Why AI adoption fails without IT-led workflow integration

At 77-year-old promotional products company Gold Bond Inc., CIO Matt Price knew generative AI adoption wouldn’t come from rolling out a chatbot. Employees needed AI embedded into the work they already hated doing: messy ERP intake, document processing, and call follow-ups.Instead of pitching benchmarks, Price built a small group of “super-users” to surface Gold Bond–specific examples and train the rest of the org. They then wired Gemini and other models into high-friction workflows, backed by sandbox testing, guardrails, and human review for anything public-facing.The payoff showed up as behavior change, not hype: Daily AI usage rose from 20% to 71%, and 43% of employees reported saving up to two hours a day. “I wanted to bring everybody on the journey,” Price told VentureBeat. “After we r