We tested AI on our own work first
AVOP has been assessing and developing people since 1971. In June 2026 we put Claude into three parts of our own business: the assessment reports our consultants write, the sales pipeline we had never been able to see, and the newsletter that kept being postponed. This is what changed, and what deliberately did not.
The assessment report
Situation
The report is our product, and it took about four hours to write. Those hours landed on the same senior consultants who ran the assessment, and they drained exactly the attention the next conversation needed. Reporting had become the bottleneck: our capacity was capped not by the assessments we could run, but by the write-ups we could get through.
Approach
We redesigned the writing workflow so the consultant moves from producing to reviewing. Claude drafts language from our own instruments, formats and house style. The consultant weighs the observations, corrects whatever does not match what they actually saw, and signs off.
Result
Three hours instead of four. The hour that came free did not leave the report: it went into the part that decides its quality, the judgement about the person in front of you. Same instruments, same standard, more attention where it counts.
Claude drafts. The consultant decides. That order is not negotiable.AVOP working principle, June 2026
The CRM we never had
Situation
In more than fifty years AVOP never had a CRM. The sales pipeline lived in people's heads and in mailboxes, which meant nobody could say with any confidence what the coming months held. Every off-the-shelf system we looked at asked us to work its way instead of ours.
Approach
We built our own, with Claude Code, around how assessment work actually arrives: enquiry, intake, proposal, planning, delivery. Deals, stages and expected close dates in one place, in our own language, maintained by us.
Result
The first CRM in the firm's history, running internally since June 2026. We can forecast the pipeline rather than guess at it, and we know what a trajectory costs us before we quote it.
The newsletter that kept slipping
Situation
Our newsletter took a full working day to produce, which is why it kept being postponed whenever client work got busy. We were sitting on more than fifty years of material and publishing almost none of it.
Approach
Editions are now drafted with Claude Cowork from our own body of work rather than from a blank page, and delivered straight into our email platform through an integration we built ourselves. Editing and approval stay with us.
Result
Two hours per edition instead of eight, and a settled two-monthly rhythm that actually appears. The gain is not only the six hours. It is that the newsletter now exists.
What stays human
An assessment report says something about someone's career. We treat that as a limit on what may be automated, not as an obstacle to work around.
Every report is verified and signed by the qualified consultant who ran the assessment. No conclusion about a candidate is produced or decided by a model. Claude drafts language from our own instruments and formats; the consultant checks every observation against what they actually saw before anything reaches a client or a candidate.
Candidate data is processed under the applicable privacy legislation, including the GDPR, and the work stays inside the professional and ethical standards that govern assessment practice. Our assessors work to the NIP code, and that does not change because a draft arrives faster.
This is also why we are careful about the numbers on this page. We did not set out to produce more reports per week. We set out to spend the same care with less typing, and to put the hour we saved back into the judgement that makes a report worth signing.
I look at processes, and at what a business can actually predict. What convinced me here was not the speed. It was that the process became visible: we can see the pipeline, we know what a report costs us, and the consultant still holds the pen.David van Ass, CFO, LEADRR, AVOP’s parent group
Claude products used
Claude Cowork for drafting and marketing production, Claude Code for building the CRM and the integration with our email platform.
In production since
June 2026, across the whole firm and in daily operational use. This was not a pilot or a proof of concept in one team.
Delivered with
STUUR.ai, which designed and delivered the three workstreams described here and trained our people to run them. STUUR.ai participates in the Claude Partner Network.
Curious how this would work in your organisation?
We are happy to talk through what we learned, including what did not work. See also our view on AI and organisational development.