Building a “COO brain” for a social intelligence company

The client: A social intelligence company that provides social listening and audience insights to consumer brands, headquartered in the United States, with around 120 people. Name withheld for confidentiality.

The situation

The company had grown quickly. Client work was tracked in a project tool, sales in a CRM, reports in shared drives and almost every decision in Slack. Nobody — including the COO — could see the whole picture without asking a dozen people.

Every Monday the COO spent most of the morning stitching together status updates. Unhappy clients were often spotted only when they did not renew. New analysts took six weeks to learn “how we do things here”, because that knowledge lived in people’s heads.

Before and after

• Monday operations review

  BeforeSix hours collecting updates from team leads, tools and Slack

  AfterA one-page brief waiting in Slack at 7am, with sources linked

• Spotting at-risk clients

  BeforeUsually when the renewal conversation went badly

  AfterFlagged early from late deliverables, falling usage and tone in client emails

• “Where are we on…?” questions

  BeforeA Slack message, then a wait for whoever knew

  AfterAsk the COO brain in Slack and get an answer with links

• Checking client reports

  BeforeSenior analysts proof-read every report by hand

  AfterClaude checks numbers, brand names and charts first; analysts review the flags

What we built

1. One assistant that sees across every tool

   With read-only access to the project tool, CRM, shared drives and selected Slack channels, the COO brain can answer questions like “Which accounts are behind on deliverables this month?” in seconds.

2. The Monday brief

   Every Monday morning it writes a one-page operations brief: delivery status by account, hiring progress, cash-relevant milestones and the three things the COO should look at first.

3. Early-warning signals

   It watches for patterns that come before a lost client — missed deadlines, fewer logins, a change of tone in emails — and raises them with the account owner.

4. The company playbook, written down

   Onboarding, pricing, escalation and reporting standards were captured as Skills, so the assistant answers the way the company works — and new hires can ask it too.

5. A report quality check

   Before any client report is sent, Claude checks that numbers match the source dashboard, brand and competitor names are right, and every chart has a takeaway.

The Claude tools we used — in plain English

• Claude Code in Slack

  Lets your team ask for work in a normal Slack message — “draft this”, “check that” — and get it back in the same thread.

  How we used it here: Where the team talks to the COO brain — no new app to learn.

• Connectors (MCP)

  Secure links that let Claude read from and write to the tools you already use — your CRM, email, calendar, file storage — with only the access you allow.

  How we used it here: Read-only links to the project tool, CRM, shared drives and approved Slack channels.

• Skills

  Your company’s own know-how — playbooks, checklists, house style — written down once so Claude follows it every time.

  How we used it here: Holds the company’s onboarding, pricing, escalation and reporting playbooks.

• Scheduled tasks

  Jobs that run by themselves on a timetable — every morning at 8am, every Monday — like a reliable assistant who never forgets.

  How we used it here: Produces the Monday brief and a mid-week check on accounts at risk.

• Projects

  A way to group several Claude assistants working on one area, so one person can supervise them all from a single screen.

  How we used it here: Lets the COO supervise the brief, early-warning and report-check assistants from one place.

• Artifacts

  Live, shareable pages — dashboards, previews, checklists — that Claude builds and keeps up to date, so nobody waits for a spreadsheet to be emailed.

  How we used it here: A live operations dashboard the leadership team shares instead of a weekly slide deck.

• Claude Code (desktop app)

  The workbench our engineers use to have Claude build and test software with them. It is why we can ship a custom app in weeks rather than months.

  How we used it here: Used by our forward deployed engineers to build and test each connector and check.

Where it runs

The company and most of its clients are in the United States, and its contracts require client data to stay there. The COO brain, its logs and its stored summaries run entirely in a US cloud region, under a data processing agreement, with access limited to the leadership team and logged for audit.

The results

• Monday review preparation dropped from around six hours to 25 minutes.
• Accounts at risk were flagged about three weeks earlier on average, giving account owners time to act.
• Errors spotted by clients in their reports fell by roughly 80%, because most are now caught before sending.
• New analysts reached full productivity in about three weeks instead of six.