Claude Enterprise Rollout Plan
Leader decision guide for Claude Enterprise allocation across business units
In summary
ALIA is the default for every employee, at no cost to the business unit. Claude Enterprise is the exception, granted only where a person has a specific, frequent, and evidenced capability gap that ALIA cannot close. Each seat is a real cost the business unit carries, and a decision its leader is accountable for.
One point worth stating up front: more usage is not more value. A person who consumes their full token cap, chasing usage for its own sake (what some call "tokenmaxxing"), is not necessarily more productive than someone doing the same work on ALIA. The measure is outcomes per dollar, not tokens consumed.
Rollout plan
Rather than open access to everyone at once, Phase 1 runs as a controlled 12-week pilot of the 100 licenses in the signed contract, an estimated $50,000 to $100,000 total for the phase depending on tier mix and usage. Doing it this way keeps cost bounded and visible from day one, lets us measure real usage before deciding whether to scale, and gives each leader a clear, owned pool rather than an open-ended commitment. At the end of the 12 weeks, the licenses are reassigned, expanded, or held, based on actual usage.
Proposed allocation
This is our proposal for splitting the 100 licenses by function, based on our read of each team's core work and where we expect Claude Enterprise usage to run highest. The numbers are a starting point to refine with each leader, not a fixed quota. Within every line, each person still clears the four gates, and requests come from E1 and above on behalf of their teams.
| Function | Seats | Why CE earns it |
|---|---|---|
| Group Finance | 10 | Consolidation, FP&A and board modeling in Excel |
| Brand Finance | 5 | Brand P&L modeling and reporting |
| MC brands (excludes Level) | 30 | Sell-through analysis, brand reviews and merchandising planning across the brands |
| Omni - Product | 10 | Spec and research synthesis |
| Omni - Digital Marketing | 5 | Audience and performance analysis, not content |
| Investments | 3 | Deal due diligence and financial modeling |
| Strategy | 5 | Multi-source synthesis into board and strategy docs |
| Intelligence | 5 | Market and competitive-intelligence synthesis |
| Omni - AI Lab | 5 | Building and research, on CE web seats |
| Data & Analytics | 5 | Large-context analysis and synthesis |
| Tech & Engineering | 5 | Building with Claude Code; higher usage per seat (see Gate 4 tiers) |
| Reserve | 12 | Cross-function evidenced cases and senior escalations |
| Total | 100 |
MC brands excludes Level, which is covered by their own 30-seat Teams plan. Legal is excluded entirely, they use a dedicated legal tool (Legora). Caps are soft: they reallocate off the 12-week usage data, and a seat that sits unused returns to the waitlist.
How this works in practice
- ALIA is the default for the whole team.
- A Claude Enterprise request is taken forward once it clears all four gates (Section 2).
- A monthly review of the usage report and the three cost questions keeps spend on track (Section 4).
- Unused seats are reclaimed. Granting access without ever revoking it is the most common way budgets grow unchecked.
- After the 12-week pilot, the usage data calibrates what comes next: expand, hold, or reallocate, and each team's allocation is adjusted to match real demand.
1. The Two Platforms
Every employee has one of two everyday productivity AI platforms. ALIA is the default for everyone. Claude Enterprise (CE) is the higher-performing platform, granted to users whose core work calls for its added capability.
ALIA
Who pays: the AI Lab, centrally ($135/employee/year). $0 to your BU.
Internal platform, broad access, full group control. The default for everyone.
- Free to your cost center: no per-seat charge to your P&L
- General productivity and content drafting
- Q&A, summarization, translation
- Internal knowledge retrieval
- Available to all employees
- Internal guardrails, no external dependency
Claude Enterprise
Who pays: charged to your BU's cost center.
Advanced reasoning, very large documents, Excel and PowerPoint plugins
- Tackles complex, multi-part analysis end to end
- Fireflies, Excel and PowerPoint plugins
- Works across very large documents at once
- Restricted access, request-based only
- Centrally governed, with a usage cap set per person
The principle
The question is never "who deserves the better tool." It's: does Claude Enterprise unlock something that's currently blocked? If ALIA handles the job, paying for Claude Enterprise is waste. Claude Enterprise is a real line item, so the bar for the exception is high. Seniority, title, and enthusiasm are not qualifying criteria. A blocked workflow is.
2. The Four Gates
Every request for Claude Enterprise passes through four gates. If it doesn't clear a gate, Claude Enterprise isn't provisioned and the person continues on ALIA. No scoring, no interpretation. Pass or fail.
The answer must be a concrete capability, not a quality difference. "Better writing" is not a gap. "Building pivot tables directly inside Excel" is a gap. "Slightly better reasoning" is not a gap. "Reviewing an 80-page consumer study in one pass" is a gap.
