Making Sense reaches Claude Select tier as companies seek AI partners with track record
Making Sense, a technology consulting firm that builds software for mid-sized companies and companies backed by private equity firms, has been named a Select partner in the Services Track of Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network.
This status is based on AI products the firm has launched and put into use for its clients.
After two years of pilot projects that rarely became working products, companies looking for outside help with AI have become more careful about whom they hire. Buyers want proof that a firm has already launched working systems before they agree to work with it.
Anthropic launched the Services Track in June to rank firms that help companies build and launch products using Claude. Partners are judged on three things: how many certified experts they employ, how many customers they have launched products for in the past 12 months, and how many public customer stories they have shared.
Making Sense has 20 people certified through the Anthropic Partner Academy and is now listed in the public Claude Partner Hub directory. Its record is based on work for two clients: Doppler, a marketing platform in Latin America, and Viallion, a company that uses AI to automate trading.
Why buyers want proof
For startups and growing companies, hiring the wrong AI partner can be costly. A project that gets stuck can use up months of the money a company has to keep running. Smaller teams also rarely have their own experts who can check whether a consulting firm's claims are true.
Past results give buyers good reason to be careful. An MIT NANDA study published last year found that 95% of generative AI pilot projects had little or no measurable effect on company profits and losses. It also found that companies building AI systems on their own failed more often than those working with outside partners.
Claims made by technology companies have not made the choice easier. Gartner has warned about a practice called agent washing. This is when companies rename existing chatbots and automation tools and market them as agentic AI. Gartner estimated that only about 130 of the thousands of companies selling agentic AI products actually offer the real thing.
At the same time, Anthropic's own partner network received more than 40,000 applications within months of opening.
The Services Track is Anthropic's way of helping companies sort through these choices. Instead of asking buyers to trust a firm's own marketing, it publishes clear requirements linked to actual results. Under Anthropic's published requirements, a Select partner must have at least 10 certified experts, must have launched Claude for two or more customers in the past year, and must have at least one public customer story.
People earn these certifications by passing exams, and the certifications belong to individuals. This means the count reflects people the firm actually employs.
“Anthropic reviews each partner’s standing every quarter, based on its certified professionals and the customers it has taken live with Claude,” said Fernando Florez, chief revenue officer at Making Sense.
“That gives clients a public, verifiable reference for what we’ve delivered, which makes choosing who to work with less of a leap of faith.”
Before signing a contract, a company can now compare firms in the Partner Hub by partner level, number of certified team members, products launched for real-world use, and named customer references. Without this directory, a careful buyer might have to investigate these details by contacting other customers directly.
Three months to launch, 6.6 cents an interaction
The firm's published customer story is Doppler, an email and marketing automation company serving businesses across Latin America and Spain. Making Sense designed and built ECO IA, an assistant that runs on Claude Sonnet 4.5 inside Doppler's product.
ECO IA reads current account data, checks how an account is doing, and prepares marketing campaigns. Users can edit and approve each draft before it is sent. The assistant was launched within three months of the project's start. It is switched on by default for every new Doppler account and is now available in more than 4,800 accounts. According to Making Sense, 95% of users who tried the assistant returned to use it over several months.
For any company adding an AI model to its product, the cost of each interaction can determine whether the feature makes or loses money. Making Sense used prompt caching. This method saves the parts of a request that stay the same each time, so Claude does not have to process them again with every new request.
The firm reports that 97% of requests reuse saved information from the cache, and each ECO IA interaction costs $0.066.
Engineers also built a dashboard that tracks usage, costs, response times, and errors in real time. This lets Doppler see how much the assistant costs to run and how well it works as more accounts begin using it.
From two months to a week
The second project shows how Claude can be used during software development. At Viallion, Making Sense redesigned important parts of the engineering process around Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool.
According to the firm, projects that once took two to three months to develop, test, and release can now be completed in about a week. Ideas can also be tested and checked four times faster.
At both Viallion and Doppler, Making Sense engineers worked as part of the clients' own teams. At Doppler, the work included automated testing and changes to the software development process. This allowed Doppler's in-house developers to keep testing, checking, and improving the Claude integration themselves. Viallion's team also continued using and improving the new process after the training and setup period ended.
Cesar D’Onofrio, CEO and cofounder of Making Sense, said that even though AI makes it much faster to write code, businesses still need people who understand how the company works.
“Claude has made building software dramatically faster. Knowing what a change will touch inside a company still takes people who understand that business: the system billing depends on, the data a regulator will ask about, the team that has to operate it the next morning,” he said.
“We’ve been doing that work for more than 20 years. We decide with our clients what is worth building, connect it to everything their operation runs on, keep it compliant and reliable, and answer for it once it’s live.”
Making Sense mainly works with U.S. companies. It focuses on agentic AI and workflow automation in industries with strict rules, including healthcare, financial technology (fintech), and logistics.
Featured image: courtesy of Making Sense
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of a company in Espacio's investment portfolio.