AI Thought Leadership — Skills & Harness

Heron's method, your format, your own AI stack.

A skill is Heron's method written down: the evaluation framework, the source-handling rules, your output template, and the quality gate every deliverable has to pass. The harness is what sits around the model, the tools it can call and the context it is given. Both run in your own stack, on the Heron MCP, and produce your deliverable rather than ours.

01 — Anatomy of a skill

From an executive's name to a finished memo, in your template.

A skill is a packaged method: the instructions, Heron's evaluation framework, the source-handling rules, your output template, and a QA gate — everything an analyst would otherwise carry in their head. Here is one concrete job, a diligence memo on a named CEO, done both ways.

Without a skill
01
Search the library and pull every interview on the executive.
02
Read them; hand-tag the evidence against the firm's evaluation criteria.
03
Draft in the house memo template; reconcile the views that conflict.
04
Check every quote against its transcript before it goes to IC.
With the skill
01
Name the executive.
02
The skill resolves the company and executive through the Heron MCP, pulls the interviews, and organizes the evidence around the dimensions the decision turns on.
03
Writes into your house template — your section order, your verdict conventions.
04
Runs the QA gate: every quote traceable, gaps flagged, verdict supported — then returns the memo and its source list.

Same evidence, same rigor. The skill changes who holds the method and how many times it runs.

02 — The library

Five areas of work, each with a finished deliverable.

Every skill in the library is built on a Heron data source and produces one deliverable in your house format. The library is organized by the work it does, not by product.

Area
What it produces
Built from
Best for
Executive diligence
What it produces
CEO and CFO Diligence Memos with a derived forward call; Management Diligence Reports organized on the evaluation dimensions the business turns on; board-grade Casebooks for CEO selection; Retrospectives that grade an earlier report against what followed.
Built from
Researcher-led management-diligence interviews and ManagementTrack career data.
Best for
PE deal teams, boards and search committees, allocators, long-only and activist PMs.
Company review
What it produces
The Heron Intelligence Review: every interview Heron holds on one company read in full, the latest wave set against the latest results and the published view, and the earlier interviews tested against what happened.
Built from
The full Heron corpus on a single company, across every interview type and year.
Best for
Analysts and PMs building or defending a position; boards taking stock.
Leadership transitions
What it produces
A daily sweep of announced CEO transitions cross-checked against the Heron library and tiered by relevance; quote-led reads on departing, interim, and incoming leaders.
Built from
News and SEC filings, matched to Heron interviews on the executives involved.
Best for
Event-driven funds, long/short PMs, sector analysts.
Post-earnings research
What it produces
Detailed Reviews that walk a quarter theme by theme; Non-Consensus Reads isolating where operator evidence departs from the Street; Operators vs. Management, testing management's earnings-call claims against former-employee interviews.
Built from
Heron Events post-earnings interviews and the prior-quarter archive.
Best for
Hedge fund and long-only analysts covering the name.
Interview quality
What it produces
Scored, ranked assessments of interview craft, researcher-led and AI-led, with call-utility and signal-yield ratings and a researcher roll-up; plus a QA gate that grades a finished memo before it ships.
Built from
Any primary research interview transcript — Heron's or your own.
Best for
Heads of research and diligence teams standardizing quality.

Built and tested on 80,000+ Heron interviews. Applicable to any primary research interview, including transcripts your own team conducts.

03 — The harness

Two skills sit underneath every deliverable.

One governs data access, so your AI resolves the right company and executive and reads the right interviews rather than guessing at them. One governs language, and gates every draft before it ships. Every report skill inherits both, which is why the outputs are consistent rather than eleven separate experiments.

01 · Your AI client

Claude, or any MCP-capable client

Runs inside your firm's environment. Your prompts, templates, and outputs stay where your team already works.

02 · Heron MCP

The connection to Heron's data

Resolves companies and executives, retrieves interviews and ManagementTrack records, and returns them to your client with full source metadata.

03 · The skill

Method, template, and the language gate

Turns what the MCP returns — or any primary research interview you bring — into your deliverable, checked against Heron's quality standard before it lands.

“Eighty percent of my own Heron usage runs through the MCP and our skills library.”

Nate Singer · CEO, Heron Intelligence
04 — The frameworks behind the skills

The method behind the skills, for teams building their own.

Skills are opinionated. The opinions are Heron's twenty years of management diligence, written down. Clients receive the frameworks the skills are built on, so their own teams can extend them, adapt them, or build new capability on the same foundation.

01

Evaluation dimensions

How Heron organizes evidence on an executive around the questions the business turns on, rather than personality — and how confidence is earned from the sources rather than asserted.

02

Interview craft

How researcher-led management-diligence interviews are structured: source selection, question design, and the signals that separate a decision-useful call from a courteous one.

03

QA rubrics

How outputs are graded before they ship: quote traceability, verdict support, gap disclosure — the same standard applied to human- and AI-produced work.

Available to Heron clients.

The cycle
Skills & Harness

Your format. Your stack. Heron's evidence.