The Channel Company’s annual ESG report used to take days. This year, it took a few hours.

The Challenge

Erika McGrath has been Chief People Officer at The Channel Company — a B2B media, events, and marketing services company — since 2015. She's seen HR technology evolve considerably in that time, and she's particular about what she uses: "I would only use a system that long if it was doing what I needed it to do."

A top recurring priority on her calendar is ESG reporting. As a private equity-owned company, The Channel Company is required to submit detailed workforce data to their PE firm every year, on a tight timeline, with no room for error.

The ESG reporting system works question by question. Each one demands a specific calculation: What was your average headcount over the reporting period? What were your net new hires? How many employees did you replace versus not replace? What are the demographic breakdowns across your global workforce? What is average compensation by group?

Each of those questions sent Erika down a familiar path: open Rippling, identify the right report to run, configure it for the right time period, export the data, perform the calculations manually, double-check the numbers, convert currencies where needed, and then enter the result. Then move on to the next question and do it all again.

With roughly 20 questions to answer across multiple angles of analysis, the whole process would spread across several days. Not a single long stretch, but the kind of work that sits open on your desk, pulling attention away from everything else, until it's finally done.

The Solution

This year was the first year Erika had Rippling AI available when ESG reporting season arrived. She was about to start her usual workflow — pulling the first report, building the first calculation — when she paused.

"I said, hmm, wait. I might be able to use Rippling AI for this."

She opened Rippling AI alongside the ESG reporting portal and tried a new approach: take the question directly from the reporting system, paste it into Rippling AI, and see what came back.

"Convert all of this to [currency] and provide the average compensation in this reporting period for this group of people."

It worked. Rippling AI pulled the global data, ran the calculations, and returned the answer — without Erika having to touch a report builder or a spreadsheet. She moved to the next question and did the same thing. And the next. And the next.

For headcount averages, net new hires, turnover rates, demographic breakdowns, and multi-currency compensation figures, Rippling AI handled the data retrieval and the math. When a question touched company policy, and that policy was stored in Rippling, Rippling AI surfaced it directly — no separate document hunt required.

The workflow became a simple rhythm: ESG reporting system on one screen, Rippling AI on the other. Next question. Put it in. Get the answer. Enter it. Move on.

The Impact

What previously required several days of picking away at reports, calculations, and currency conversions was completed in an hour or two within a single day.

But Erika is quick to point out that the time savings were only part of the story. The other part was confidence.

She did spot-check the results independently. Everything was accurate. After years of painstakingly verifying her own manual calculations, she now had a single source of truth doing the work for her — and getting it right.

Her reaction was unambiguous: "It was beautiful. It was life changing. It was life changing from the HR side."

Days reduced to hours. A multi-day ESG reporting process — spanning 20+ questions, global headcount data, turnover calculations, and multi-currency compensation analysis — was completed in a single sitting.

No manual calculations. Rippling AI handled the data retrieval, the math, and the currency conversions directly — eliminating the error-prone step of running reports and computing results by hand.

Confidence in the output. Because Rippling AI works from a single, unified data source, Erika knew the answers were accurate without needing to cross-reference multiple reports or re-check her own work.

HR freed to lead, not administrate. Time reclaimed from reporting and calculations means more capacity for the work that actually moves the business: strategic partnerships with leaders, supporting employees where it counts.

There's no going back. "We're loving it so much. There's no going backwards now."