Leveraging AI

262 | Build an army of agents using Claude's Skills with no technical background with Isar Meitis

• Isar Meitis • Season 1 • Episode 262

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Can a single AI platform replace your analysts, report writers, and slide deck creators — and do it better?

That’s the promise behind Claude Skills — the most underrated AI breakthrough you’ve probably never used. Until now.

In this episode of the Leveraging AI Podcast, host Isar Meitis breaks down how Claude’s new Skills framework, combined with Claude Cowork, unlocks the holy grail of AI: multi-agent orchestration. No APIs. No developers. No code. Just smart business leaders using smarter tools.

The result? Fully automated financial reporting, SOP execution, brand-compliant content, and multi-format deliverables — built by swarms of Claude agents coordinating like a dream team.

If you’re serious about AI-led business transformation, this episode is not optional listening.

In this session, you'll discover:
 - Why Claude Skills are so much more than custom GPTs — and how they work behind the scenes
 - How to build brand-aligned assets and SOPs with one prompt
 - What “multi-agent orchestration” actually means — and how you can use it without any technical setup
 - The step-by-step breakdown to creating Skills and skill swarms for business workflows
 - How Claude auto-generates Excel analysis, Word reports, and branded PowerPoints — from the same input
 - The critical mindset shift: Don’t automate old processes. Rethink them with agents in mind
 - How to train your team to use Claude Cowork effectively without losing control of your data
 - The real risk: if you don’t move on this, your competitor will — and you’ll be stuck in 2026

About Leveraging AI

If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!

