McClatchy Media Transforms Operations with AI

McClatchy Media stands as a leading media conglomerate in the U.S., with a rich history and a portfolio of 30 local news properties. Three key areas of their organization are covered in this case study: CoMag Marketing Group (a periodical magazine distribution powerhouse), Trend Hunter (a trailblazing innovation and trend insights platform), and McClatchy's New Products and Experiences division.

McClatchy Media uses elvex to equip their employees with easy, approachable, and secure ways to use popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude in their everyday work.

With elvex, McClatchy Media unlocked new workflows in data analysis, reporting, sales enablement, and content creation. From eliminating hours of manual spreadsheet wrangling to enabling account-based selling at scale, McClatchy Media experienced measurable gains in efficiency, collaboration, and business decision-making.

Results:

• 400+ employees adopting AI
• 12,000 AI-powered tasks monthly
• Growing ecosystem of tailor-made assistants

Why McClatchy Media Chose elvex

McClatchy Media's leadership needed an AI solution that was not just powerful, but also secure, scalable, and future-proof. Key reasons they chose elvex include:

Broad Adoption

User Experience & Team Adoption: McClatchy Media needed AI to be approachable and useful for all employees, regardless of technical skill. They also needed it to be easy to share useful AI workflows with the team.

Easy Integrations with Business Data: Connecting business data makes AI useful for work, and reduces hallucination. McClatchy Media needed to make it easy for employees to bring AI to their work.

Expert Support and Onboarding: elvex provides expert onboarding, live support, and management of both front and back ends, removing devops headaches and freeing McClatchy Media's technical teams for mission-critical projects.

Usage-Based Pricing: Unlike seat-based SaaS models, usage-based pricing enabled McClatchy Media to add as many users as they like, and only pay for the realized adoption.

Enterprise Flexibility and Control

Interoperability Across Models: McClatchy Media needed the flexibility of using multiple LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere, etc.), making it easy to swap models as new ones emerge, without being locked into a single AI.

Enterprise-Grade Security & Controls: McClatchy Media needed to control AI risk, requiring comprehensive access management, strict permissioning, privacy guarantees, event logging, self-hosting options, and analytics.

CoMag uses elvex to parse enormous spreadsheets & accelerate operations

Challenge

CoMag manages periodical distribution for 3,000 publications, servicing over 32,000 U.S. retailers. Their operations involve massive spreadsheets, countless deadlines, publisher requirements, and strict logistics.

Historically, information retrieval, error-checking, and reporting were time-consuming manual tasks ("filtering a spreadsheet, or doing VLOOKUPs") to find specific data across tens of thousands of lines.

Solution

James Clay (Sr. Product Manager) and his team adopted elvex to build custom AI assistants that could instantly parse, analyze, and update enormous spreadsheets. This automation helps them with reporting, organizing OKRs, cross-referencing purchase orders & policies, and accelerating quality assurance. 

Clay's team now shares live documents and AI tools across departments, and Clay himself has built nine different assistants for specialized tasks, saving hours every week.

Benefit

The results speak for themselves:

Automated routine tasks: Routine 1-hour tasks have been eliminated entirely. "Being able to eliminate, entirely, a task that used to take at least an hour a week was an aha moment," said James Clay.

Faster goals alignment and tracking: The goal-tracking assistant provides up-to-the-minute reporting with a single click, saving every product manager and senior leader up to an hour a week per person.

Deep data analysis is now faster: "elvex allows me to get to information that is tens of thousands of lines, can zero in on the exact information I want almost instantly." 

Leadership engagement: "I built this financial analysis in five minutes, right in front of them... the Chief Financial Officer said, 'Oh, my God! ...It's right.' And I said 'So how long would it have taken you to do this?' He sat back in his chair and said, 'I don't know. Days.'"

"People ask me if I'm going to retire, because I'm about that age. I tell them I don't want to retire, with elvex I'm actually doing something interesting and I'm enjoying it. Every time I see a complicated task, I'm thinking, OK, how can I make this easier? Using AI."
James Clay, Senior Product Manager, CoMag Marketing Group

Trend Hunter: Sales using elvex to research before meetings

Challenge

Trend Hunter, as McClatchy's innovation and insights engine, faces high complexity in sales, research, and operations.

