INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Guest: Maria Flores, Director of Operations, Greenfield Manufacturing
Interviewer: David Chen, Charter Oak Consulting
Date: February 12, 2026
Duration: 22 minutes

DAVID: Maria, thanks for sitting down with us. Let's start with the obvious question. You implemented Claude across your operations team about six months ago. What's the honest verdict?

MARIA: The honest verdict is that it took longer to see real results than I expected, but now that we're there, I wouldn't go back. The first two months were rough. People were either ignoring it entirely or using it to write emails that sounded like a robot. We had one guy in logistics who was copying and pasting his entire inbox into Claude and asking it to "deal with this." That didn't go well.

DAVID: What changed?

MARIA: Training. Real training, not a webinar. We brought everyone into a room for a full day and made them actually use the tool on their real work. Not hypotheticals. Their actual reports, their actual emails, their actual spreadsheets. That's when it clicked.

DAVID: Can you give me a specific example?

MARIA: Sure. Our quality team used to spend about eight hours every Friday compiling the weekly defect report. They'd pull data from three different systems, normalize it, write the summary, format it for leadership. Eight hours, every single week. After training, one of the QA analysts built a workflow where she uploads the raw data exports and Claude produces the entire report in about twenty minutes. She still reviews it and makes edits, but she went from a full day to about an hour including review.

DAVID: That's significant. What about the people who were resistant?

MARIA: We still have a few. Honestly, the resistance isn't about the technology. It's about fear. People hear "AI" and think "replacement." We had to be very clear that this was about making their jobs less tedious, not about eliminating their jobs. The ones who came around were the ones who had the most tedious work. Once they saw Claude could handle the parts of their job they hated, the fear went away pretty quick.

DAVID: If you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?

MARIA: Start with training before deployment. We gave everyone access on a Monday and said "go explore." That was a mistake. People don't explore well when they're busy, and everyone's busy. I would have run the training first, then given them access the next day while the momentum was fresh.

DAVID: What's your advice for other operations leaders considering this?

MARIA: Pick three workflows that eat the most time. Not the most complex ones, the most time-consuming ones. Start there. Get those wins on the board. The rest follows.

DAVID: Maria, thank you. This is exactly the kind of practical insight we're looking for.

MARIA: Happy to help.