From Spreadsheets to Revenue AI: How Fortune 1000 Company Alight Solutions Runs Revenue with Clari

Before partnering with Clari, Ally Bean, Alight’s SVP of Revenue Operations and Demand, was running revenue through manual spreadsheets and Power BI. While adequate, these tools often required manual stitching of data, which took hours and were neither built to scale nor adapt to the enterprise’s unique needs. This left Ally and her team with limited visibility into deal health, and unable to spot and respond to risk in pipeline or revenue forecasts quickly. To support its growing commercial team and the recent onboarding of new account executives, Alight needed to evolve from reactive reporting to real-time visibility and predictive analytics.

The team evaluated multiple revenue intelligence platforms, but ultimately zeroed in on Clari because of its end-to-end revenue workflows and intuitive interface. In addition to Clari’s current capabilities, Ally emphasizes Clari’s vision for platform growth as well as its future ability to scale with the company.

Predicting Deal Risk with AI

According to Ally: “Clari's AI brings together all of the buying signals across all of our systems and surfaces them in a way that is actionable for our team. What used to take us probably time and manual reports of stitching those buyer intent data together now happens instantaneously.”

It’s been nine months since Alight implemented Clari, and Ally notes there’s been marked improvement in forecast accuracy each quarter, and a significant reduction in slipped deals thanks to Clari’s AI-powered Opportunity Scoring. Clari’s risk indicators enable Alight to surface gaps early on, which allows the team to course-correct mid-quarter rather than after the fact.

Ally’s team recently had a couple of deals that were pushed out from the last couple quarters; and using Clari, they were able to evaluate what level they were engaged with, when the next meeting was, and what executive sponsor they needed to pull in to secure those deals by the end of the quarter.

There have been fewer fire drills since onboarding Clari, Ally says, which gives everyone the time and space needed to focus on strategic execution and how they can best move the needle.

The Right Message, the Right Person, the Right Moment

The marketing-to-sales handoff has long plagued revenue organizations, but Ally reports that Clari has enabled Alight to better align its sales and marketing teams around engagement signals and buyer readiness. When Alight’s marketing team spots elevated engagement or account scoring, it’s able to flag this in real time and help support the build of its ABM platform. “This level of transparency has really supported our digital-first marketing strategy. It helps us deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment, thereby maximizing that conversion across every stage of our funnel,” Ally explains.

AI Informed by Revenue Context

Ally stresses that Clari’s AI is the core driving her team’s strategic planning process. Alight’s adoption of Clari’s AI allows for a data-centric approach that enables Ally and her team to thoroughly analyze historical performance and market trends. This deep understanding gives Alight invaluable context, empowering them to confidently make informed business strategies that can be implemented across all departments. According to Ally, “It’s not just about the benchmarks from the past, but what those past historical results support moving forward.”

After onboarding a significant number of new account executives last year, the goal was to get them ramped up quickly so they could start hitting their quotas fast. Clari empowered the Alight team to be more precise in its inspection, enhancing pipeline coverage, and improving the team’s overall accountability.

Weekly Cadences That Foster Collaboration

Clari has streamlined how Alight operates by standardizing its recurring Revenue Cadences to get cross-functional teams on the same page regarding what’s already happened and what needs to happen next. Instead of working in disconnected spreadsheets, every revenue-critical employee is now aligned to the same data, actions, and objectives. “Clari has really become the revenue operating system here in Alight,” Ally says. “When we think about forecast improvement and accuracy, we now have one version of the truth.”

Saving Time to Focus on What Matters

Time saved has been a huge added benefit across Alight’s team, from both the seller and leader perspective. In fact, Ally estimates that her team has saved up to one day per week, per person by eliminating spreadsheet workflows and streamlining meetings. Forecast updates, pipeline reviews, and reporting used to take hours, but now, Ally says leaders and sellers can walk into those calls knowing exactly where to focus. “We’ve really minimized the amount of time from hours to a day per week to help them get out of spreadsheets so they can spend more time building those relationships and driving the revenue line.”

Alight’s sellers have also seen a significant reduction in administrative work for each sales cycle, which Ally attributes to Clari. Before, each seller would be required to make manual updates and conduct offline reviews; now, this is all captured across the platform. According to Ally, “It really synthesizes that data automatically for us, to view where they are in that sales cycle and areas where we can't control market cycles. This now gives us the agility to react faster and to pivot where necessary.”

AI Built for the Future of Enterprise Revenue

For organizations struggling with disconnected systems and reactive processes, Alight's journey demonstrates that the right AI platform can deliver measurable business transformation in less than a year. As Alight continues expanding Clari across more parts of its business and taking advantage of advanced AI features, its story illustrates how modern revenue teams can build a sustainable competitive advantage through intelligent automation and predictive analytics – both now and well into the future.

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