Graham has a confession: he hates PowerPoint. Always has. The late nights at Lehman Brothers lining up charts pixel by pixel. The IC memos that never end. And when he recently tried using Claude Opus to build slides, his words were blunt: "they looked like cr*p."
So this week, he and Debs gave Anthropic's newest model, Fable 5, one sentence and a template. Build an investment banking style company overview for Nvidia. No test runs. No preparation.
The result was a genuine split decision. Formatting earned an A from both Debs and Graham: clean, well-aligned, properly labeled with units and sources. The basics that junior analysts routinely forget were all handled correctly.
Content was a different story. Graham gave it a B-plus. Debs was harsher: a C. The overview covered Nvidia at a high level but lacked segmental revenue breakdown, forward estimates, and what Graham described as "emotion."
The conversation that followed was arguably more interesting than the output itself.
Graham argued that PowerPoint might actually outlast Excel as a day-to-day skill in finance: even after you stop building models, you never stop editing IC memos and pitch materials.
Debs made the case for reusable prompt "skills," pre-prepared instructions that teams can share and iterate on, as the practical path to getting first-pass results from AI that are actually usable.
Debs's closing verdict: "I think this is a superb use of AI in investment banking workflow."
Not because the output was perfect, but because the tedious formatting work is exactly what AI should be handling.
Key Discussion Points:
Graham's confession: why he hates PowerPoint and what Opus produced when he tried it.
The Fable 5 test: one prompt, one template, no preparation.
The split verdict: formatting A, content B-plus/C.
Why the output "lacks emotion" and what that means for AI-generated materials.
PowerPoint as a career-long skill: Graham's argument that it outlasts Excel.
The skills approach: how banks are building reusable prompt libraries.
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