Building a slide deck by hand has been a time-consuming endeavor, until now.

Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson break down how to connect Claude to the systems that hold your data, pull the information, analyze it, and then create an on-brand, template-powered slide deck in minutes, not hours.

If you're currently creating slide decks by exporting reports, reformatting numbers, fighting a master slide, and then emailing a PowerPoint file around for feedback, this episode is for you.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why the manual part is the data, not the design, and how connectors remove it
• What a design system actually is, described as a fancy way of saying your brand guidelines
• How to turn a call transcript into a deck instead of starting from numbers every time
• What to say to a design team that does not want to hand over the template
• How to get feedback with Claude Design using in-context comments that pass straight back to Claude
• How a 60-slide deck was fully animated with a single prompt and no edits

The episode also debuts the "BO Report" (Biggest Obstacle), a new closing segment on the biggest obstacle that teams face related to the episode topic.

This episode is brought to you by Biggest Goal, the company Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson co-founded.

Fifteen years of scaling their own companies taught them that adoption is a people problem long before it's a technology problem, so we train executives and their teams through workshops, cohorts, mastermind groups, and hands-on implementation support.

For more info about our programs, join our free community at your.biggestgoal.ai.

Thank you for supporting the podcast!

Bank reconciliation is the task everyone wants to automate, and before today's AI tech, nobody could. Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson explain why it stayed manual for so long, then walk through the exact prompt that turns eight to ten hours of line-item matching into a short 10 min review.

When you export your statements from your bank and QuickBooks (or another accounting platform), there are no matching IDs, no shared descriptions, and nothing a traditional automation could key off; somebody had to sit down and compare them line by line, and that somebody was expensive.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why rules-based automation could never reconcile your books and what changed when AI could read AWS, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon Web SVCS as one vendor
• The three-rule starting prompt that matches on description, amount, and a three-day date window
• How to read the exceptions when AI explains that a check has not cleared or a bank fee has not hit QuickBooks yet
• How to turn the first run into a reusable skill so you never re-explain your setup again
• Where the human stays in the loop, because the matching is low-value work and the exceptions are not
• How the same approach applies to investment property statements, media buys, and anything else with two lists that should agree

Reconciliation might be a boring task, but that's exactly why it is a great place to point AI first. Press play and start automating your reconciliation workflow this week.

This episode is brought to you by Biggest Goal, the company Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson co-founded.

Fifteen years of scaling their own companies taught them that adoption is a people problem long before it's a technology problem, so we train executives and their teams through workshops, cohorts, mastermind groups, and hands-on implementation support.

For more info about our programs, join our free community at your.biggestgoal.ai.

Thank you for supporting the podcast!

Automate Your Agency is taking a short break and coming back as something different. Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson are reimagining the show to match where AI actually sits (and shouldn't sit!) in a business today.

The questions listeners send in have moved well past “how do I automate this workflow.” They now cover finance, marketing, executive teams, and everything in between, and the show is being rebuilt to match.

What’s changing:

• A new name and a new brand for the show, arriving after a couple of weeks off recording
• Same feed, same place to listen, so there is nothing to re-subscribe to
• Every past episode stays available; the back catalog is not going anywhere
• Deeper use-case episodes across finance, marketing, and executive teams
• An open call for topics, because the next format is being shaped around what listeners ask for

Send over the topics you want covered!

This episode is brought to you by Biggest Goal, the company Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson co-founded.

Fifteen years of scaling their own companies taught them that adoption is a people problem long before it's a technology problem, so we train executives and their teams through workshops, cohorts, mastermind groups, and hands-on implementation support.

For more info about our programs, join our free community at your.biggestgoal.ai.

Thank you for supporting the podcast!