👋 If you only check out one highlight this week: Skills.

Well, ok, it’s half of the edition, but I really believe they matter. Even if you don’t use Claude (my favorite AI for work). They are coming to an AI near you. 👇

This is the last edition of the year. Thanks for reading!

I will ponder how to evolve these highlights during the break. Therefore, any and all feedback is welcome (hit reply).

I wish you a wonderful holiday season! 🎄❄️🎅 🎉

And if you work at an AI-native 9-9-6 startup (ridiculous discrimination against parents, IMO, but that's a rant for another day), I hope you'll get more than a couple of real days off.

-François

“Skills” rising. This may be the real app store moment for AI

Want to easily extend your AI with additional capabilities, even create your own?

Enter skills, introduced by Anthropic in October. After MCP, the makers of Claude innovate again with a simple, elegant standard that others, especially OpenAI, quickly adopt.

What's a skill?

From Anthropic:

“Skills are reusable, filesystem-based resources that provide Claude with domain-specific expertise: workflows, context, and best practices.

Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude discovers and loads dynamically when relevant to a task. Think of them as specialized training manuals that give Claude expertise in specific domains—from working with Excel spreadsheets to following your organization's brand guidelines.

How Skills work

When Claude encounters a task, it scans available Skills to find relevant matches. Skills use progressive disclosure: metadata loads first (~100 tokens), providing just enough information for Claude to know when a Skill is relevant. Full instructions load when needed (<5k tokens), and bundled files or scripts load only as required.

Unlike prompts (conversation-level instructions for one-off tasks), Skills load on-demand and eliminate the need to repeatedly provide the same guidance across multiple conversations.

Think of them as your own standard operating procedures that you add (i.e. extension) or create, and that Claude can save at your account level.

Key benefits

• Specialize Claude: Tailor capabilities for domain-specific tasks

• Reduce repetition: Create once, use automatically

• Compose capabilities: Combine Skills to build complex workflows

The power of skills lies in their ability to encode institutional knowledge, standardize outputs, and handle complex multi-step workflows that would otherwise require repeated explanation or investment in building a custom agent.

When to use Skills 

Choose Skills when you need Claude to perform specialized tasks consistently and efficiently. They're ideal for:

• Organizational workflows: Brand guidelines, compliance procedures, document templates

• Domain expertise: Excel formulas, PDF manipulation, data analysis

• Personal preferences: Note-taking systems, coding patterns, research methods”

And you can share them across your team! 👇

Skills are so helpful that OpenAI is now copying that feature and embedding it into ChatGPT and Codex.

Swyx, a leading voice in the AI engineering space, published this last week.

“The story you're most likely going to care about a year from now is the continued growth of Claude Skills. Launched in October, it was pretty universally ridiculed as a "folder of markdown" and/or pivot from MCP (now moved to Linux Foundation), but among insiders, traction has grown and grown and grown. One way to gauge this growth is the Claude Skills talk crossing 100k views in 1 day - easily the fastest to that milestone in AI Engineer conference history.

The announcements today are:

• Org admin support for Skills across an org

• A new Skills Directory

• Becoming an "open standard" with a vendor-neutral name of "Agent Skills"!

Skills adoption is growing and, if our IRL conversations are any indication, you are probably also underestimating them.

The last time we made a non-news trend call like this was Claude Code.” - Swyx 

I recommend the YouTube tech talk he refers to, even if you’re not technical.

On Dec 18, Anthropic announced this:

This may be as critical as the app store was for the iPhone. ChatGPT’s initial GPT store didn’t take off, but this feels different.

Want more skills good news? 

Creating a skill, unlike a mobile app, is now SUPER easy, as you will read in the sections below. In Claude, at least. Not just for users of Claude Code. I see no reason ChatGPT will not adopt a similar UI very quickly to create and “save skill” to your account. And then share them with others.

Happy upskilling!!

🛠️ My selection of resources, tips, and tools

🎙️ (Granola) Create recipes that act on your meeting notes

This is a simplified version of Anthropic’s skills, applied to Granola. Yes, Granola, the awesome “local” AI note taker that doesn't actually show up in your meetings. I can't work without it anymore.

It collects so much context that being able to act on that context easily is a great timesaver.

They introduced “recipes” a while back. They are prompts you save to use during or after your meetings. You can also create your own.

Want a specific type of minutes (analysis and format) for a specific recurring meeting?

Want it to coach you and give you feedback after a one-on-one with your manager? In another way, after a one-on-one with a direct report?

Want a structured recap of your interviews to copy and paste into your applicant tracking system?

Click on the chat window at the bottom of a meeting or folder, click “All recipes”, then “+ Create Recipe”, and enter your prompt.

I created my own interview summarizer last week 👇

My prompt, if you want to borrow it (make sure to use a thinking model), and please, please apply your best judgment to what the AI produces. We're talking about people's careers here:

I bet Granola will soon adopt the same standard as Anthropic Skills. How great would it be to create one new skill and make it work across all your favorite AI and AI-augmented tools…

👉 How to repeat your best work with AI? GPTs = good. Skills = better.

Sometimes it takes a few tries, multiple chats, and multiple days to get to a good outcome with your favorite LLM.

It happened to me recently, and I wanted to remember how I did it (I did it over a couple of weeks), streamline it, and replicate it for my next project.

So I asked Claude (you can do the same with ChatGPT or Gemini) to:

1. retrieve my various chats relevant to that project (I had forgotten to consolidate them in a single project folder),

2. analyze the sequence, my process, and

3. recommend a streamlined process.

