Your company has probably piloted at least one AI use case, if not a whole bunch. But how many of those pilots have actually changed the way you work six months or a year later? If your organization is like most, there’s a gap between AI that gets deployed and AI that sticks.
For 40 years, global professional services firm BTS has worked with the world’s leading organizations to solve their business problems and compete strongly in their markets. All of this bleeding-edge work is done from a singular vantage point: “We've discovered that smart people tolerate what academics and consultants tell them, but they only act on conclusions they come to themselves,” Peter Mulford, EVP and Chief AI Officer, explains.
When it comes to AI transformation in particular, BTS noticed a critical pattern across enterprises. “Many people confuse access with adoption,” says Ranjeet Pookattil, BTS’s Global Head of IT and Compliance. “They roll out tools and assume that transformation will automatically follow without the training, workflow integration, or connection to real business problems. This creates discretionary usage, not real operational change.”
When instituting AI solutions internally, Mulford and Pookattil took this philosophy equally seriously, embedding intelligence directly into existing workflows rather than adding another tool to the stack.
From manual searches to automated workflows
One of the most time-consuming tasks for BTS account managers involved monitoring client contacts for job changes and other information in order to craft personalized outreach. Account managers would manually check Salesforce, scan LinkedIn for updates, and draft individual emails — a process that consumed hours of productive selling time.
To fix this problem, BTS built a custom AI-driven workflow that cross-references Salesforce data with LinkedIn signals, pre-drafts personalized emails, and delivers them directly to account managers’ mailboxes. The managers simply review, refine if needed, and send.
“The impact was not just efficiency. It changed the whole behavior,” Pookattil notes. “Managers could reach significantly more contacts in a day with a higher consistency and better timing.”
The solution also delivered an unexpected benefit: improved CRM hygiene. Because updates are now driven by the workflow rather than manual entry, contact data stays current automatically. As Pookattil puts it, the system “basically just shifted the effort from searching to selling.”
Box as the foundation for institutional knowledge
With Box as the content layer, BTS is poised to thoughtfully apply AI to all kinds of content without constraints. “We have a significant investment in Box. It’s our primary knowledge repository. Most of our institutional knowledge lives here,” says Pookattil.
Since AI is only as good as the data it can access, the unification of content, plus the security and governance Box enables, create a foundation BTS can use to institute strong AI solutions. Along with basic centralized content management, other Box products give BTS a lot of flexibility in how the company accesses and uses its content.
For instance, BTS uses Box Hubs to curate the right content to feed AI initiatives. Different teams within BTS use Box Hubs to organize their highest-quality materials — from proposals to training simulations. Box AI layered on top of these curated collections amplifies the value of that organizational effort. Pookattil says, “We’re putting a lot of effort into curating this information because we want to give the AI our best-in-class data. If we organize our data thoughtfully using Box Hubs, AI layered on top of that should compound that investment of that time.”
Governance as an enabler, not a barrier
For a professional services firm working with direct competitors across multiple industries, data boundaries are a critical consideration. BTS approaches AI governance with “liberating constraints” — guardrails that actually enable faster innovation. “Guardrails allow you to go faster,” Pookattil says. “When you underestimate risks, you waste a lot of time experimenting and then have to pull it back.”
From the start, BTS established non-negotiables around data sensitivity, cross-client exposure, and security posture. This approach allows teams to move quickly within defined trust boundaries while protecting client confidentiality.
Mulford adds perspective on why this matters: “Because the boundaries are there, people feel free to try all kinds of new and wild things, confident that Ranjit and his team have basically protected any of the potential downsides from doing that experimentation. It’s really empowering when you're trying to innovate.”
Measuring what matters: From adoption to impact
BTS takes a staged approach to AI measurement. Initially, the team focuses on adoption metrics to ensure teams are actually using the tools. But they quickly move to operational metrics that matter.
“For me, the interest is more on how to operationalize it,” Pookattil explains. “We start by asking the teams, ‘What’s the friction in day-to-day work?’ Then, we design end-to-end workflows that integrate AI in the systems they already use.”
The company tracks specific metrics including:
- Cycle time reduction for proposal drafting and account research
- Response rates and client feedback quality
- CRM data hygiene improvements
- Number of contacts reached per day by account managers
“It’s easy to make productivity claims, but operational metrics are harder — and they’re more honest,” Pookattil notes.
The path forward for enterprise AI
BTS’s approach to implementing AI internally demonstrates how enterprises can move beyond AI pilots to operational transformation by embedding intelligence directly where work happens, resulting in measurable improvements in cycle time and quality across critical business processes. Thoughtful integration of intelligence into the workflows teams use every day will always beat simply adding more tools to the tech stack. When these align, experiments become scalable solutions that drive real business value.
To learn how Box thinks about AI transformation within our own organization, read the blog series starting with AI-First Transformation: Box's Principles, Strategy, and Execution Framework.