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Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI Podcast, a podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Metis, your host, and I have a life changing episode for you today. Uh, really nothing short of that. We are going to talk about Claude skills, and we're going to talk about why they might be the biggest unlock for productivity and. Dramatic changes in your business and in other operations that you're doing in your personal life as well, and how easy it is to actually create new skills and use them in order to build swarms of agents to do more or less. Anything you can imagine. The reason I decided to record this episode is because I started using more and more of Claude Cowork, and I was using skills actually way before Claude Cowork showed up last week. But I did not understand how critical and important and powerful they are until I started combining it with Claude Cowork. So first of all, if you don't know what Claude Cowork is, go and check the previous episode where I talked about this, and I'm going to record another episode on some of the things that I'm doing right now to give you the biggest unlocks possible with the combination of these tools. But today, again, our focus is Claude Skills and let's first of all define what the hell is a Skills, how does it work? And then we'll go and build more and more complex concepts from there. So a single Skills is basically teaching Claude to do something very specific, such as your brand guidelines. So this was the very first Skills that I've built for my business. The brand guidelines Skills of Multiply, which is the name of my company. And what it enables me to do is now every time I'm anywhere in the Claude environment, I can ask you to create something based on my brand guidelines. And then the fonts are correct, the colors are correct, the style is correct, the tone is correct, the background, everything within the brand guideline just works magically and all I have to do is ask for it in Claude and it knows how to do everything else. Uh, other examples for single Skills is. How do you want all your SOPs structured in your company so you can define that. And then whenever you create SOPs, they're all gonna be structured in the same way and so on. So that will be a single Skills. So how does it actually work? Well, it works very similar to a custom GPT or a cloud project or a gem, depending on the universe you're in. So it has access to multiple pieces of data. These could be different kinds of files, references, links, et cetera, and it has instructions. The combination of these two things allow it to basically do whatever it needs to do. So it has the examples or reference materials combined with instructions of what it needs to do, and now it knows how to do these things. Such as to apply your brand guidelines or to create specific structure for any kind of document, whether SOPs, proposals and so on. But the biggest unlock for me was the understanding that you can take any process in your organization as long as it is a digital knowledge work, kind of something versus a physical world kind of something. So as long as it is a knowledge work thing you're trying to unlock, you can create anything with combination of Claude skills. So let's break this down. A Claude skill can activate other Claude skills, meaning you can build an entire hierarchy of workers in the AI language agents that can talk to one another and collaborate and coordinate and share information and make progress in parallel, and then aggregate all the information, review the information and so on, which means you can take. Really complex processes, break them down into steps and sometimes even sub-steps. And each and every one of them can be its own skill that can then work together in parallel or in sequence with other skills in order to complete the overall task. Basically, the biggest promise of multi-agent orchestration, which is the holy grail of AI automation and a complete rethinking of how a business can operate, all can happen with cloud skills, with zero third party tools and with zero technical knowledge. Now I'm sure you're asking yourself like, okay, how do I even get started? How do I identify what I need to do? How do I create these skills? What are they? How do they talk to one another? How do I figure this out? This is exactly what we're going to cover in detail in this episode. So let's start with where do these skills live and how do you update and create new ones? If you go to your Claude, either application in this particular case or if you are on the web environment, it is the same exact thing. On the bottom left, you have your account. If you click on your account, one of the options is settings. Then inside of settings you have multiple things. one of those things is capabilities. If you click on capabilities, then you have artifacts and then code execution and file creation and so on. Memory, and then you have Skills. If you look at mine, I have multiple Skills, probably a couple of dozens, but you have an add button. If you click on add, it says Create with Claude. Write Skills instructions or upload Skills. So let's go through all of them. If you click on Create with Claude, it is basically going to start a Claude conversation that will allow me to create whatever Skills I want just by describing what I wanted to do. Write Skill instructions basically allows you to write your own instructions just by. Typing them on your own, basically in the same way you're building custom gpt. I don't recommend doing that. Uh, I will get to that in a minute or upload a skill. How do you create a skill file? Well, Claude will create it for you. So another way to get to this is one of the skills that exist inside of Claude that comes with the system. If you are watching the screen, you can see under Skills, I've got your skills, which is all the ones that I created. And there are example skills. Example skills might be, canvas design, might be internal comms, MCP builder, slack, uh, gift creator, theme factory, et cetera. But one of those is a skill creator skill. And you can see that each and every one of those skills has three dots, basically ellipses menu on the right side. And if you click on that, you can select try in chat. If you select that, it will take you to inside of the Claude Chat and will say, Hey Claude, can you make something amazing with skill creator skills? Uh, this is just a placeholder, but then I can tell you to do whatever I want. But now let me explain something important about skills. How do you use skills is the simplest way you can think about it. You don't need to know anything. You literally just have to ask. So even if I didn't use any of this and all I requested is I went to the regular Claude and say, I want to create a new skill that will do one, two, and three, it knows to automatically, dynamically on its own to activate the skill creation skill because you're asking to create a new skill. If you ask it to analyze an Excel file, it will use the Excel file analysis skill. If you ask it to create a Word document, it will use the word document skill that it or has built in. So many of these come behind the scenes inside of Claude, but then you can create new ones just by literally asking in a regular cloud chat to create