Examples of real gaps
| Function | The capability they need |
|---|---|
| Finance | Build and update financial models directly inside Excel |
| Strategy | Pull 15+ long documents into one clear thesis in a single pass |
| Product | Work across a long product spec and all its supporting docs at once |
| Investments | Build a financial model and refine it over a long working session |
| Brand | Pull a large consumer study and sell-through data into a single brand review |
Examples of NOT gaps
| Claim | Reality |
|---|---|
| "Claude writes better emails" | ALIA writes fine emails. Preference is not a gap. |
| "I prefer the Claude interface" | UX preference. Not a capability blocker. |
| "Claude is faster" | Speed difference. Not a blocked workflow. |
| "I need AI for my presentations" | ALIA generates the content. High-volume deck production can qualify as a temporary gap (see below); the occasional slide does not. |
| "Everyone on my team should have it" | Not a gap. Each person assessed individually. |
| "All my history and saved work is already in Claude" | Not a gap. ALIA is adding import from other AI tools, including memory, so your history and context move over. The switch is temporary, not a lock-in. |
Temporary gaps (e.g. slide / deck generation)
Some gaps are real today but already on ALIA's roadmap. Slide generation is the main one: ALIA can't build decks yet, but the capability is coming, and it will not exist by the time this form goes live, so people will raise it as a gap. Handle it as temporary, not structural.
The gap existing isn't enough. If someone hits it once a quarter, the workaround cost is trivial. Frequency is the multiplier that turns a capability gap into a budget justification.
| Frequency | Decision | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Strong candidate. Proceed. | The gap is structural to their role. They work around it every day. |
| Weekly | Moderate. Proceed, start at lower tier. | Meaningful friction but not constant. Base or Standard tier. |
| Monthly | Weak. Challenge it. | Is the workaround really that painful 12 times a year? Probably manageable. |
| Rarely | No. Stay on ALIA. | The tool will sit unused. Waste of budget. |
This is the anti-inflation mechanism. We know this kind of proof is hard to collect, and the intent isn't to discourage enthusiasm. Evidence is a pulse check: a way to weigh the cost and benefit of a seat before granting it, not a strict test to pass. The stronger the evidence below, the clearer the call.
| Evidence type | What it proves | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Can show 3+ real examples where ALIA couldn't do the task | Tried ALIA, hit the wall, documented it. This is what we're looking for. | Core |
| Can walk through the workaround and what it costs in time | "Without the integration I rebuild this in Excel by hand: 3 hours. With it, 20 minutes." Concrete and quantified. | Core |
| Already pays for a personal Claude / AI subscription | A real signal they rely on it, but not proof on its own. They still show the workflow above. | Supporting |
| "I think it would help me" with no examples | Aspiration, not evidence. | Not evidence |
| Manager vouches for them | Useful context, but the person still demonstrates it themselves. | Not evidence |
Don't guess. Don't let the leader pick the tier that "feels right." Anchor to what's observable about their current usage.
| Tier | Annual Cap | Anchor |
|---|---|---|
| BASE | $250 | Equivalent of a $20/mo plan and they don't max it out. Weekly gap frequency. Plugin-dependent but not daily-intensive. |
| STANDARD | $500 | Equivalent of a $20/mo plan and they regularly max it out. OR: no prior usage data (this is the safe default). Daily-to-weekly frequency. |
| POWER | $750 | Currently on a $100/mo personal plan. Daily frequency. Heavy analytical workflows. |
| MAX | $1,200 | Currently on $100/mo AND hitting limits regularly. The heaviest users. Exception, not norm. |
| CLAUDE CODE | $1,500 | Claude Code users show around 3x a regular user's usage, per Anthropic research, which is higher than the Max tier. |
Default rule
When in doubt, start at Standard ($500). It sits near typical enterprise consumption and is a safe mid-point (confirm the current benchmark with the AI Lab). Raising a cap takes one approval. Revoking a license damages trust. Start low, adjust with data.
3. Where Leaders Get It Wrong
Four instincts that feel reasonable in the moment but lead to the wrong call. The gates exist to catch them.
Reading seniority as need
"She's a VP, she should have the best tool." It's natural to assume seniority means need, but it doesn't. If she uses AI 10 minutes a day for email polish, ALIA is the right fit regardless of title. A junior analyst using Claude for hours a day on financial modeling is the stronger case.
Reading heavy usage as a gap
"He uses AI more than anyone on my team." Heavy use of ALIA doesn't mean Claude Enterprise is needed. If ALIA handles his tasks well and he's simply a power user, he stays on ALIA. High usage with no capability gap is simply a well-served ALIA user.
