WASBO – Getting Started with Claude AI: From Your First Conversation to a Repeatable Workflow
Description
Most professionals have tried an AI chatbot — but trying it and relying on it as a professional tool are two different things. This session is designed to bridge that gap, helping professionals move from curiosity to confident, productive use of Claude AI. Developed by Anthropic, Claude brings strengths that align exceptionally well with analytical, document-heavy, judgment-intensive work. Participants leave with awareness of Claude’s capabilities, practical skills for structuring effective conversations, and a concrete starting point for building their own AI-assisted workflows.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:
Recognize Claude AI’s core capabilities and how they differ from other Gen AI tools commonly used in professional settings.
Recall the key advantages Claude offers for accounting and finance work, including its approach to reasoning, document analysis, and response quality.
Identify the key components of an effective Claude prompt and recognize how structuring a conversation influences the quality and usefulness of the output.
Major Topics
What Is Claude — and Why Does It Matter for Finance Professionals? A non-technical introduction to Claude AI, who built it, and what it does well. Focus is on professional relevance — how Claude’s design priorities (accurate, nuanced reasoning) align with the standards accounting and finance professionals are already held to.
Claude’s Core Strengths: What Sets It Apart The capabilities that make Claude distinctive for professional work: an extended context window for analyzing full contracts or 10-Ks; reasoning depth for complex financial and regulatory questions; clean, professional writing quality; calibrated honesty about uncertainty; and Projects for building a persistent, role-aware assistant.
The Claude Ecosystem: What’s Available and How to Access It A practical tour of claude.ai — Free, Pro, and Team tiers — and what each unlocks. Covers the interface, file uploads, web search, Artifacts, and Projects. Goal is familiarity and confidence, not technical configuration.
Prompt Design That Works: Structuring a Claude Conversation Output quality depends on input quality. This section introduces a simple, repeatable framework — Role, Context, Task, and Constraints — with live comparisons of casual vs. structured prompts to illustrate the difference it makes.
Provider
Business Learning Institute
Course Level
Basic
CPE Field of Study
Information Technology
2.0
Who Should Attend
Accounting and finance professionals who are curious about Claude AI but have not yet made it a regular part of their professional workflow. No prior experience with Claude is required. Professionals who have used other AI tools (such as ChatGPT or Copilot) and want to understand how Claude compares will also find value in this session.
Instructor(s)
DONALD TOMOFF
Prerequisites
None. Participants are encouraged to create a free claude.ai account before the session so they can follow along during the session. A Pro subscription is not required for this introductory course.
