Posted by Hi, and welcome to Try AI for Growth, a baby podcast out of Make Space for Growth. Here I share short, and sometimes surprising stories of how I’ve used technology to tackle everyday challenges. At home, at work and in business. I am your host, Sara Vicente Barreto and today, I want to tell you about Claude for Word.
Some documents deserve much more attention than we have time to give them. Client reports are one of those. They need to be thoughtful, structured and professional because they represent your work and your relationship with the client. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they should take hours to write. Recently, I found myself facing exactly that challenge, and instead of opening a blank Word document, I decided to let Claude do something rather different.
The Background
One of my advisory clients receives regular progress reports from me. Nothing particularly glamorous, but an important piece of communication. These reports explain what we’ve worked on, where we’ve made progress, what still needs attention and what comes next. They’re also an opportunity to remind the client of everything that has happened since the previous report, because let’s face it, once you’re in the middle of running a business, it’s easy to forget just how much has been accomplished.
The challenge wasn’t knowing what to write. I already had all the information. Over the previous weeks, I had been keeping notes as I worked. I also had the original mandate describing the scope of the engagement.
The problem was that my notes looked exactly like notes should look: short sentences, unfinished thoughts, reminders to myself, and ideas captured quickly between meetings. Turning all of that into a polished client report was going to take time. Not because I needed to think harder. Simply because I needed to organise it, structure it and rewrite it in a more formal way.
That’s exactly the type of work I increasingly ask myself whether AI should be doing instead of me.
The Experiment
Instead of going to the Claude application, this time I decided to try Claude for Word. Now, if you haven’t come across it yet, Claude for Word is Anthropic’s integration inside Microsoft Word. Rather than copying text backwards and forwards between applications, you can work directly within the document itself. Copilot works in very similar ways, but I am just more attuned to Claude at the moment.
The add-on has access to your document, understands its structure and helps you edit, rewrite, expand or draft sections while staying inside Word. It feels much closer to collaborating with someone sitting next to you than switching between different applications.
For this report, I uploaded two things. The first was the mandate for the client engagement, so Claude understood the objectives and what I had originally committed to deliver. The second was a copy-paste of my working notes. There wasn’t much beauty in those notes. Some were bullet points, some were half-finished sentences, some were simply reminders of next steps I wanted to work on.
The Ask
I asked Claude to prepare a professional client progress report. I asked it to propose a logical structure, write in formal business language and organise the information into clear sections. Within moments, I had something that genuinely surprised me. Or maybe it does not even surprise me anymore…
It hadn’t simply rewritten my notes. It had grouped related ideas together. It suggested headings I probably would have used myself. It created a natural flow from work completed, to current priorities, to next steps. It also adopted a tone that felt appropriate for a client report; it was professional, balanced and concise.
Even better, because I was working directly inside Word, the report adopted my branding and created a document template with just the right colours and formatting. That might sound like a small thing. But anyone who produces reports regularly knows formatting often takes almost as long as the writing itself. Instead of spending my time fixing headings, adjusting fonts or moving paragraphs around, I could focus on reviewing the substance.
The Outcome
Of course, I didn’t send the first version. As with almost every AI experiment, the first draft wasn’t the final draft.
I adjusted a few sections, added nuance where only I knew the context, removed over-polished language and checked it all for accuracy. The human judgment remained mine. But the heavy lifting had already been done. Sometimes, getting started on a task can be the greatest barrier, even when the task itself is not too hard.
This was not a one-off experiment. A follow-on experiment came the week after. The following week, instead of starting again from scratch, I simply added my latest progress notes to the same document and asked Claude to update the report. My weekly scribbles became a polished progress report in minutes. The structure and format were the same. The process became repeatable. And that’s when AI becomes really valuable. Not because it saves you time once. Because it creates a workflow you can use again and again.
In reality, I would probably not have such a high-quality report if I did not have AI supporting me, as I had limited time to dedicate to it. But having it is a better outcome.
Lessons Learned
- Focus on capturing the content, not writing the report: I’ve realised my job during the week isn’t to produce beautiful prose. It’s to capture good thinking. If I write down the important discussions, decisions and progress as they happen, AI can help transform those notes into something much more polished later.
- Structure is often more valuable than writing: One of the biggest benefits wasn’t the wording. It was the organisation. Good reports tell a story. They guide the reader through what happened, why it matters and what comes next. Claude helped create that structure far faster than I would have done on my own.
- AI gives you leverage, not permission to stop thinking: Everything in that report came from me – the ideas, the work, the judgment. Claude did not hallucinate on the progress I had made. It just presented it more effectively. That’s a very different role from replacing expertise. It’s amplifying it.
- Repeatable workflows create the biggest gains: The first report saved me time, the second even more, and the third created consistency. Now I have a process. Every week, I collect my notes, update the document and let AI do the first draft before I review it. That’s where the real productivity comes from.
Friction Removed
This experiment reminded me that AI isn’t just about creating content. It’s about removing friction. Too often, we delay important communication because we think it will take too long. Client updates, board papers, progress reports, strategy documents. Many of these already exist in pieces, in meeting notes, emails and working documents.
The value isn’t asking AI to invent them. It’s asking AI to help assemble them into something clear, structured and professional. That allows us to spend more time thinking, advising and building relationships, and less time worrying about formatting and sentence structure.
For me, that’s a much better use of technology.
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Thanks for listening. Until next time — keep experimenting and keep having fun.