How Sonos went from an engineering pilot to a company-wide Claude Rollout in one quarter

Sonos makes the wireless speakers, home theater systems, and headphones found in millions of homes, and has spent more than two decades making hardware, software, and design work as one. In early 2026 the company applied the same standard to its own work. Rather than pilot AI in one corner of the business, it opened Claude Enterprise to over 1,000 employees and brought in forgd, an Anthropic Preferred Partner, to turn access into adoption. The goal was to expand what people can do, giving every team room to work on things they previously couldn’t get to.

With Claude, Sonos:

• Opened Claude Chat, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork to over 1,000 employees in the first quarter of 2026, shortly after Cowork became available.
• Took 300+ engineers through advanced Claude Code deep dives, 200+ business users through a Cowork deep dive, and over one hundred knowledge workers through a citizen developer session.
• Turned a monthly three-country category report that took a full day into a five-minute Cowork workflow, freeing time for deeper market analysis.
• Built an internal app in about four hours to visualize checkout concepts, making early design exploration faster.
• Gave engineers a shared PR review agent that supplements human code review, and began building an internal skills marketplace.
• Saw non-engineers in marketing, design, and finance build internal tools for their own teams with Claude Code, hosted on an IT-approved platform.
• Extended adoption from engineering into business teams across the company after the March kickoff.
• Delivered over 20 Sonos-community developed plugins within their marketplace that are designed to operate within Sonos’ internal security and development standards.

The challenge

A small team, and a whole company to bring along

Access was the easy part. Turning it into daily use for over 1,000 people fell to a handful of employees, and different parts of the company were starting from very different places.

Engineering got there first. A pilot with about a hundred engineers had grown into a company-wide Claude Code community, anchored by a Slack channel with hundreds of people sharing what they were building, and where Sonos’ executives, including the CEO, showed up as users rather than sponsors. The enthusiasm was real but uneven. A handful of engineers were already building agents and multi-step workflows. Most were still finding their footing, and business teams were only beginning to ask what Claude could do for them.

Internally Sonos supported the rollout of Claude Enterprise with an enablement team, also known as the AI Squad: a lean team of software leaders and an IT counterpart. By March the team had already built its own “Claude Code 101” training, stood up Slack channels to share knowledge, and run the company-wide communications. It was a small team for a company of over 1,000.

Their constraint was reach and depth, not ambition. “Our engineers are extremely smart,” David Lopez, Principal DevOps Engineer at Sonos, who led the engineering side of the rollout with Principal SDET Michal Szelag, said at the kickoff. “Once they start using it, they figure out way more stuff than Michal and I could probably ever dream up in a short one hour training session.” The team wanted to get everybody to a baseline while taking advanced users to the next level of managing multiple agent workflows.

Three gaps needed outside help. Engineers needed advanced Claude Code content on agent orchestration, sub-agents, skills, hooks, and code review workflows. Business teams needed a foundational, approachable path into Claude Chat and Cowork, and a clear answer to which Claude surface fits which job: when to reach for Claude Chat, when to hand a task to Cowork, and when Claude Code is the right tool. And a growing set of non-engineers in marketing, design, finance, and operations were already building things with Claude Code but, as David Lopez put it, “all have the same problem, which is how to operationalize something.”

The solution

Enablement built for how Sonos already worked

Sonos and forgd ran the enablement as a ten-week program from March 23 to May 28, 2026, built around what Sonos’ teams had already put in place rather than starting over. It opened with a review of Sonos’ Claude Enterprise configuration, to make sure the platform was set up for success across the entire organization as access expanded beyond the pilot users.

A company-wide session followed, introducing Claude Enterprise, Claude Code, and Cowork via live demos. It gave business teams a clear picture of where each tool fits, and a shared vocabulary for the Claude-specific ideas they would meet next: context, projects, and model families among them.

Ninety minutes at a time

For engineering, forgd built two deep dives that reached over 300 engineers: context management at the scale of a multi-hundred-engineer organization, skills as executable policy, multi-agent orchestration, hooks, and a preflight plugin engineers could adopt the same day. A Cowork deep dive for over 200 business users covered how Cowork works, when to use it, and how to put recurring work on a schedule.

The citizen developer track was added mid-engagement, after Sonos saw non-engineers building with Claude Code. Following a planning session, forgd delivered a Citizen Developer Foundations session for over 100 knowledge workers within Sonos that covered terminal use, Claude Desktop use, Python basics, and how to build a simple app safely and host it within Sonos’ guardrails.

To round out the engagement, forgd joined Sonos’ Slack channels to answer questions asynchronously across the organization, and led six one-hour office hours where employees brought live problems from their own work.

Sonos’ own community model carried the rest: a Claude Code channel with hundreds of members, champion circles in each function, and executives who used the tools themselves.

The outcome

Teams that build their own tools

In ten short weeks enablement reached every part of the company, from engineering to finance. Business functions that brought live use cases to office hours included FP&A, general ledger accounting, external financial reporting, lifecycle marketing, demand planning, HR, program management, and internal communications. Since the kickoff, employees have brought Claude into more of their day-to-day work, using it more deeply over time rather than for one-off questions.

Engineering: from individual use to shared practice

Before the enablement, Claude Code at Sonos was largely an individual affair: each engineer with their own setup, their own prompts, and their own habits. Afterward, teams began treating those setups as shared infrastructure. CLAUDE.md files now live in repos across the organization, and hooks and sub-agents are shared as team practice rather than personal tricks. Some run automatically when a pull request is opened, giving engineers a consistent first pass before their own review and approval, easing the downstream burden on merge and CI/CD, and helping guard against architectural drift. Engineering teams use AI-assisted tools to support code review alongside established human review and approval processes.

Business teams: more time for higher-value work

Business teams started from a different place than engineering. Most were using Claude Chat for one-off questions and drafts, and few had a reason to open Cowork. The enablement moved them up in steps. The company-wide overview mapped which surface fits which job. The Cowork deep dive showed how to hand Claude a multi-step task and put recurring work on a schedule. Approved integrations helped employees incorporate Claude into existing workflows, and office hours turned individual questions into working automations. Within weeks, people in finance, marketing, and operations were building workflows of their own.

One example came from Sascha Heinze, Senior Business Intelligence Manager at Sonos, who rebuilt a monthly category report covering three countries as a Cowork workflow. “It was taking me a whole day, and now it’s five minutes,” Sascha said. The work grew from there into an AI-assisted workflow developed in Claude Code that supports market analysis and presentation preparation, with employees reviewing and refining the outputs.

Another example came from Jeremiah King, Director, CX Customer Signal & Intelligence at Sonos, who built an application in Claude Code that helps the CX team analyze business performance metrics and prepare weekly reviews using approved data sources and internal tools.

Citizen developers: internal tools built by the teams that use them

The citizen developer track put the power and creativity of Claude Code in the hands of people who had spent their careers adjacent to engineering, and kept that work to internal tools, built inside Sonos’ guardrails. For David Lopez, the point is what it does to how people think. “The thing with these tools, using your judgment, allows you to go a little wider into a domain and perspective that maybe you don’t have as much expertise in, but you do have an opinion,” he said. “You can think more like a product owner. You could think more like a tester. You could think more like an architect.” With Claude Code, they can act on those opinions. Sonos’ knowledge workers are now empowered to do exactly that, within the guardrails of the hosting platform and the training behind it.

Sonos continues to invest in education, teaching people to be skilled operators: describing accurately what they want to build, letting Claude build it, and validating the result against the standards Sonos already holds its work to.