Advantage Solutions gives frontline managers 70,000 hours back with Claude

Turning scattered AI pilots into operational scale

Going into 2026, Advantage had AI experiments running in pockets across the company without a central owner. One demo business unit had automated 90% of its scheduling for thousands of daily shifts, but most teams were still experimenting independently.

The cost was diffuse. Advantage manages roughly 70 million labor hours a year across frontline operations like in-store product demonstrations, retail merchandising routes, and overnight shelf restocking. Tasks that take 20 or 30 minutes per event manager per shift, multiplied across thousands of locations, add up to hours that could be going to training, retention, and customer-facing work instead.

In early 2026, Advantage commissioned an enterprise AI diagnostic with Tenex, an AI transformation firm. The diagnostic surfaced more than 50 active AI use cases at varying levels of maturity and made clear that Advantage needed governance, fluency, and a clearer set of priorities. 

“We needed a central force that was actually thinking about where we were spending time and resources, in order to deploy that in the organization,” said Bethany Miles, Chief AI Officer. “We want to get rid of some of the truly redundant manual tasks, and think about how we upskill our teammates to spend more time on training and being out on the store floor.”

Choosing Claude, starting at the top

Working with Tenex, Advantage chose Claude as one of the platforms to build around. “Our team worked closely with Advantage to explore single-player and multi-player AI opportunities,” said Arman Hezarkhani, Managing Partner at Tenex. “With their scale and reach, Advantage needed a platform with enterprise-grade power and reliability. Claude was one of the leading models we could stand up quickly at their scale.” 

Advantage made two organizing decisions. The first was governance: the company stood up an AI office reporting into a CEO-sponsored group of C-suite executives that meets regularly to review the portfolio. The second was sequencing. "We needed to meet people where they were in their AI learning journey. We chose to invest in AI fluency starting from the top of the organization," Miles said. The executive leadership team would go through Claude training before anyone else.

“Every major shift in this industry has separated the companies that moved with intention from the ones that waited to see what happened. We chose to move with intention,” said Dave Peacock, CEO of Advantage Solutions. “We chose to start at the top, because you can't ask an organization to transform if its leaders haven't done the work themselves.” 

Peacock is equally direct about what AI is for. “The way I think about AI is simple: it's an enabler,” he said. “It enables our teammates to do more meaningful work, our leaders to make faster and better decisions, and increasingly, it's going to enable us to show up for our customers in ways that truly set Advantage apart.” 

After the executive team finished, the company ran a three-hour Claude session for the next layer of senior leaders. From there, a growing network of business unit champions began emerging across the pilot, building Claude solutions for their own functions. The pilot itself launched with 150 people. Tenex helped design the curriculum: a 101 orientation on chat, a 201 module on Claude Cowork for multi-source workflows, and a 301 module on Claude Code.

Inside the pilot, super-users emerged quickly. One member of the retail merchandising team built a store-routing model in Claude Code that is now starting to appear in client pitches. It’s also actively being piloted to engage current clients and sharpen their retail execution strategy. Advantage is turning the prototype into a deployable solution. 

A finance super-user, Ash Gupta, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Advantage, was spending about 10 hours every forecast cycle on slides, commentary, and validation. He automated the assembly work in Claude, compressing it to under 30 minutes. “Claude took all of that off our plate,” said Gupta. “Now we're doing what finance is supposed to do: finding the insight and driving the decision. That's a meaningful shift for a team supporting a business of this size.”

The biggest workforce operations build is in event management. Each shift, an event manager overseeing in-store product demos checks off supply availability and compliance items with highlighters and paper, a 20-to-30-minute task. Advantage is building a tool, in part using Claude Code, that lets the manager take a photo of the cart setup and get a verified compliance check in minutes. Across the network, the company projects the automation will reclaim over 70,000 labor hours a year. "It means they could be on the floor more with our teammates, helping other teammates get training," Miles added. "It's giving us more meaningful work."

70,000 hours back, and a path to enterprise scale

The event manager compliance tool is on track to redirect over 70,000 labor hours a year from manual checks toward training and floor presence across the network. The retail merchandising routing model that started as one super-user's weekend project is now in client pitches. The finance forecast validation automation has compressed a 10-hour-per-week workload to under 30 minutes. 

“Seventy thousand hours is not an abstraction,” said George Johnson, Chief Operating Officer of Workforce Operations and Demonstration Services at Advantage. “That's real people, real shifts, and real time that was going to paperwork and is now going back to our teammates. Those teammates are now training faster, staying longer, and being present on the floor. That's not an efficiency story. That's a people story. That's what this is all about.”

A related workforce operations push targets time to first shift for new hires. "There's a gap between saying yes to Advantage and starting your first shift, and we want to close it," Miles said. "The sooner someone's trained and on the floor, the better it is for them, and the better we show up for our clients." Claude Code is being used alongside Tenex to redesign communication channels with new hires and compress that timeline.

Claude Cowork has also become part of how the company communicates, including the company's first-ever shareholder letter this spring, which Peacock closed with a public AI diligence statement on Claude's role in refining it. Miles is applying the same pattern in the CEO office building out Claude Cowork as a working assistant that takes on day-to-day execution so she and Peacock can spend more time on higher-order work. "For anything that's pulling files, synthesizing, or creating workflows, that's where I use Claude Cowork," Miles said.

Looking ahead

Advantage is now scaling Claude Enterprise from the 150-person pilot to thousands of users across the company. The rollout has expanded through marketing, communications, and other functions, and will continue through the end of 2026. Workforce operations remains the largest area of focus, and Advantage intends to apply Claude to operational opportunities across the business. 

The company is also looking beyond internal productivity. “We see a lot of potential here,” Miles said. “It’s really opened the eyes of our leadership team, who have been really impressed with what Claude and Anthropic can do."