Business OperationsTrack one · Margin
The decentralized
productivity track,
run on purpose.
As organizations roll out AI productivity tools to their employees, our aim is to make each department fluent in them through its own work, person by person, and help its leaders know when it’s time to start expecting more from their teams.
Taught through your department’s own work
Hands on, person by person
Model-agnostic and platform-independent
Where you areThe tools are switched on.
The tools are switched on.
The program is the step.
Organizations are taking different approaches to rolling out AI productivity tools on the decentralized track, and all of them are beneficial. The question becomes how quickly AI fluency spreads throughout the employee base and starts to show up in measurable productivity. We can help departments accelerate the pace of this adoption, taught in their own language and applied to their own existing workflows.
Generative AI assistantsDraft, summarize, analyze and answer. The knowledge worker’s first tool, for looking up what they need to know and getting a first version on the page.
Agentic desktop toolsCarry multistep tasks through to completion. The number crunching, the data processing and the presentation draft that used to take days to complete.
AI coding toolsLet employees build their own custom solutions. Small tools shaped around the part of the job each person finds hardest.
What the evidence supports
Ten to 20 percent, expected on purpose.
Field studies that gave general-purpose AI tools to professionals for their own work measure gains in exactly this range: more tasks completed at higher quality, and less time and effort on the same work. Two in three workers who use the tools say they feel the difference. Ten to 20 percent, department by department, sits inside what the evidence supports.
12%
more tasks completed by 758 knowledge workers at a global professional services firm using a general-purpose AI assistant, at higher quality.
Harvard Business School · Organization Science, 202620%
less time and effort, at minimum, for engineers at an education technology company using general-purpose coding assistants across their own work.
Stanford Digital Economy Lab · April 202622%
of workers who use AI on the job say it lets them complete more tasks overall. Two in three say it raises their own productivity, and 40 percent get tasks done in less time.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York · April 2026How the work runsSix moves,
Six moves,
run inside the department.
The productivity track, run on purpose, comes down to six moves, each of which belongs to the departments rather than to a central team. Here is what we do inside each of them.
1
Move one
Run a fluency program for each department.
Not a two-hour orientation but an actual program specific to each department, with classes, practice and time, aimed at making everyone in the department fluent in the productivity tools they now have. A generic AI class teaches features. A class taught by someone who understands sales or accounts payable or demand planning changes what people attempt within weeks.
What we doOur consultants know the domain and are deeply fluent in the tools. They teach the classes through your department’s own work, in its own language, and the fluency arrives in the hands-on part: sitting with people, suggesting, and teaching them to build the solutions themselves. Awareness is the easy part. Hands-on application is what we bring.
2
Move two
Let the departments own it.
The decentralized track is decentralized by nature, and the best thing an enterprise can do is embrace it. Each department is responsible for getting its own people fluent, and each department, through its own leadership, sets the expectation that fluency turns into more and better work. Central teams enable this with sanctioned tools and shared rules.
What we doWe work with the leaders and their teams who run the department, inside the department. The CFO, the CHRO, the head of sales, the COO, the general counsel, the CIO. The program is theirs, and we bring qualified consultants who help accelerate the impact and the productivity timeline.
3
Move three
Give people permission to build.
Every department is really a set of sub-departments, and every sub-department a set of teams and sub-teams, down to the individual. At every one of those levels, people should have explicit permission to create small solutions that help them do their own jobs, and especially to build tools that strengthen their weak spots.
What we doWe sit with each person and ask them to take us through what they do. That walkthrough of the work as it is today is the diagnostic. We are looking for the manual steps that can be automated, the number crunching and data processing that can be handed to a multistep tool, and the things the tools do well that nobody is using yet. Then we build the first solutions with the person, and teach them to build the next.
4
Move four
Let the good ones climb.
What happens next is organic, and it should be allowed to be. A tool that works for one person gets noticed by a sub-team, which adopts it. A sub-team’s tool proves useful to the sub-department, then to the department, and a few travel far enough that they become something the enterprise adopts formally. This is how a decentralized track discovers what the organization actually needs, through hundreds of small experiments with the useful ones rising on their merits.
What we doPeople do things their own way, and we do not standardize that away. A solution one person builds is the seed of this mechanism: shown to the sub-team, adopted, climbing. We help the useful ones travel, and we help governance meet them with an invitation rather than an audit, which is how our AI Governance Methodology treats this track at its second level.
5
Move five
Raise expectations over time.
Once a department is fluent, its leadership can begin to expect more from the same workflows, in the range of 10 to 20 percent more work completed and better work delivered. That is not an aggressive number. Time saved without an expectation attached to it is simply absorbed.
What we doWe help the department’s leadership set the baseline measurement today and learn what to expect against it, in quantity and in quality. Whatever productivity goals the department already carries, this is how it reaches them: the same people, the same workflows, everyone AI fluent.
6
Move six
Add new measures as fluency grows.
Every department already has a sense of how it is doing, from its metrics, outputs, and reports to a feel for how each team is running, some of it written down and some of it simply understood. That baseline is where measurement starts when productivity tools are layered onto the work. As fluency takes hold, new measures become worth tracking, the ones that show what the tools now make possible. In time, that same fluency begins to feed the transformation track.
