Try AI for Growth

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto explores Claude Skills after realising how much time she was spending teaching AI the same processes again and again. Starting with a nine-step accounting reconciliation and the "Playbooks" she had already been building in Excel, she experiments with turning a process that works into a reusable Skill.
The experiment raises a bigger question than simply saving time: what knowledge about how we work is currently sitting in our heads, old documents or forgotten AI conversations? Sara explores how Skills could help capture that knowledge, make processes more consistent and, potentially, share the way work gets done across a team or organisation.

When my nine-year-old son received a cash gift to buy his first shares, I thought the challenge would be choosing the right company. Instead, it became an unexpected AI experiment in designing a learning experience. Rather than telling him what to invest in, I wanted to help him understand how businesses work and how investors think.
In this episode of Try AI for Growth, I share how a simple ChatGPT conversation evolved into a printable investing guide, a company rating framework and a series of child-friendly company profiles—all through continuous iteration. Along the way, I explore why AI is at its best when it helps us refine ideas, build reusable systems and think more deeply about the problems we're trying to solve. Whether you're creating learning materials, developing a business framework or simply looking for a better way to brainstorm, this episode is a reminder that AI can amplify your thinking, not replace it.

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto explores how Claude for Word transformed a routine client reporting process into a repeatable workflow. Starting with nothing more than a project mandate and a collection of rough working notes, she used AI to create a structured, professional report in minutes, while keeping complete control over the content and judgment behind it.
Rather than replacing expertise, this experiment shows how AI can remove the friction from documentation, helping leaders focus on thinking instead of formatting. Sara shares practical lessons on capturing good notes, creating repeatable workflows, and using AI to produce polished reports that save time without sacrificing quality.

In this episode of Try AI for Growth, Sara Vicente Barreto shares how she built an AI Grant Scout agent for her charity, Um Pequeno Gesto — a structured workflow designed to identify, assess and prioritise funding opportunities more strategically. A tool with real commercial applications. 
Rather than treating AI as a chatbot experiment, Sara explores what happens when you build an agent around a real operational workflow: defining rules, creating scoring systems, developing reference documents, and onboarding a team member to use it effectively. Along the way, she reflects honestly on what worked, what still feels frustrating, and why the real value of AI often lies in the thinking and structure behind the build.

Sara Vicente Barreto set out to fix one cluttered slide. What followed was an accidental full redesign of a charity pitch deck — and a new way of thinking about strategic presentation work.
In this episode, Sara shares what happened when she gave Claude for PowerPoint a real brief: a side-by-side comparison, a vague positioning concept, and a five-year-old intro slide that no longer reflected how the organisation thinks. The results were better than expected. The rabbit hole was deeper than planned.
She also explores what made this experiment different — working through it live with a colleague, and discovering that the real value wasn't just in the slides Claude produced, but in the strategic conversations it accelerated.