a specific skill for you. But the right way to do this is actually to do this in a much easier and yet more sophisticated, complex, and organized way, which is to explain to Claude or to Claude Cowork or in Claude Code, it doesn't really matter what is it that you're trying to achieve. So describe the broader task and ask it to come up with the different skills that will be required to achieve your goal. This episode is a really advanced episode. It is talking about building swarms of agents and multi-agent orchestration solutions that can automate your entire business. However, it will be very hard for you and your team to do this effectively without knowing the baseline. The basic building blocks, the do and don'ts, the core capabilities that AI provide across image generation, video generation, how to prompt properly how to keep your data safe and so on. To know that basic, we have created the AI Business Transformation course. I've been teaching this course since April of 2023, so we're now almost three years of teaching this course to multiple organizations and thousands of business people that have taken advantage and are transforming their careers and or their businesses with the knowledge they acquire in the course. So if you are looking for a way to really start 2026 strong, when it comes to solid AI foundations, don't miss this opportunity. The course starts on February 2nd, it's a Monday, and it's gonna go for four weeks on Monday, noon Eastern time, two hours every single week. It will give you incredibly strong foundations for any AI transformation you wanna perform, either for your career or for your entire business or department or team, or whatever it is that you are managing. Since I am extremely busy with company specific courses and work, I usually teach these public courses about once a quarter, which means if you're gonna miss this course that starts on February, you'll probably have to wait until around April or May in order to take this course again, which means you missed an entire quarter of getting AI benefits in whatever it is that you're trying to do. So, do not miss this opportunity. Make this your New Year's resolution to start 2026 strong with solid AI foundations, and come and join us next week and join us on February 2nd for the AI Business Transformation Course. And because you are a listener of this podcast, you get a hundred dollars off with the promo code leveraging AI 100. Don't miss this opportunity. And now back to the exciting and amazing world of Claude skills. So let's look at an example. In this particular case, I am showing a financial analysis of a really complex set of files. These are a planning file, an actual file in a p and l file for a really large international project. It has multiple regions and multiple roles and multiple types of things that are involved, and it has probably over 20 columns and a few thousands of rows. So going through that file to a human would've taken a few good days of understanding how it works, creating pivot tables and analyzing the information. And I wanna be able to create a process that does it automatically. So what I wrote is a row to, you are the executive VP of finance at a large corporation. I'm going to provide you with three files and then I'm expl explaining what the files are and I'm asking you to understand the structure of the files and the data that's in them. But then down here I wrote, your first goal is to think about what skills you would need in order to do similar analysis in the future. Such skills may include analyzing specific aspects of data, doing online research on conditions and changes in specific regions and countries in the world, comparing different things such as seasonality, et cetera. The goal is for you to then develop multiple skills that when combined together. We'll provide a thorough analysis of similar files in the future. Try to think of each Skills as a highly capable financial analyst who specializes in finding very specific kind of information in similar data. Some skills should allow to coordinate between all the other Skills in order to perform the handshake in the most effective way, as an example. If skill number one finds that there is a quarter over quarter increasing cost, it'll hand over the research for that specific quarter to additional skills. One would research the type of labor that was performed, and another would research the project or the WBS components that were involved. And so I'm basically explaining what are the tasks that I'm trying to perform, giving it an idea of what kind of analysis I want to do, and then it goes to work. And then it reads the three different files that I gave it. It does the analysis. It tells me that it has X number of rows and. Four regions and 11 resource countries and 58 roles, et cetera, et cetera, like all the stuff that's in this gigantic files. But then. It also starts and comes with ideas for the skills it is going to create. So it is going to start with a financial analysis coordinator. The purpose of that is the master orchestrator that coordinates all other skills. Then it has variance analysis, trends analysis, regional cost analysis, labor cost analysis, WBS analysis, profitability analysis, and external research. This is just step one. Later on, I ask you to create skills that will allow it to create the outputs in specific formats. So what I wanna show you next is I wanna show you what happens when I actually run the analysis. So now that I have the skills already in place, all I have to do is write a very short prompt because the skills will do all the rest. So I'm writing the following prompt. You are an expert financial data analyst. I would like you to review the following files, and then I give it access to the three files. And use your financial analysis Skills to analyze information in the files provided and create the three reports. That's it. I don't explain what kind of analysis. I don't provide it any additional details. Very short. And now I click on Let's Go. And what you're gonna see that's going to happen is it is going to start working on the process, but the first thing it is going to do, it will start using the So on the right side where it says context, you can see the first thing it launched is financial analysis coordinator, which is the one that will invoke all the other skills. The second skills that he's using is XLSX Skills, which will allow it to read the files that I gave it. It is asking me a bunch of questions, which I'm going to answer very quickly. It's less relevant to our current situation. And now once it's doing the analysis, you will see that on the right side it will start invoking new skills and it will create a plan. So now it's already. Uploading PPTX and Doc X because you will need to write and create those. It uploaded the multiply brand and then it's now looking at the financial report generator as well. So it's adding more and more skills that it, it has created on its own previously in order to do the work. So I'm gonna stop it right now because I already have created those and I wanna show you how these look like. Like what is the final report looks like once it knows how to use all these skills. So it's going to run for about, I don't know, 15 minutes or so to do all the different steps of the analysis that it needs to do. And