Acting on enthusiasm, not evidence
"She's really keen to explore what Claude can do." Enthusiasm is welcome, but it isn't a blocked workflow. The 60-day revisit is there for exactly this: come back when she can show what ALIA couldn't do for her.
Granting seats, then walking them back
A leader approves 15 seats, the first invoice lands higher than expected, and access gets pulled. Granting a tool and then removing it is hard on people and on trust. The four gates avoid this by only letting through real, evidenced need up front.
4. Cost Control
This tool sits on your P&L. The four gates are your cost control mechanism: every seat that passes all four gates is justified. Every seat that doesn't is waste.
Treat AI tooling like headcount, not like software licenses
A Claude Enterprise seat is not a SaaS license you bulk-buy. It's a productivity investment in a specific person. If that person isn't delivering measurably more because of the tool, the seat is wasted OpEx. Evaluate each seat the way you'd evaluate whether someone needs a second monitor or a business class ticket: does the output justify the cost for this specific person?
Team Budget Calculator
Enter your numbers and the totals update live. ALIA is free, so only Claude Enterprise and other tools hit your budget. CE usage shows each tier's annual cap (the ceiling, not a forecast).
How you'll see usage
You don't need to chase this data. The plan is for the AI Lab to send every leader a short monthly CE usage report for their team, so the accountability comes with the means to act on it. This is pending confirmation of Claude's reporting and observability platform.
What the monthly report shows
- Per CE user: % of their cap used, and the trend vs. prior months
- Flags for anyone under 20% of cap (underused) or hitting their cap early (maxing out)
- Total team CE spend vs. the budget your calculator set
- A reminder that high usage is not the target: the flags are prompts to check value, not to reward consumption
Self-serve dashboards may come later; for now this is a pushed report, no tool to log into.
Monthly cost rhythm
Three questions each month, answered straight from the report above. Build into your existing cost review.
1. Who's not using it?
Any CE user under 20% of their cap for two consecutive months? Either the gap wasn't real (downgrade to ALIA) or they need enablement help. Either way, the seat isn't delivering value today.
2. Who's maxing out?
Any CE user hitting their cap before month-end more than once? Either upgrade their tier (the gap is bigger than estimated) or investigate whether they're using it for tasks ALIA could handle (the gap was misidentified).
3. Is the total tracking to budget?
Your budget calculator gave you an annual number. Are you on track? If you're 20%+ over after 90 days, it means either a gate was too lenient (revisit evidence) or tiers were set too high (adjust down). Reclaim underused seats before adding new ones.
5. Ongoing Governance
Migration triggers
| Signal | Action |
|---|---|
| ALIA user hits the wall with documented examples | Run them through the four gates |
| CE user barely uses it (under 20% cap, 60 days) | Downgrade to ALIA, reclaim seat |
| Personal subscription user doing work stuff | Priority: move to compliant tool immediately (skip to Gate 4) |
| CE user hitting cap regularly | Tier upgrade with usage data as justification |
| New team member in a role where predecessor had CE | Not automatic. Run them through gates independently. |
| ALIA ships slide / deck generation | Migrate all time-boxed "slide gap" users back to ALIA; close those CE seats unless another gate still applies. |
Review cadence
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Day 30 | First usage check: is the tool being used? Is the gap real? | AI Lab + Leader |
| Monthly (Q1) | Cost rhythm: underuse, overuse, budget tracking | Leader |
| Quarterly | Cost reconciliation: actual spend vs. budget, seat utilization | Leader + Finance |
| Annually | Full framework review: are the gates still right? Has the tool landscape changed? | AI Lab |
Approvals, escalation, and timing
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How long does a request take? | Target: a decision within 5 working days of manager sign-off. |
| What if a request is declined and the leader disagrees? | Escalate to the AI Lab lead with the business case. Genuine edge cases are decided there, not re-argued at the gate. |
| Who owns the overall budget? | The AI Lab sets the group-level envelope; each leader owns their BU's share within it. |
Leaving, terminations, and renewals
| Event | What happens |
|---|---|
| Someone leaves or is terminated | Access is revoked automatically at offboarding through SSO, the moment employment ends. The seat is reclaimed. No leader action and no cancellation request needed. |
| Someone changes team or role | The seat does not move with them. Their new manager re-justifies it through the four gates, or it's reclaimed. |
| Renewal | Nothing auto-renews. Each seat is re-justified at the quarterly and annual reviews above; a seat that no longer clears the gates is not renewed. |
Feature access layers
Claude Enterprise includes multiple capability surfaces. Not all are provisioned by default.
