Authority AI Editorial
Six Skills to Try First if You Use an Agent for Client Work
If you use an AI agent for client work, you already know which jobs come back. There's a proposal to write, a claim to check, a chart for Thursday's meeting and an update to send on Friday. The agent can do a passable version of each. Passable is the problem, because the client reads the work as yours.
A skill is a written method for one kind of job. It tells the agent what a good result looks like, the steps in order and what to check before it hands anything back. You don't need thousands of them to feel the difference. Start with six, one for each job you already hand over most weeks.
Here are the six we'd try first. For each one: which pack it comes from, how the job usually goes wrong without a method, and what to look for when the agent is done.
1. A proposal that answers the client's question first
Without a method, a proposal draft tends to open with you: your history and your approach. The client's problem turns up on page two, and the next step is somewhere near the end.
Journalists solved this a long time ago. The inverted pyramid is a structure in which "the most important information (or what might even be considered the conclusion) is presented first," as Amy Schade of the Nielsen Norman Group describes it. A reader who stops after one paragraph still knows what the piece is about. A busy client often reads a proposal the same way.
The Business pack includes proposal drafts. Whichever method you use, check one thing before the draft leaves: does the first paragraph name the client's problem and the outcome you're proposing, in their words? If you have to scroll to find either, send it back.
2. A research check before any claim goes out
Client work is full of small factual claims: a market size, a regulation, a line from a report. An agent will supply all of them in the same confident tone, whether they're right or not.
The Research pack's strongest skills make the agent prove its claims. One backs each claim with at least three separate sources. Another checks that every reference in a draft is real. A third keeps a record of where every claim came from, so you can trace any sentence back to the page it rests on.
What you check: pick the claim the client is most likely to repeat in their own meeting, and open its sources yourself. If the agent can't show you three that agree, the claim comes out or gets softened.
3. A retention chart you can explain in the room
Ask an agent how retention is going and you'll often get a chart with no definition behind it. Nobody can say afterwards which customers were counted or from when.
The Data pack covers cohort and retention analysis with the segment stated before the chart. The method starts by naming who counts. As an illustration, that might be customers who signed up in March and are still paying, with paused accounts left out. The pack's cleaning steps record every change made to the data along the way, so the working sits next to the result. Then the chart gets drawn.
What you check: read the definition aloud before you look at the line. If you couldn't defend it to the client's finance lead, the shape of the chart doesn't matter yet.
4. A landing page review with ideas you can test
"Make this page better" gets you opinions: a new headline, a different colour, more white space. Some of it may help. None of it tells you what to try first, or how you'd know it worked.
The Marketing pack reviews a landing page and lists what to test, and it reads the results of a test carefully when they come back. That matches how the UK government's guidance describes A/B testing: comparing two versions of a design to see which performs better, starting from a hypothesis or a goal, and deciding how long to run the test based on the number of monthly visitors. The same guidance warns that you need many users before the result is statistically significant.
What you check: every suggestion should come with the change, the reason and the number that would show it worked. A suggestion with no number to watch is a matter of taste.
5. A decision memo for people who missed the meeting
Client decisions often get made by someone who wasn't in the room. An agent's first draft of a memo or deck tends to retell the meeting in order. It reads like minutes, and the decision you need sits in the last paragraph, if it's there at all.
The Business pack builds board decks and meeting packs written for the reader, including the person who missed the meeting. The shape it aims for is plain: six slides, one idea each, ending on the decision you need from the room. A memo follows the same rule in fewer words. Put the decision first, then the options, then the reason you recommend one.
If decision memos are a large part of your week, the Advanced Business Skills Pack is an extra pack of business skills covering proposals, pricing, process documentation and decision memos, as its own download.
What you check: could someone who reads only the opening lines say yes or no? If not, the decision isn't near enough to the top.
6. A weekly update written from your list of changes
The Friday update is the job most likely to slide into a list of everything that happened, from meetings held to emails sent. The client wants to know what moved and what they need to do about it.
The Productivity pack turns a list of changes into a clear update. You give the agent the raw list of what changed this week, and the update is written from that list rather than from a vague memory of the week.
What you check: count the items the client has to act on. There should be one or two, and they should be easy to find. If the update needs a reply, say so near the top.
What the six have in common
Look across the list and the same pattern repeats. Each method decides what a good result is before the agent starts writing. Each puts a check between the draft and the client. And each moves the important thing, whether that's the answer, the definition or the decision, to where a busy reader will see it first.
That's why these six are worth trying before anything more ambitious. They're jobs you already do, so you can hold the result up against your own version the first time you run one.
Most organisations are already past the question of whether to use AI. Stanford's 2026 AI Index reports that organisational adoption reached 88 percent. Having an agent is common now. Getting work back from it that you'd put your name to is the part that still takes a method.
Where to start
Pick the one of the six you'll do soonest. If a proposal is due this week, start there. Run the job once with a skill attached and once the way you'd normally ask, then put the two drafts side by side and apply the check for that job.
Keep a note of everything you still had to change by hand. Those notes are the start of your own version of the method. Add them to the skill before you run the same job again, and the next draft starts closer to what you'd send.
If you'd rather not write all six from scratch, the AI Ultimate Skill Collection includes the Business, Research, Data, Marketing and Productivity packs used above. It's 3,029 ready-made skills in 12 packs, one for each kind of work, and it works with Claude Code and other agents that use skills.