We saw what AI could do for data analytics, so we made Claude part of our daily work, built on the security and expertise our customers count on.
We're proud to announce that Civis is a Select partner in the Claude Partner Network Services Track. For Civis customers, this means your whole team can get the answers they need fast, backed by the data experts you trust at Civis.
How we got here
Two months ago, we shut down all product engineering work at Civis for two weeks to go deeper on Claude. No regular sprints. Just our team and Claude.
Our whole team was already using Claude, but using a tool every day and mastering it are different things. We wanted time to experiment together, rethink how we solve problems, and figure out how this technology changes our work.
Along the way, people from across our team took and passed Anthropic's proctored partner certification exam. It's a technical exam with, ironically, no AI allowed. Like the SAT, without your TI-83.
Those certifications, plus our work helping customers use Claude alongside Civis Platform, helped us achieve Select partner status.
Why it matters: self-service analytics
Our goal is self-service analytics: anyone on a team can ask a question of their data and get an answer they can act on, without waiting in line for an analyst.
Claude brings that goal closer than it has ever been. People can now ask questions of their data in plain English. But AI makes analytics easier to access and harder to get right. An answer is only as good as the data under it: records from different systems matched to the same person, definitions everyone agrees on, permissions that decide who sees what, and a way to check the result.
That is the work Civis does underneath Claude. We keep handling the core data infrastructure, like connecting systems and resolving identity, so your team can spend its time on answers.
Four lessons that apply beyond engineering
A few lessons from those two weeks apply well beyond engineering teams:
- Shut down the regular work. Don't squeeze learning into leftover time. Give people uninterrupted time to actually get somewhere.
- Pick real problems from your roadmap, especially ones that might benefit from a totally different approach. Give people room to rethink them.
- Set a shared goal, then work in small groups. Give each group room to experiment and compare notes.
- Bring different disciplines together. We included engineering, DevOps, security, product, and data science. Each asked different questions and defined "useful" differently.
What the training changed for our engineers
The certification came with Anthropic's partner training. Here's what it changed for our engineering team.
The courses are worth taking.
"Building with the Claude API" and "Claude Code in Action" are essential for any organization building AI into its systems. Our engineering lead kept going through Anthropic's catalog after the required courses were done, and has recommended them to engineering leaders outside Civis.
Using AI and delivering it are different skills.
The training showed us how to deliver AI as a service that customers can rely on.
It changed daily work.
We now use subagents for research and coding, built a coding agent that handles small tickets and prepares pull requests, are adding prompt testing to the conversational systems we build, and use Claude for work like sprint planning.
AI got less magical. We got more bullish.
Seeing where its limits are, and where it needs care and attention even as models change, made us more confident in what it can do.
That last point matters most for our customers. Knowing where AI needs care is how we build an environment for trusted data analytics with Claude.
Thank you, Anthropic
Thanks to the Anthropic team for the support along the way. They're here to solve problems, and it really shows.
If you're curious how Civis and Claude are changing the way teams work with data, we'd love to chat.