In order to deliver consistent, high-quality customer interactions (while maintaining data privacy and organizational security) SDRs and account teams must aggregate insights from a huge set of sources. Manual research and ad hoc workflows create delays and inconsistencies.

Solution

Cian Quinlivan-Hopkins, Senior Vice President Of Inside Sales and AI at Trend Hunter, leveraged elvex to build specialized assistants, most notably the Sales Bot. Key uses include:

• Single-stop shop for salespeople with pre-built templates for discovery briefs and account planning
• Seamless access to structured data, web search, and company materials
• Strictly defined output formats, so "everyone sees the same thing, and it was just about repeating and optimizing from there" (Quinlivan-Hopkins)
• Bots for HR, editorial, pricing, and operations, each tailored for specific workflows and data privacy

Benefit

Better outcomes from every meeting: The sales team benefits from enhanced support for research, editorial, and price quotation tasks across the organization. SDRs and account execs reliably generate insights, briefs, and client strategies in minutes.

“The goal was: how could I make a single stop shop for anyone on our sales team at any point of the sales process that's fully trained on everything that we do. So we can essentially help them brainstorm and navigate those different scenarios."
Cian Quinlivan-Hopkins, Senior Vice President Of Inside Sales and AI, Trend Hunter

The New Products Division synthesizes customer feedback with elvex

Challenge

Kat Sheplavy, Senior Director of New Products and Experiences at McClatchy, leads a dynamic team responsible for designing, engineering, and researching new products and experiences across McClatchy's websites, apps, and online newspaper editions.

Following a recent revamp of their online newspaper product, McClatchy collected roughly 5,000 survey responses consisting of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. The sheer volume of responses made it impractical to read and catalog every response manually. 

Solution

Kat adopted elvex to transform her team's research and product development processes. Key applications include:

• Uploading and analyzing massive spreadsheets of survey responses using SQL capabilities
• Combining survey feedback with customer service call center data for comprehensive analysis
• Creating automated data sorting and summarization workflows
• Generating executive summaries and reports with comprehensive information sets
• Performing complex data analyses without requiring specialized data analyst support

Benefit

elvex's robust features delivered significant value for McClatchy's product development:

Time Savings and Increased Data Understanding: elvex enabled Kat's team to swiftly create insightful reports from the analysis of thousands of open-ended survey responses, saving countless hours of manual data sorting.

Empowerment and Self-Sufficiency: elvex empowered Kat, who is not a data analyst, to perform complex data analyses independently.

Actionable Insights and Proactive Measures: By integrating survey feedback with customer service data, elvex equipped McClatchy to take proactive customer service measures.

"We had thousands upon thousands of open-ended responses to analyze. The ability to upload a spreadsheet and use SQL within elvex has been incredibly helpful."
Kat Sheplavy, Senior Director of New Products and Experiences, McClatchy

Becoming AI native

The impact of the McClatchy–elvex partnership is measurable both in direct results and cultural transformation. Hundreds of employees now use elvex weekly, collectively launching thousands of assistants and automations customized for their day-to-day reality.

Instead of waiting for IT, employees across subsidiaries routinely create and iterate on their own assistants, adapting as business needs evolve. As one senior leader put it, "I've built 9 different assistants now and taking this tool away would be like taking email away."

Most notably, there has been a palpable mindset shift: across the company, employees now approach problems by asking, "Could that be done with AI?" Because elvex is seen as a tool for empowerment—not replacement—leadership buy-in and creative engagement have rapidly accelerated. Assistants built in elvex are now frequently highlighted in internal presentations and cross-functional meetings, further fueling a virtuous cycle of operational innovation.

From reimagining media operations at CoMag, to building the future of sales enablement at Trend Hunter, to revolutionizing product development research at McClatchy's core news division, McClatchy's results show how AI, when democratized and operationalized across teams, leads to measurable, sustained improvement.