Financial planners at Range build agents without writing code because they know the firm's decisions, checks, and limits.
2
An agent can draft a cash flow or insurance analysis while a planner is busy, but a planner reviews every recommendation before it reaches a client.
3
A reliable skill comes from choosing a judgeable workflow, teaching it with real cases, testing it repeatedly, and assigning an owner and a separate reviewer.
Summary
Matthew Ragone describes how Range's financial planners built agents for their own work without writing code. The change was moving from chatbot assistance to drafts that happen while a planner is occupied with another client. Agents can prepare cash flow and insurance analyses, but planners review and approve every recommendation before it is sent. Ragone gives a five-step process: choose a repeated workflow whose quality is easy to judge, teach the agent with real cases, package the planner's judgment into a skill, test it five to ten times, then ship it with an owner and a separate reviewer. The instructions must include the questions the agent should ask and the actions it must never take. Six months in, Range had 24 skills across the company, including 17 in planning. The harder problem now is deciding who owns the instructions and how quality will be checked as more people rely on them.
The useful shift is work happening while the planner is busy
Ragone says typing speed was never the main constraint for a financial planner. A planner can only be in one place at a time, so making a prompt faster does not create much capacity. At Range, an agent drafts a cash flow analysis or insurance analysis for one client while the planner is on a call with another. After the call, the planner opens the draft, reviews it fully, changes what is needed, and sends the recommendations. The agent never sends anything directly to a client.
A skill captures how Range does a specific piece of work
The agent has to work where the firm's work already lives, rather than in a separate chat window that requires copying and pasting. It also needs to know Range's process, including what planners check first, what they always flag, and how they phrase recommendations. Ragone calls this combination a skill: the firm's way of doing one specific piece of work, written so an agent can follow it. The people who know the work should build the skill, and none of the five steps requires code.
Start with work that is repeated and easy to judge
Ragone advises against starting with the flashiest or most complex workflow. The first choice should be something the team does often and where a planner already knows what good work looks like. He also recommends workflows with substantial manual effort, even if they are relatively simple. At Range, cash flow analysis and insurance reviews fit that description. If a person cannot judge the output quickly, the team cannot test the skill properly or trust its drafts.
The planner's reasoning matters more than a list of clicks
To teach a skill, planners should walk through several real cases from start to finish. They should explain why they open a document, what they are looking for, and what would make them stop and ask a question. A sequence such as opening a particular file is easy to record, while the judgment behind that action makes the workflow specific to the firm. The skill also needs the questions it must ask before starting and the limits it must follow. At Range, it drafts recommendations but never sends them to a client.
Repeated testing exposes missing questions and confident mistakes
Ragone recommends running a new skill five to ten times on real cases before anyone else sees it. Each run can reveal an edge case, a question the skill should have asked, or a draft that sounds confident while being wrong. The team updates the skill, saves it, and runs it again. He compares this work with the larger cost of handing an unfinished skill to many people across the company.
Ownership keeps a skill aligned with changing practice
A shipped skill needs an owner who keeps it current and a reviewer who checks it before the team relies on it. Processes and tax rules change, so instructions that were right in March may be wrong by December. The reviewer should be someone other than the author, following the same separation used when planners review each other's plans. This turns an individual's shortcut into something a team can depend on.
Subject matter experts made the skills more specific
After six months, Range had 24 skills across the company, with 17 in planning. Sales, product, and marketing began building their own agents without a mandate. Ragone says the resulting skills became more specific because the person who knows insurance best builds the insurance skill, while the person who knows tax law best builds the tax skill. Peer review also carried over naturally from planning work to skill review.
The remaining problem is governance beyond the engineering team
Ragone says the question of whether a model can draft a cash flow analysis has already been settled at Range. The harder questions concern who writes down the firm's method, who tests it before release, and who owns it after many colleagues depend on it. As agents spread beyond engineering, these responsibilities become part of the work. He is direct that there is not much field data yet, and presents Range's process as its current answer.
