Agentic AI / Internal Tool · 2026 · Honda Motor Co. — AI Innovation Division
A custom Claude Code skill that turns raw source material into brand-compliant, editable Honda decks through a five-phase multi-agent pipeline — letting a non-designer generate a polished, on-brand deck from natural language without ever facing a blank slide.
Internal individual initiative within Honda's AI Innovation Division, under internal review. This case study describes the agent orchestration, UX flow, and brand-compliance design — not confidential brand assets or internal source material.
2026 (in progress)
GenAI Engineer · Product & System Design
Five agents, one approval step
Overview
A custom Claude Code skill for Honda's AI Innovation Division. A user drops in source material — notes, data, a rough brief — and describes, in plain language, what they want to present. The skill runs a five-phase multi-agent pipeline that analyses the content, structures the narrative, applies Honda's brand system, checks quality, and produces a finished, editable PowerPoint deck. The user never starts from a blank slide: they answer a few questions, approve the direction at a single checkpoint, and receive an on-brand deck ready for final edits. The official role sits in AI development, but the work here was primarily product and system design.
The Problem
Producing a brand-compliant Honda deck from scratch is slow and repetitive. A non-designer faces a blank slide, an unfamiliar brand guideline, and a long manual process of laying out content, choosing on-brand colours and type, sourcing illustrations, and checking everything matches the template. Most people get stuck at the very first step — the empty slide — because slide creation isn't really a creative problem for them; it's an orchestration problem. They know what they want to communicate. What they lack is the time and design knowledge to assemble it on-brand.
Research & Discovery
Workflow analysis — found non-designers consistently get stuck at the empty slide; the real task is orchestration, not creativity
Brand-guideline audit — encoded Honda colours, type, template structure, and layout rules as machine-readable Claude Code context files
Agent-role decomposition — split the job into Analyst, Visual, Quality, Coach, and Assembly so each phase carries one clear responsibility
Authorship-boundary exploration — tested how much to automate before the user loses the sense of authorship, settling on automating how it looks while leaving what it says fully in the user's hands
Key Insight
“Automate everything about how it looks, and leave the user in full control of what it says. The user should describe what they want to communicate; the system should own structure, design, brand, and quality.”
Design Process
Single approval step — five specialised agents run behind one checkpoint. The user gives input once, approves the direction once, and receives the result. The complexity is real but hidden.
Phase 1 · Analyst — understands the source material and intent; extracts the key messages and structures the narrative.
Phase 2 · Visual — applies layout, typography, and Honda's brand system; sets slide structure and visual hierarchy.
Phase 3 · Quality — verifies brand compliance and consistency against the locked template rules, so the user can't accidentally ship an off-brand deck.
Phase 4 · Coach — checks narrative coherence and stakeholder framing: does the deck actually make its case?
Phase 5 · Assembly & Export — generates supporting illustrations with GPT-image, assembles the slides, and produces a fully editable PPTX for last-mile tweaks.
Critical Pivot
It began as an individual tool to make the author's own deck work faster. The shift came from treating brand not as a user burden but as a locked source of truth the agents read from — enforced by the Quality phase rather than left to the person. Once a non-designer could no longer accidentally produce an off-brand deck, the same pipeline became a reusable skill that removes the empty-slide barrier for non-technical colleagues across the division.
Results
Functional as a Claude Code skill; pitched individually within the division and under internal review
Used by teammates for trip reports, design reviews, and quarterly updates
Output is a fully editable PPTX — not a locked export — so the user keeps final control
Considering extension to a web or local desktop app so non-technical users can use it without installing Claude Code, broadening the addressable user base
Reflection
“This started as a tool to make my own work faster, then I realised the same pattern could remove a real cognitive load from non-technical colleagues who get stuck at the empty slide. The interesting design question is: how much can you automate before the user loses the sense of authorship? The answer here was to automate everything about how it looks, and leave the user in full control of what it says.”