Anthropic releases Claude Skills for comms teams

View profile for Frank Dias

I train teams on AI with their use cases | Founder | IC+AI Practitioner | AI Educator | AI Agitator

Comms folk, pay attention. Anthropic has just released in Claude a new capability called Skills. They have a default Internal Comms one... Essentially, they're enabling capability redistribution at scale for anyone with access to Claude. "Here's the scaffolding, here's the company context, now anyone can draft." Claude isn't the predom enterprise AI tool, but it's out there. This gives a glimpse how these AI companies can turn a penny in an instant toward support service teams. My guess if you're an enterprise using Claude, you'd have control over whether these skills are visible. The other interesting things is, you can create your own skills. I'd therefore want IC to create their own aligned skills for IC. The opportunities to build in AI to help employees write better more consistent and aligned comms to your values, brand, tone, style are arriving. Things that are/were pain points for IC pros, can utilise AI tools to help reduce them. A few quick thoughts... as I want to unpick this more later. 1. The "good enough" threshold has shifted - Many IC teams spend a disproportionate amount of time on what's essentially formatting and basic drafting. Finessing toward a "perfection"? IC teams spending time as editors and reformatters. Yuck. Now the baseline quality potentially jumps, but it also means IC teams lose that "quality control" touchpoint. Is our greatest value QC? 2. The strategic void - If employees can self-serve on drafting, what should IC teams be doing? The obvious answers are the strategic human stuff, narrative architecture, stakeholder mapping, change design, measuring actual behaviour change not just message delivery. But, this is the brutal bit, are IC teams tooled or positioned to do this work confidently? I'd say many of us are still in "comms factory" mode. This could expose that gap pretty quickly if we don't get our AI act together, and lean into the strategic value of IC now. 3. The customisation imperative - IC teams must edit these skills and create their own org relevant ones to align. This is the critical bit. This is more than just chat usage. Real AI value to IC teams is in understanding the full toolset and building stuff with it. You must build your confidence up today. The customisation work is actually strategic. It requires IC teams to codify "this is how we communicate here" in a way that can be taught to an AI. But how many of you are thinking about AI as something you must train rather than just use? 4. The tool integration dependency - The Skill's power comes from internal integration into the tools/platforms you use everyday. IC teams that understand this must position themselves at the centre of those conversations with IT, HR, legal, compliance. 5. The replication factor - Is a category shift. Every knowledge worker will have an AI assistant that can draft comms. The question is whether that assistant is trained by you the IC pro? I can fast-track your team with your AI tools. Get in touch.

  • graphical user interface, text, application
Frank Dias

I train teams on AI with their use cases | Founder | IC+AI Practitioner | AI Educator | AI Agitator

6d

I definitely want to dive into this more. In the meantime, here's how to create custom Skills in Claude - https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512198-how-to-create-custom-skills

Thanks for sharing this! I need to think about it some more, but my first thoughts go towards your second point. I think many of us want to/think we ought to move up the strategic ladder - but I also think quite a few are pretty comfortable in the content factory zone. Are we prepared to pivot?

Volker Grünauer

Advatera - Knowledge Sharing for Digital, Comms and Marketing Managers - AI Workshops for Your Team - 15+ Years in AT, BE, CH, DE, FR, NL, UK - Responsible AI - University Lecturer

6d

I am not so much into Claude yet, are skills trchnically prompt enhancements/system messages like Gems or CustomGPTs but triggered by the users prompt instead of by the user explicitly using them? That sounds super cool!

Lexi McCausland, CMP®

Communications Leader | Internal Communications | Corporate Communications

6d

Interesting. I mostly use Chatty G and Copilot but I have a free Claude account as well so I'm curious to see how this compares to custom GPTs. Now that AI is a huge part of my workflow, I've trained it to write in my company's voice and I hardly write at all anymore (is that a problem? Idk yet...) BUT I get to spend a lot more time now on deep thinking and strategic activities and digging into data. I feel like a whole new me!

Jackie Vos

Strategic Communications Leader

6d

Sadly, many leaders who don't value strategic internal comms will see an AI assistant trained on a brand's tailored voice, style, writing standards, etc. as a big cost-savings. This will lead to jobs lost and a sea of sameness. Generic, though well-written, content that doesn't connect will flood all internal comms channels, rendering them ineffective. The meaningless noise will further fuel employee disengagement and eventually whittle both efficiency and culture down to nothing. My optimistic side will gladly teach a firmwide AI tool to help employees draft content that follows brand and style guide parameters. I'd rather spend my time editing that higher quality contributed content than having to rewrite slop. The orgs that value comms will benefit from these efficiencies because they will free up time for comms pros to dive deeper into strategy, planning, storytelling, listening, improving measurement through better data, executive coaching, technology adoption, crisis stress testing, professional development, employee recognition, cross-functional coordination, change management, benefit utilization, team building, case study development, SOP enhancements, recharging, etc. You know...what we'd like to spend more time on!

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Lee Smith

Co-author, People-First Internal Communication (Kogan Page, Dec 25) | Strategy Partner, IC Partners | Co-founder, The EX Space | FIIC | FCIPR | MSc | Brand owner, Lost Years Rum | Ex-EY

6d

Thanks for being on the ball with the ever changing world of AI Frank 👏🏻👏🏻

Richard Parker

Head of Enagagement and Internal Communications

6d

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

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