People love Claude right now.

Marketers are running it all day. Founders are building with it on weekends. Whole teams have it open next to their inbox. That’s the good news.

Here’s the problem. Loving a tool and building your business around it are two different things. Most companies buy the seats, announce the rollout, tell everyone to go experiment… and then wait for the business to change.

It doesn’t.

I sat down with Travis Tallent, founder of Daynova, for an episode of The Ross Simmonds Show I keep coming back to. Travis has led big teams. He’s rolled out Claude across entire organizations. And he’s watched the same thing happen over and over… people fall in love with Claude, then use maybe five percent of what it can actually do for them.

One line of his stuck with me:

“People innovate. AI elevates.”

Tape that to your monitor. Claude makes the people who already understand your business far more powerful. The judgment still belongs to them. The brands pulling ahead won’t be the ones with the most Claude seats. They’ll be the ones who built real systems around it.

 

Where Claude actually lives in a business

Travis runs Claude across three surfaces every single day, and each one does a different job.

Claude Chat is his thinking partner. Sparring on strategy, writing, sharpening positioning, pressure-testing an idea before it goes anywhere.

Claude Code is his builder. Tools, proposals, internal workflows, the kind of thing that used to take a developer and a week.

Claude Cowork is his operator. Deep research, daily briefs, competitive monitoring, the steady background work that keeps a business sharp.

Most people stop at the chat box. That’s the browser-tab habit. The brands getting real value treat Claude as something that runs across the whole company. The chat box is just one door in.

The real difference is Claude Skills… This is important:

Travis doesn’t type “build me a proposal” and hope for the best. That gives you generic output every time, because Claude has no idea who you are. Instead, he builds Skills inside Claude. He teaches it once and it remembers. Brand voice. Design rules. Fonts and colors. Words you never want to see in your copy. Pricing context. How to read a discovery call and pull out what actually matters. Now when he asks Claude to build a proposal, it already knows the brand, the tone, the structure, and the guardrails.

The output comes back sounding like the company instead of a robot.

That’s the whole game for a brand. A vague prompt gives you vague work. A Claude that’s been trained on how your business actually operates gives you a real edge.

And it scales across everything repeatable. Proposals. Content briefs. Competitive research. Sales prep. SEO analysis. Campaign reporting. Every one of those is a process. Every process is a Skill waiting to be built.

The Daynova Framework

Travis gave us a clean four-part model for turning Claude from a toy into infrastructure. Narrow. Orchestrate. Validate. Amplify.

Narrow

Find the work actually worth handing to Claude.

Most teams get distracted automating tasks that save ten seconds, then call it a win. That doesn’t move anything. The better target is where Claude creates real time, quality, or revenue gains. For a marketing team that’s internal linking analysis, SEO opportunity research, content briefs, competitor monitoring, customer interview synthesis. Pick the use case before you fall in love with the feature.

Orchestrate

Claude needs shared context, and this is where most companies fall apart.

Brand guidelines live in one folder. Customer research in another. The sales deck is buried in Slack. The positioning is stuck inside one person’s head. Feed Claude that mess and you get mess back.

The fix is a shared knowledge base Claude can actually reach. Brand guidelines, approved messaging, product docs, sales narratives, customer proof, visual assets, the rules of the road. Connect it to the tools you already use. What matters is that it’s accessible, governed, and consistent, so every person on the team works from the same source of truth.

Validate

Keep humans in the loop.

Claude can draft, summarize, score, and analyze all day. People still own the calls that touch trust, revenue, and risk. Travis makes a point worth repeating… Claude isn’t always the answer. Some jobs are better handled by a simple script or plain automation. Knowing where Claude belongs and where it doesn’t is the skill that separates the pros.

Amplify

This is the part most executives miss completely.

When Claude gives your people time back, you need a plan for that time. Travis rejects what he calls “small work theory,” the idea that AI mainly exists to cut cost. His view is bigger. Use the hours you save to grow output, raise quality, and do work you never had the capacity to touch.

His best example is IKEA. They rolled out an AI chatbot that handled roughly 40% of incoming customer service requests. Instead of cutting headcount, they retrained thousands of service reps into design support specialists. Travis points to that move as a driver of $1.5 billion in design business growth.

That’s the play.

Don’t bank the hours Claude gives you. Redeploy them into work worth more…

Every team is a product team now

One of Travis’s sharpest points… everyone is becoming a product manager.

It doesn’t mean every marketer has to learn to code. It means everyone has to think harder about what they build with Claude. A product manager asks whether a thing is worth building, who it helps, what data it needs, and what happens if a connected tool goes away.

That mindset matters because Claude makes building easy. And easy building creates a fresh problem… teams cranking out tools and agents nobody asked for. Volume stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. Judgment is the constraint now.

How to put Claude to work across the company

The episode got specific. Here’s how a brand can hand Claude real jobs, function by function.

Claude For Marketing

Build a reporting agent on top of Claude, connected to your analytics, SEO, and sales data. Stop digging through dashboards. Just ask how you’re ranking or how sales moved week over week.

Claude For Operations

Stand up a company knowledge agent so people can ask Claude about travel policy, brand assets, per diem rules, or internal workflows instead of pinging ops every time.

Claude For Account Management

Point Claude at your client call notes. Let it score communication quality, pull out action items, and push tasks straight into your project tool. Nobody should spend an afternoon turning meeting notes into cards.

Claude For Finance

PO reconciliation, forecasting, contractor payment checks, month-end support. Travis compares it to calculators and QuickBooks. Accounting didn’t disappear. The work changed.

Claude For Sales & Growth

Three strong ones. Claude reviewing an RFP and surfacing the decision criteria. Claude running prospect analysis before a first call. Claude coaching reps off their call notes and a scoring rubric. Better prep, better conversations, better close rates.

The human side

Putting Claude to work is a trust problem as much as a systems problem.

Travis talks about VUCA… volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. When people feel all of it at once, they freeze. Leaders have to plan for that instead of waving it off.

Psychological safety is what makes it work. Teams need to hear a leader say, “We don’t have every answer, but we’re building this with you.” The goal is to help people reinvent how they work without feeling like they have to give up who they are.

Build the system, then turn Claude loose

Here’s the part nobody wants to admit:

Claude won’t fix a broken process. It’ll show you exactly where the cracks are.

Scattered knowledge, fuzzy workflows, a team that doesn’t trust leadership… Claude shines a light on all of it. Build the system first and that same Claude becomes the engine your whole company runs on.

We’ve seen this pattern before at Foundation. We were early on Reddit for B2B back in 2018. We were building around GEO and AEO long before most people could spell them. The lesson never changes. The advantage always goes to the same place… whoever knows exactly where the value comes from and builds a system to capture it. The shiniest tool has never been what wins.

So pick the workflows worth handing over. Give Claude your context. Teach it your brand with Skills. Keep your people on the decisions that matter. Then take every hour it gives back and pour it into work that grows pipeline, customers, and the business itself.

Everybody already loves Claude.

The brands that win are the ones who put it to work.