Scaling a startup isn’t just about product and funding—it’s about people. The Business of People is a biweekly newsletter that helps people leaders learn to think like business leaders. You'll get tips, tricks, tactics, and templates to build high-performing teams, scale operations, and drive commercial success.
🚀 Two weeks of a VP of People's Claude use cases
Published 5 days ago • 6 min read
Two weeks of a VP of People's Claude use cases
March 31, 2026 | Edition #21
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Rachel’s Series C cybersecurity company is trying to become “AI-native,” whatever that means.
What it feels like to her is that everyone is suddenly being told to “USE AI” without any specifics on the tools, use cases, or goal outcomes.
To make using AI more approachable and fun for her People team, they picked a single tool to test — Claude — and decided to do a two-week experiment where they begin every work task from within Claude.
She was inspired by her CTO who recently had the engineering team do a full sprint where only AI-assisted code could be introduced to the codebase.
The idea wasn’t to move to 100% AI-assisted code on an ongoing basis, but rather to have an intentional, and potentially less productive, transition period where people tested out new ways of working.
In a similar way, the two-week People team experiment really helped everyone to figure out the potential and limitations of Claude. By simply asking Claude if it could handle the task that needed to be done, the team learned things like, “Cool, it can send emails for us from a .csv, but it’s a bummer it can’t hold the Gmail email signature.”
Instead of needing to come up with use cases for AI, using AI became the default and the rate of learning skyrocketed.
Rachel also made it a team effort with live Demo Days, 1:1 Donut pairings, and Team Bonding sessions with dueling AI builds.
Here’s what two-weeks of a VP of People’s Claude use cases might look like from simple to sophisticated:
Level 1: Internal communication with Claude Chat (Sonnet 4.6)
You’re launching a company-wide L&D initiative and need a Slack announcement for your #all-team channel. Assume the initiative, Galactic Graders, is space-themed, informal, and energetic.
You can give Claude the context and tone you want as well as the Notion doc with content for the first session.
Claude will draft the announcement, make decisions about what to include vs. save for the channel itself, and link to the project-specific Slack channel by ID so it renders as clickable. Expect to edit maybe two sentences.
Level 2: Document redaction with Claude Cowork (Opus 4.6, extended thinking enabled)
In HR, we have a lot of documents that have details with varying levels of sensitivity. If you have a PDF document and you need to remove one section (e.g., compensation expectations) before sharing it more broadly, you can have Claude Cowork redact the document with a Python script.
No, you don’t need to know Python. Just describe what you want removed in plain text. No more using Preview to put black or white shape boxes over things.
Level 3: Compensation analysis with Claude Cowork (Opus 4.6, extended thinking, HR plug-in)
This is where Cowork gets interesting. Anthropic launched an HR plugin that’s designed for people operations — recruiting, onboarding, performance reviews, compensation analysis. It comes pre-loaded with slash commands like /offer-letter, /onboarding-plan, and /comp-analysis. You can configure it with your company’s actual benefits, equity structure, and comp philosophy so the outputs aren’t generic.
You can use the compensation analysis workflows alongside existing job architecture, salary tier/band system, etc. to do things like calculate formulas for new sub-tiers/bands faster (Claude can derive the spread formula you use and apply it in new rows from a sheet with values only) and sanity check the data pulled from your compensation tool.
Level 4: Manager updates with Claude Cowork and connected tools (Slack, GoogleDrive, Notion)
Let’s say you recently confirmed salary or equity changes and need to individually inform managers and give them all the details along with a script and deadline to tell their direct reports.
By giving Claude Cowork the GoogleSheet with the confirmed impacted team members and changes, a Notion/GoogleDoc SOP, and an example from last cycle, Claude can draft and send all the necessary DMs via Slack.
Level 5: Optimize daily schedule with Todoist MCP, Morning OS skill, and Claude Code
If you use Todoist, or any other task management tool with either a Claude connector or MCP, you can build a Morning OS skill that scans your email, Slack, meeting notes, to dos, and more, then flags the most urgent items for you with direct links to them.
You can take it one step further and have it assign tasks to complete in between meetings on the calendar so you have a view of what you need to be doing at any point throughout the day.
Combine this with any other instructions you want (e.g., draft my morning standup post for me) and a continuous session in Claude Code to plan and execute your whole day from one starting point.
Here’s an example of a member of Zapier’s People team doing this with the Zapier MCP. (I start mine every day by saying "Hey Claude, let's do my Morning OS." But her "let's go" works too.)
Here’s the 27-minute video I found most useful to understand what the set up process for a complex workflow like this would look like.
The Four-T Playbook
Every edition, I share a proven tip, trick, tactic, or template. This time, it's a:
👉Tip: No matter what AI tool your company uses, take the time to research and set it up well.
For Claude, this means setting up a Claude.MD context file and folder structure for Claude to store projects, templates, and other information it learns about you. This is how it gets better and better at understanding and responding to your situation over time.
If you’re debating switching platforms, but don’t want to lose built up context, you can ask the AI to export all the information it knows about you in a swipe file that you can import to another tool.
This is an infographic from Ruben Hassid. I highly recommend picking a single AI content creator to follow and learn from to prevent overwhelm. He's mine and the tips are great.
Quick note before you dive in: AI adoption policies differ across companies, and some of what I describe in this newsletter may not be approved, compliant, or appropriate in your specific environment. Before implementing any AI use case, please check your company’s acceptable use and data privacy policies, and loop in your legal or compliance team as needed. I’m sharing what I know or am seeing in the field as a practitioner — not giving legal or compliance advice.
I’m planning to create more products and add them to a bundle. So, I’d love to hear from you: What templates, playbooks, or resources would be most helpful to you?
Until next time, Melissa
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The Business of People
By Melissa Theiss
Scaling a startup isn’t just about product and funding—it’s about people. The Business of People is a biweekly newsletter that helps people leaders learn to think like business leaders. You'll get tips, tricks, tactics, and templates to build high-performing teams, scale operations, and drive commercial success.
