Summarising Long Documents

Claude is just as useful on the other side of the writing problem. Long documents, dense reports, the things that pile up in your inbox.

The 9am with Chris

It's 8:45am. Sarah's just got into the office. She's got a meeting with Chris, the MD, at 9am. The firm's annual report has just landed in her inbox. There's quite a lot of information in there, too much to digest properly in fifteen minutes.

What she does is drop the document into Claude and add some context:

Claude reviews the entire document and highlights the most important points for Chris. Instead of wading through pages of detail, Sarah gets a concise summary of the key wins, risks, and items that require attention.

For example, Claude might identify that revenue and margin both performed strongly, while client concentration is emerging as a risk. Hartwell now represents 14% of revenue, the highest single-client share in five years, and the current plan is to reduce that concentration by winning additional tier-one clients rather than reducing work with Hartwell.

Sarah can improve the output even further by providing more context about her role, what Chris cares about, and what she is expected to bring to the meeting.

Now Claude starts highlighting the issues that are actually Sarah's responsibility, such as hiring a senior auditor and the Birmingham office expansion. Rather than simply summarising the report, it begins connecting the findings to Sarah's role and the actions she may need to take.

In just a couple of minutes, Sarah can walk into the meeting with a much stronger understanding of the document than she would get from a quick skim-read.

The same approach works for almost any long document, including reports, contracts, policy updates, and even long email threads. You can ask for a general summary, or focus on specific areas such as risks, financial performance, key decisions, or important clauses, and Claude will extract the information that matters most.