago, I was seeing just just zooming out for a second and think about this from a 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 like font sizes and sizes of tables and white space on a page that kind of thing that's where that's where I was seeing real real issues before and if I just you know kind of zoom out and look at the page here in terms of how it's used the space.

12:04Debs: 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. The fact that I think we've delivered a lot more with this year 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 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 clod skill and it says, all right, here's the company overview template for my preference, for my firm, whatever the case may be.

12:50Debs: 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, say, saying, produce this one page around a video, it's already got that skill to hand and kind of goes through and builds correctly. but also if we just I'm sure if we prompted here and said hey provide this revenue on a segmental basis it would just do it right so as a starting point I'm I'm I'm getting I'm getting happier with this and I wish 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 it was a lot more manual fine-tuning to get stuff looking the way I wanted to.

13:45Debs: But from my perspective, at least on the PowerPoint pain points, just getting stuff looking nice 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 Graham, one thing that you mentioned that I think really important is the use of skills, which in my view are kind of like pre-prepared prompts almost that you can then recycle. because we're now teaching a lot with AI in the classroom. We're introducing how AI is used in key workflows across investment banking. And we know that efficiency is important.

14:24And 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, a pre-prepared prompt that you then save into your skill bank, you can then keep reusing that.

14:57So 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 that host

15:12Debs: those skills yeah exactly 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.

15:55Obviously, there will be some improvements that we could make. But I know what we've done previously is we've graded, Claude. how do you think Claude has done this week? Give it a mark.

16:06Debs: Okay, I'm going to split my grades into two components here. I'm going to give a formatting grade and then a content grade. Formatting, I think I give this, you know, 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+. 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.

16:49They've done all of that. The basics, which so many analysts, when they're starting out, they forget to include. It's essential. 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. 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 reviews is someone's thought, oh, 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.

17:19An A, very solid A for me. But the content, I always have 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. Oh, okay.

17:31Debs: Okay. Maybe it's a B, not a B plus. I mean, yeah, it lacks, it lacks, is it crazy to say it lacks some emotion? I don't know. It's just, Oh my gosh. That's beautiful, Grant. It's just, it's just a bit generic, but you know, 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, you know, unless you really have, you know, if you're working on the banking side, until you've got information on that private company, the information is going to be quite limited.

18:07Okay. 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 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. So if we have got a situation where we have a skill that can automate a lot of that process, great.

18:46I think this is a superb use of AI in investment banking workflow.

18:51Debs: Agreed. 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 Graham 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 graham indeed stay tuned for more it's been fun been fun this week and we'll see everyone same time here next week