I reviewed it, edited it, and asked Claude to create a test prompt.

I tested and iterated on it until I got good outputs.

I could have created a Claude Project, a custom GPT, or a Gem with that prompt as instruction, but in this case, I wanted that new capability across my entire Claude account.

So I asked Claude to create a skill based on it (see next section for my first skill example).

Here's how I created my first Claude skill 👇

🕺 How I created my first Claude skill

(This is only for premium users of Claude. Well worth the $20/ mth.)

Well, I did not create my first Claude skill.

Claude did it for me.

I thought setting up a new skill in claude.ai was a little complicated, but Anthropic made it super easy recently.

I figured that out when I asked Claude: "How do I create and use a "B2B software narrative analyzer" skill and use it in Claude.ai (vs Claude Code)?"

Instead of telling me how to do it, it created a really good skill! (the magic of Opus 4.5)

In only 1 or 2 minutes, it:

1. identified six great positioning and narrative best-practice templates (E.g. Brand Story, Andy Raskin's Strategic Narrative, Jobs to be Done, etc),

2. created a rubric based on them, and

3. even added a writing style guide.

I requested that it:

1. Add a positioning framework that it had missed (from April Dunford’ Obviously Awesome)

2. Update the rubric criteria ("Add simplicity and memorability to that rubric") and writing styles.

Then I only had to click "Save skill" to add it to my Claude account (see the top-right of the screenshot).

I then tested on a given narrative for two specific personas.

The critique was really good (it selects the 2 most relevant positioning or narrative frameworks and bases the critique on them), and the new proposed outline was clear and engaging.

Not 100% right, but that gives me a very solid foundation to start from.

In 10 minutes only, I had a new reusable skill, a narrative analysis, and 2 new outlines.

And since it's a skill, it's now available across all my Claude chats and projects. Claude will automatically invoke that skill when it believes my prompt requires it.

👉 I'm going to transfer a lot of my custom GPTs into Claude Skills.

📚 An AI Marketing playbook for 2026

I agree with this post from Kieran:

“Here’s what marketers should be prioritizing in 2026:

1. Create Your Internal AI Team: Stop working alone. Build three AI assistants:

- Data Strategist: Upload data, get back incredible data visualizations with insights and actions. Move from data analysis to data actions.

- Chief of Staff: Tracks your projects, reminds you what's blocked, flags what's at risk. Create a high-execution culture.

- Content Strategist: Plugs into YouTube, Podcasts, finds ideas, hooks, and angles you turn into emails, media, and posts for your audience. Never be short on ideas

In 2026, a solo marketer + AI assistants will dominate a solo marketer every time.

2. Make Every Lead Count: Traffic's dropping. You need more from less

- Chat SDR: Your website chat becomes your first sales rep. It answers questions, qualifies visitors, and walks them through a demo. No more "thanks for your interest, someone will reach out." Accelerate every deal.

- Personalize Everything: Turn data and context into personalised email, chat, and webpages. Their industry, role, and actual problems. Segments are dead; it’s one-to-one now

- AI-Enabled Sales Rep: Before every call, your reps get a brief: deal summary, their pain points, and talking points that matter to them. Then the call recording becomes custom follow-up material for that specific company.

In 2026, you can’t afford to waste a lead, clicks are disappearing, and traffic will decrease; extract more from less.

3. Know Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else: Obsess over Customers vs. Clicks.

- AI Customer Twin: Build an AI version of your ideal customer. Run every campaign, email, and landing page past it before you ship. Get instant feedback.

- Instant Research: Feed AI what your audience is saying across social, reviews, forums, YouTube, communities, sales calls, and chat conversations. Turn data into hyper-specific details about your customer.

- Customer Vocabulary Engine: Map the exact words, phrases, and mental models your customers use so every marketer on your team writes with the same high-converting language. Always speak in your customer's language.

In 2026, the marketers who obsess over customer vs. clicks will win.”

🔄 How Hightouch uses Clay for ABM

Members of my community were asking on Slack “How do you use Clay for ABM?”

Alex Roed, the head of growth at Hightouch, gave the best answer. I then invited him to give a lightning talk to the community. Here's the recording + his slides.

His key points (summarized by Claude Opus 4.5 within Granola):

Reposition Clay as a RevOps Tool, Not Just Outbound

• Clay isn't a magic pipeline box—it needs quality signals and messaging to drive results

• Use Clay for list enrichment, Salesforce hygiene, and AI-powered account research at scale

• Automate manual RevOps tasks like industry normalization and loyalty program lookups in minutes

Build Pre-Opportunity Stages to Orchestrate Marketing Actions

• Create 5 marketing stages before traditional sales stages to progress prospects systematically

• Trigger automated actions by stage: e.g., ads audiences, SDR alerts, gifting, and localized events

• Measure lift at the account level across all sources, not individual lead attribution

👩🏻‍🏫 Storytellers in high demand

Interesting. Makes sense: when there are so many startups and products, a good story is foundational to generate attention.

Final Words

Thanks for sharing these highlights with busy marketing execs around you.🙏 

Someone forwarded you this email? You can subscribe here.

François | LinkedIn 

I'm a CMO, advisor, and "CMO Wingman". Yes, that's a thing :-). Ask my clients: in this AI era, CMOs need a strategic proactive advisor more than ever. I’m former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.