The constraint was being in two places at once
A financial planner can ask a chatbot to make a client message clearer and save a few minutes. But while the planner is on a call, somebody else's cash-flow analysis still waits. Faster typing barely touches that constraint.
At Range, an agent prepares that draft while the planner works with another client. Matt Ragone, a certified financial planner leading the team's AI adoption, describes what changed in his own day. After the call, he opened the analysis, reviewed it, changed what needed changing, and sent the recommendations himself. The agent never sent them. In a regulated advice business, that review remained part of the work. 3:02:06
For this arrangement to work, the agent needed access to the place where planners actually worked. Copying material into a separate chat window left the planner coordinating every step. It also needed Range's way of doing a task: what to inspect first, what to flag, and how to phrase a recommendation. General knowledge about financial planning could not supply those firm-specific choices.
The planners wrote those methods as skills the agent could follow. Their advantage was knowing why a draft was wrong and how to fix it. They did not need to become programmers first.
Pick, teach, pack, test, ship
Ragone describes a five-step process, beginning with work small enough to judge and frequent enough to matter.
- Pick a repeated workflow. Start with something done every week, where a knowledgeable person can quickly distinguish good output from bad output. Range chose cash-flow analysis and insurance reviews: familiar work with substantial manual preparation. The most impressive or complex task is a poor first choice if nobody can evaluate the result quickly.
- Teach through real cases. Walk through several plans already delivered to clients. Narrate why a pay stub is being opened, which detail matters, and what would trigger a question. A list of clicks records the procedure; the explanation records the professional judgment that makes the procedure useful.
- Pack the method into a skill. Write down the questions the agent must ask before starting and the limits it must respect. Missing information should produce a clarification instead of a confident guess. At Range, a central limit is that the agent drafts and a planner decides whether anything goes to a client.
- Test on real work. Run the skill five to ten times before sharing it. Each run can expose a missing question, an edge case, or an answer that sounds right but is wrong. Update the skill and repeat. Ragone compares that effort with the much larger cleanup required after distributing an unfinished process to a whole team.
- Ship with an owner and a reviewer. An owner keeps the skill current as processes and tax rules change. Someone other than the author reviews it before colleagues depend on it. A method that worked in March may no longer be right in December.
The critical teaching material often sits between the visible steps. Why stop here? Which missing document changes the answer? What must the agent never decide by itself? Those details make a skill more than a checklist. They also make review possible: another planner can examine whether the written process reflects the firm's practice. 3:04:38
Maintenance follows the work
Six months into this effort, Ragone reports 24 skills across the company, with 17 in planning. He says adoption spread to sales, product, and marketing without a company-wide mandate. Colleagues saw planners getting useful drafts and started building methods for their own work.
The skills became more specific as specialists took ownership. The person who understood insurance best could write the insurance process; the person closest to tax work could maintain that process. Reviewing one another's skills also fit an existing professional habit. Planners already reviewed one another's plans, so the new artifact entered a familiar cycle of authorship and checking.
Once colleagues depend on a skill, someone has to keep it correct. Who updates the insurance method? Who catches a changed tax rule? Range's ownership and peer review answer those questions using habits the planning team already had. The model makes the draft; the planners maintain the practice behind it.