it is going to generate three different files because these, what the Skills of the generation tells it to do. One of them is an Excel file that looks like this. So the Excel file has multiple tabs. The first one is an executive summary with high level information. The second one is variance analysis, then trend analysis, regional analysis, labor analysis, profitability analysis. Each and every one of those tabs was created by a separate skill, or if you want a separate agent that knows how to research specific kind of data. And generate a specific kind of report. They all report together to the orchestrator that invokes them. And then the orchestrator gives the work to the skills that generates these reports. So one of the skills generates this Excel report. The other one generates a Word document, which I will show you next. So you can see this is a highly detailed report. It has multiple pages and it has color coding that is consistent across the entire report. So you can see the color legend, with green, red, cyan, orange, red and yellow. Each and every one of them means something else. And you can see here an executive summary with a written analysis and a table and the color coding. It has the variance analysis with different things to pay attention to, whether minor, significant or critical. It has the quarter over quarter analysis. It has graph charts, bars, everything is extremely well organized and even recommendations in the end. With color coding and using my brand guidelines as far as the colors and so on, and all of this, because it has skills to create all of that. And the third file that it generates is a PowerPoint presentation. Again, fully aligned with my brand guidelines, each and of you one of the slides includes a combination of text and charts and graphs. Again, color coded with clear highlights for everything the analyst wants you to pay attention to in their specific areas of interest, such as rate versus volume, decomposition. And top variance contribution, whether up or down by project, by region, and so on. It's an extremely well organized PowerPoint presentation. It is way better than what I could have created on my own. And all of this was done by me asking for that simple prompt of just doing the analysis. And the reason it knows how to do all these things is because it has all these agents, each and every one of them, focusing on something very specific and an orchestrator that knows how to make them all work together. So now let me explain to you how does it work from the moment I ask for these skills to the moment they actually exist in my Claude Universe. So it is actually very, very simple. The way these skills look like they are files that are dot Skills in the type of the file. And the way Claude works is when it creates these files, it either allows you to download them if you are in the regular Claude Chat environment, or if you're using Claude Cowork and you're giving it access to a folder, it usually creates a new sub folder. In that folder. It calls it Skills or Skills update if you've done multiple versions of them. And I will show you now exactly how that works. So I'm going back to my Claude environment, and again, you can do the same exact thing, not on the Claude desktop, you can do the same exact thing in the Claude over the web and you can see this is the folder that it's working in and you can see that it has an updated Skills section and you can see that it has files that are.md and file that are dot Skills. The ones that are.md, you can completely ignore the one that are dot Skills are the one you need. And so I just made an update to one of these skills, asking it to make some changes to it, and it updated the file. And all I need to do in order to update the Skills in my environment is again, go back on the bottom left corner to my profile, click on settings, go to capabilities, and now I don't even have to scroll anywhere. All I have to do is drag the file that is the dot skill file into this environment, and you can see. That Claude understands. It says drop. Drop to upload skill. I just drop the file. It already identifies that it has this skill in its memory. If it'll be a new one, it will just upload that and it says, replace financial analysis coordinator skill. There's an existing skill, blah, blah, blah. And I said, yes, upload and replace, and it's going to upload it and create it for me. And then I get a message on top that it's ready to go. That's it. Now, if you go back. You will see that it has all these other Skills that I created that do multiple things in my business right now, some of them work as a standalone Skills some of them work in tandem with others to do really sophisticated and complex things. So why do I think skills are life-changing and so critical and so important? The first thing is they are a very similar concept to. Two custom GPT or projects, but with two huge differences. One, Claude is really good at building them for you, so you don't have to be an expert. You just gotta give it the right information and it will help you build the Skills. You don't need to know what to do, you just need to know what you're trying to achieve. The second thing is. They do not take space in the context window unless they are called and invoked so different than a custom GPT. All that data is in your conversation as soon as you upload the custom GPT versus here. It can have 300 skills in your company, but it will only call the one that it needs. As it needs them, and hence it's gonna save space in the context window, and hence it will allow you to be more flexible with what you're doing without running out of space. The second thing is they are extremely powerful because they know how to work in a multi-agent orchestration environment, and you don't need to know anything about what the hell that means and how it gets set up. All you have to explain is what you are trying to achieve and let Claude do the magic for you and then just fix from there. Either just showed you. It doesn't always work perfectly the first time, but then you go back and say, Hey, this is what happened. I would like to update that capability or that component. Which skills do we need to update? And sometimes it will get it perfectly, and sometimes you need to help it, like it will forget the orchestrator as an example, with very simple attention to details. You can have it fix whatever it needs to fix you drag and drop it back into the Claude environment and then it works. So that's the second reason. It is extremely powerful multi-agent orchestration building capabilities. The third reason I think this is extremely powerful is because you can literally take your existing company's SOP every SOP you have and turn it into a Claude Skills. Meaning you can take existing documents. First of all, as I mentioned, you can build a skill that will allow you to build better SOPs, but I'm putting that aside for a second. But you can take your existing SOPs and build skills from them, and then Claude will magically know how to do them. And then the last reason this is so powerful is the fact that philanthropic did something that makes it so simple, which is. It works in every aspect of the Claude slash Anthropic universe, meaning skills. Work in the regular Claude Chat skills, work in Claude Cowork skills, work in Claude Code, and