| Surface | Default access | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| Web + App | Yes, for all CE users | Included in standard provisioning |
| Plugins: Excel, PowerPoint, Fireflies | Yes, for all CE users | Included; the Excel plugin is the primary gap driver |
| Claude Code | No | Separate request. AI Lab validates. Engineering/technical roles only. |
| Cowork (computer use) | No | Research preview. Sandbox testing first. Not provisioned broadly. |
Appendix A: How Gaps Differ by Function
The four gates are universal. The answers differ by department. Use this as calibration, not as rules.
| Function | Example use case | Typical frequency | CE impact | Expected outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group Finance | Reforecast the budget and rebuild the monthly board pack directly inside Excel, instead of exporting, prompting, and pasting back | Daily for modelers | High | Clear pass; the Excel gap is binary and hard to dispute. |
| Brand Finance | Model a brand's P&L and margin scenarios in Excel ahead of the brand business review | Daily to weekly | High | Pass for the modelers and controllers. |
| MC brands | Pull a season's sell-through, stock cover and a consumer study into one brand review | Weekly for directors | High | Each brand leader allocates within their team; analytical and commercial roles pass. |
| Omni - Product | Hold a full product spec plus its research, tickets and competitor notes in one session to pressure-test a feature | Daily | High | Pass for product builders. |
| Omni - Digital Marketing | Synthesize six months of campaign and audience data into a single performance read | Weekly | Medium | Analytics leads pass; content stays on ALIA. |
| Investments | Work through a target's data room and build the valuation model in the same session | Daily in deals, weekly otherwise | High | Passes during active deal flow. |
| Strategy | Pull 15+ market reports and internal docs into one board-ready thesis | Cyclical, daily in cycles | High | Pass. |
| Intelligence | Track a competitor across earnings calls, filings and news into one running brief | Weekly | Medium | Selective pass for analysts. |
| Omni - AI Lab | Synthesize long technical papers and vendor docs to scope and prototype a build | Daily | High | Pass; CE web seats. |
| Data & Analytics | Reason across a large dataset and a stack of reports to answer one business question | Daily | High | Pass. |
| Tech & Engineering | Build, refactor and debug across the codebase with Claude Code | Daily | High | Claude Code tier; higher usage per seat. |
Appendix B: The Request Form
An E1+ leader nominates the team member, the team member completes the gap and evidence questions below (the parts only they can answer), and the leader signs off. Keeping the leader as the gatekeeper holds budget accountability with them, while the person with the blocked workflow still describes it in their own words. Identity fields are auto-filled. It's ready for Tech & Data to build in Microsoft Forms; each answer maps to a gate.
| # | Question the employee sees | Answer type | Maps to |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | You: name, work email, department, cost center, line manager | Auto-filled from your profile, just confirm | Audit & cost attribution |
| 2 | In one sentence, what can you not do in ALIA today? | Short text | Gate 1: Gap |
| 3 | Which best describes it? Excel, PowerPoint or Fireflies plugin · Working across very large documents · Confidential data that can't be stored or used for training · Slide / deck generation · Something else | Single choice. Picking "Slide / deck" shows a short note that this access is temporary, with a tick to acknowledge. | Gate 1: Gap |
| 4 | How often do you hit this? Daily · A few times a week · Weekly · Monthly · Rarely | Single choice. "Monthly" or "Rarely" shows: this is usually an ALIA use case, you can still submit. | Gate 2: Frequency |
| 5 | Show us. Upload up to 3 examples where ALIA fell short, and/or describe your workaround and the time it costs. | File upload + short text. At least one required, intent alone doesn't pass. | Gate 3: Evidence |
| 6 | Do you already pay for a personal Claude / AI plan? No · About $20/mo · $100+/mo | Single choice. Supporting evidence, and it sets your starting tier. | Gates 3 & 4 |
| 7 | What other AI tools do you already use for work? Granola, Fireflies, Otter, Adobe AI, Gamma, Canva, ChatGPT, Copilot, other... and rough monthly spend if you expense any. | Multi-select + optional spend. No wrong answer, this is for visibility and overlap, not judgement. | Tool visibility |
| 8 | Anthropic training: a link to the recommended courses, with an optional completion upload | Recommended in phase 1, not a blocker. Becomes required once tracking sits in Chalhoub University, after the initial rollout. | Enablement |
| 9 | Acknowledge: ALIA is the default and Claude Enterprise is for an evidenced, recurring gap; usage is monitored and a seat under 20% of its cap for 60 days returns to ALIA. | Checkbox | Expectations |
Your starting tier comes from question 6: no paid plan or unsure goes to STANDARD $500 (the safe default), $20/mo to BASE $250 or Standard, $100+/mo to POWER $750 or MAX $1,200. AI Lab confirms or adjusts on review.
What happens next
Questions about access, eligibility, or budget planning? Reach out to the AI Lab team.