On Tuesday night I ran my AI Systems Masterclass and somebody in the chat asked a question I hear a lot. What happens if Claude loses my AI employees one day?

My answer surprised a few people. An AI employee is just text. It's a standard operating procedure written clearly enough that Claude can follow it, and you could save every one of mine as a Word document.

So if you want AI doing work in your business, the skill that matters most is writing SOPs. Here's how I write them so Claude follows them the same way every time.

What makes an SOP something AI can follow?

An SOP that AI can follow has five parts: when to start, what to read first, the steps in order, the rules, and what finished looks like.

Most SOPs written for people skip steps. That works with people, because a person fills the gaps with experience. Claude fills the gaps with guesses, and guesses are where the generic output comes from.

I feel like the people who've worked in corporate pick this up the fastest. They've been writing SOPs for years, so when I explain that a Claude skill is an SOP, it clicks right away. If you've never written one, that's fine. It's a skill you can learn, and once you see it, you start noticing steps everywhere in your business.

Why does AI give generic answers without a written process?

If you don't have a step-by-step process for something, you can't automate it.

When you paste a one-line request into a blank chat, Claude doesn't know your vendors, your pricing, your rules or how you like things done. So it gives you the average answer for anyone, and then you spend the next 20 minutes arguing with it to make it sound like your business.

I told the peanut butter and jelly story in what to set up first in Claude. Writing "get the peanut butter, get the jelly, put it on bread" isn't enough. Open the pantry. Unscrew the lid. Get a knife out of the drawer. That's the level of detail an SOP for AI needs.

How do you write an SOP for AI, step by step?

I'll use a skill I built for my dad's business as the example. He runs Carolina Wood Carvings.....custom carvings, Christmas trees, dough bowls, things like that. Every month his credit card statement comes in with business and personal charges mixed together, and somebody has to code every line before his CPA can do anything with it.

Here's how I wrote that process down.

  1. Name the trigger. Tell Claude exactly when this SOP applies. Mine says to run it any time a credit card statement gets uploaded or pasted as a CSV.
  2. List the files it reads every time. The bookkeeper reads his company profile, chart of accounts, vendor list, categorization rules and his expense history from the past few months. Every single run, before it does anything.
  3. Write the steps at sandwich level. Number them. One action per step. If a step says "handle it like usual," Claude has no idea what usual means.
  4. Mark which steps are yours. I think about it like a 5 step process where you handle step 1, AI handles steps 2 and 3, you come back in for step 4 and AI handles step 5. The human stays in the loop on purpose.
  5. Write the rules. This vendor is always business. That one is always personal. This kind of charge is iffy, so always flag it. One of the rules I gave it: if you're 90% sure or higher, code it. If you're not, flag it for me.
  6. Show what done looks like. Describe the output format and drop in one example of finished work. Claude matches what it can see much better than what you describe.

What does a finished AI SOP look like?

Here's a trimmed version of the bookkeeping SOP. Yours will look different, but the shape stays the same.

Name: Monthly transaction coding
When to run: a credit card statement is uploaded or pasted as a CSV
Read first: company profile, chart of accounts, vendor list,
  categorization rules, past few months of coded expenses
Steps:
1. Read every transaction on the statement.
2. Match each vendor to the vendor list.
3. Pick a category using the rules and past expenses.
4. Give each transaction a confidence score.
5. 90% sure or higher: code it. Under 90%: flag it with
   your best guess and the reason.
Rules:
- Never add or rename a category on the chart of accounts.
- Anything that could be personal or business gets flagged.
Output: a table of coded transactions, then a short list of
  flagged ones for review.

Last time it ran, the statement had 187 transactions and my dad had to review 14 of them. The rest were coded the way he would have coded them, because the SOP told Claude exactly how he does it.

How do you turn an SOP into a Claude skill?

A skill is a saved set of instructions Claude runs the same way every time. In Claude, each skill has a name and a short description at the top that tells Claude when to use it, and it can carry reference files like a vendor list or a pricing sheet.

The easiest way I've found to build one:

  1. Open a chat inside your Claude Project and paste in your SOP.
  2. Run the task once with a real example, like last month's statement.
  3. Fix anything that came out wrong right there in the chat.
  4. Ask Claude, "Can we turn this into a skill?"

The Project and the skill do different jobs. The Project holds what Claude knows about your business: what you sell, your pricing, your brand. The skill holds the steps for one task. When you run a good skill inside a well-stocked Project, you get output that sounds like your business instead of everybody's business. That's level 2 of an AI employee, the trained employee, and it's the level every other level is built on.

How do you keep an AI SOP up to date?

You treat it like a new hire. A person gets better the more you correct them, and a skill works the same way if you roll the corrections back in.

At the end of a session I paste in this prompt: "Before you update this skill, can you let me know the things that you learned during this chat, and then I'll tell you what things I want you to remember. And then we'll update the skill together."

Claude lists what it picked up. I keep what's right, toss what isn't, and the skill gets a little sharper every month. When my dad adds a new vendor or a new recurring expense, it goes into the files and the bookkeeper knows it next time.

And since a skill is just text, save a copy somewhere outside Claude, like a Google Drive folder. If anything ever happens, you still own your process.

What mistakes make AI ignore your SOP?

These are the things I see trip people up with their first skills.

  • Steps that only make sense to you. "Send the usual follow-up" means nothing to Claude. Write what the follow-up says.
  • One giant SOP for everything. A broad "office assistant" has no clear steps. Build one skill for proposals, one for meeting prep, one for follow-ups.
  • No examples. Two or three samples of finished work do more than a page of adjectives about tone.
  • No human check. Have Claude draft emails instead of sending them, and flag anything below your confidence line. You review the last 5 or 10%.

Where should you start?

Pick one task you do every week that follows the same steps. Write the trigger, the files, the steps, the rules and what done looks like on one page, then run it through Claude and see where it guesses.

If you'd rather have your processes written and built into AI employees with me in the room, that's what the AI Operating System is. It's six live sessions where we install working AI systems in your business, starting with the processes you already run every week.