you don't have to know. How or why or when? All you have to explain is what you're trying to do, and the Claude environment on its own will know how to call and activate the right skill, usually the orchestrator skill, which will then call the relevant other skills that it needs in order to complete the task. This is the ultimate democratization of agentic capabilities that ever happened. This is a huge step forward that enables literally anyone to create extremely powerful multi-agent solutions that can achieve more or less anything that is knowledge work in your company and it takes minutes to set up a few more minutes to test, and then you're up and running with literally any aspect of operation in your business. So a quick summary, a yes. I'm really excited about this and terrified at the same time because this. Means that a lot of jobs that exist today can disappear in the very, very near future if people learn how to use this properly or you can keep these jobs and 10 x your company, which makes it very exciting. I'm going to talk about,, a quick summary and then I will go to what this means. So before we end, I wanna do a quick recap and then I want to tell you what it means for you and how I think you should use it. So the recap is this skills allow you to create either individual, very specific things that Claude can do or really advance complex entire processes with very big goals, with multi-step processes that will work as a multi-agent orchestration kind of solution. You do this by simply asking Claude to help you build those skills and by explaining what you're trying to do. Explaining what information and data you can give it access to, and then allowing it to define what skills are required. Brainstorm it a little bit, provide it additional feedback, and then ask it to create the actual skills. Once it creates the skills files, all you have to do is drag them into the place that I showed you in Claude, and you have the skills working, test it out, ask it to make minor changes, and you're up and running. It is really that simple. The other thing that I will say, then what does that mean for the world, and what does that mean for you? And what I suggest you do, what it means for the world is that multi-agent orchestrations that used to be saved to the biggest companies in the world by hiring multiple, highly skilled individual, highly skilled individuals is now available to anyone now, yes, the$20 a month license may not be sufficient to build as much as you want. You may need to upgrade to the max plan that is a hundred dollars. Or if you're going really crazy and doing multiple things in parallel, like I'm doing$200, but for$200 a month, you can build armies of agents that can replace anything in your business. And by the way, once you finish building them, you can downSkills back again because they run. Because when they run, they take significantly less tokens than actually creating all these things in parallel. But now I'm getting to the point of what I think you should do if you are in a leadership position, you need to teach your people how to do this. You need to build procedures in your company. From a data security perspective, from an infrastructure perspective, from an API and data access perspective, in order to make sure nobody does anything stupid. But once you do that, you should give every single employee access to the max planning, Claude, and have them start building everything they need. Every building block, every bottleneck, every problem they have, they can more or less solve with this by just explaining what they're trying to do and have it build the skills and the operation for them. Combined with Claude Cowork, you can do. Magical things in your organization in a very short amount of time, and my suggestion is hire somebody like me. It doesn't have to be me. It can be anybody else to teach you and other people in your company how to do this effectively. And then define the rules of engagement. Define the right safety guards from a data. Perspective and start allowing people, you know, forget about, start allowing demand from people to start building these kind of solutions because it can 10 x the amount of work people can do and do it faster, better, and cheaper than most humans. When I said in the beginning, this is a life-changing episode, I totally meant that, and my hope is that you will a experiment with this and B, start implementing these kind of solutions because if you move fast, you can grab. Significant market share in your industry, in your niche. And if you move slow, somebody else will figure out what I just showed you and will do it to you, and you'll stay behind doing everything manually the old way. Now, on the bigger picture, I think what we will find is that we will stop doing things the old way and just automating them with Claude skills. We will find new ways to do things that will be aligned with the way. Agents can work, which might be significant game changers versus just replacing what we are doing right now just with agents. We need to remember that all the processes we have right now, were built for humans because of human limitations, but agents and skills don't have similar limitations, so we might be able to, and we probably should rethink entire processes and entire things we do in our companies in order to adjust them to how these new capabilities can work in order to make the most out of them. But even if you start with experimenting, with replacing existing processes in your company, you will find that you can drive. Exponential growth across more or less every knowledge base, digital aspect of your business. I would love to hear your thoughts about this episode and about Claude Skills and about Claude Cowork. As I mentioned, I will record another episode where I will teach you what I think are the biggest, most important steps to do in order to capitalize on this incredible opportunity. But. I would love for you to reach out to me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think and what you're testing or what you're trying to test so I can help you out or just book a call with me if you want to go deeper and there's a link for that in the show notes, and I can help you, your company, whatever you need. I can help you, your company, your organization, understand how to implement this at a full Skills with clear guidelines and a lot with clear guidelines and the right safety in place. That's it for today. If you are enjoying this podcast, please like us and rate us on your favorite podcasting platform, whether it's Apple Podcast or Spotify, and share the podcast with other people who can benefit from it. I'm sure you know a few people who can learn as well from everything that we are sharing. So click on the share button on your phone right now unless you're driving, and then just think about a few people and then sta share the link to the podcast with them, on your favorite communication channel, whether it's email or Slack or WhatsApp, or text messages or whatever it is that you're doing, share the episode, share the podcast with other people. I'm sure they will be grateful. I will be grateful and you will feel great about helping other people as well.

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Isar Meitis

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