A decades-old, PE-backed services company of roughly 700 people had rolled out Claude, but adoption was uneven. Before a broader rollout, the leadership team needed conviction grounded in their own work, not a vendor's promise. 7 Layer's four-week executive sprint put AI directly into their hands.
The Challenge
Everyone agrees AI will transform the way companies operate, but in most companies the impact has been hard to see and harder to measure. People use AI for one-off tasks, but the operating model doesn't change. This leadership team wanted to move from interest to impact and to lead the rollout from the front.
The Approach: Learn by Doing, Lead From the Front
The sprint put Claude directly into executives' hands on day one. Six leaders each worked across four touchpoints: a hands-on kickoff, two 1:1 coaching sessions, and an executive readout. Every leader left with a saved, reusable AI skill they could run the next morning.
What the Leaders Built
- Head of HR: turned raw ADP data into a formatted monthly turnover summary with regional breakdowns. An 8-hour task, now minutes.
- Sales Leader: built an ROI calculator and client-ready proposal template to standardize value-based selling across the sales team.
- CEO: built a pipeline win/loss analysis by deal size, segment, seller, and season, pinpointing where the team wins and where deals fall flat.
- COO: built a monthly report ranking field teams by labor cost percentage, plus a standardized service excellence playbook.
- Supply Chain: scored the vendor base by spend and single-source risk, auto-generated scorecards, and drafted RFP templates, quantifying a seven-figure cost savings target.
- CFO: encoded a weekly wage report as a reusable skill. A 30–45 minute task that now runs in five minutes.
I thought this would have taken us a year. Now we have a way to run fast.
The Results
Every leader left energized to bring AI into their own function, with working tools built on their own data, not demos. This is step one of the AI journey: fluency and conviction first, as the foundation that pulls everything after it.