What we doWe start by bringing together what the department already measures. Then, as the department and its teams gain fluency, we help its leaders identify the new measures that fit their own work, so they can understand the higher expectations of productivity, in quantity and in quality, and grow into them.
Department by departmentSix departments,
Six departments,
in their own language.
Every engagement is taught through the work a department already does, by people who know that work. Here is what the day looks like in each, and where the three kinds of tools land in it.
CFOFinanceCRO · CMOSales and MarketingCOO · CSCOOperations and Supply ChainCHROHuman ResourcesGeneral CounselLegalCIOInformation Technology
For the CFO and the controller
Finance
The month is the close: reconciliations, accruals and the journal entries behind them, then the reporting package. Around it run the forecast and the budget cycle, variance analysis against both, customer credit, invoicing and collections on one side, payables and expense reimbursements on the other, treasury’s cash position and cash flow forecast, the tax provision, internal controls and audit support. Most of it lives in spreadsheets, and the people who run it are good with numbers. That is the best starting point on the track.
AssistantsDraft the variance commentary from the trial balance and last quarter’s narrative. Answer a policy question from the accounting manual, with the section cited.
Multistep toolsRun the reconciliation pack: pull the subledger, match it to the general ledger, list the breaks, and draft the entries for the accountant’s review.
Coding toolsA small tool that reads the collections aging each morning and drafts the follow-ups for the analyst who owns those accounts.
For the CRO and the CMO
Sales and Marketing
The week runs on the pipeline review and the forecast: leads and opportunities moving through stages, account plans, quotes and proposals, RFP responses due, sales orders and renewals, and the CRM notes that keep all of it honest. Marketing runs beside it on campaign plans and budgets, pricing and promotion, go-to-market plans, customer insight and the product marketing material the field sells from. Most of the day is writing, reading and keeping records straight, which is where the assistants land first.
AssistantsTurn call notes into the CRM update and a follow-up in the rep’s own voice. First-draft an RFP response from the last three proposals that won.
Multistep toolsBuild the account plan from the CRM record, the last three business reviews and the customer’s annual report, in the team’s own template.
Coding toolsA tool that reads each channel partner’s weekly sell-through report, in whatever layout the partner sends it, and posts the numbers into the team’s forecast sheet.
For the COO, the CSCO and the CISO
Operations and Supply Chain
The cycle is S&OP and the demand plan, then everything that executes against it: purchase orders and the three-way match, sourcing events and supplier scorecards, production schedules and quality holds, inbound material, the warehouse’s exceptions, carrier and freight, on-time-in-full, and the customer tickets and escalations that follow a miss. Security runs its own cycle inside operations: alerts and triage, vulnerability scans and patch windows, access reviews and the evidence an audit asks for. It is the most process-heavy work in the enterprise, and the multistep tools were built for it.
AssistantsExplain a supplier’s contract terms before the renewal call. Draft the incident summary from the ticket thread, in the format the on-call lead uses.
Multistep toolsPrepare the S&OP pack: forecast accuracy by product family, exceptions against safety stock, the open order list, in the planner’s own layout.
Coding toolsA tool that reads the day’s late and short deliveries and drafts the customer notices. Another that turns a vendor security questionnaire into first-pass answers from the policy library.
For the CHRO
Human Resources
The work is people, one at a time, at scale: requisitions and time to fill, screening and offers, onboarding, the performance cycle and the merit cycle behind it, compensation benchmarking and the bands, open enrollment, learning and development, the engagement survey, employee relations cases, policy updates, and the HR system tickets that arrive every hour. Every one of those has a document, a checklist or a template behind it, and each of them is a place for the tools to land.
AssistantsDraft the job posting from the role profile and the last three like it. Answer a manager’s leave question from policy, with the policy cited.
Multistep toolsRun onboarding for a cohort: the checklists, the accounts to request, the week-one schedule, and the prep note for each new hire’s manager.
Coding toolsA tool that reads the engagement survey comments team by team and drafts the themes for each HR business partner before the readout.
For the general counsel and legal operations
Legal
The queue is matters and contracts: intake, NDAs and master agreements, redlines against the playbook and its fallback positions, outside counsel invoices against the guidelines, legal holds, privacy requests, policy reviews and the board materials due each quarter. Legal reads and writes for a living, and it is measured on turnaround, spend and risk, which is exactly what the tools move.
AssistantsSummarize a counterparty’s redline against the playbook. Answer a business team’s question with the clause that governs it.
Multistep toolsTriage the week’s contract requests: classify them, route the standard ones to templates, and draft the first turn on the rest for counsel’s review.
Coding toolsA tool that reads the contract repository for renewal dates and notice windows and puts next quarter’s in front of the team before the windows close.
For the CIO
Information Technology
IT enables the other track, and it has its own work to run in the meantime: the service desk queue, incidents and problems, change requests and the change board, releases and patch windows, access provisioning, asset and license renewals, runbooks and the documentation that never catches up, and the vendor contracts behind all of it. The team that supports everyone else’s tools deserves the same fluency in its own, and it usually gets there fastest.
AssistantsDraft the change record and the rollback plan. Answer a user’s how-to question from the knowledge base, in the words the knowledge base uses.
Multistep toolsAnalyze the delivery artifacts across a portfolio of projects to identify standardization opportunities and best practices.
Coding toolsA tool that reads the incident queue each morning, groups the repeats, and drafts the problem records for the engineer who owns them.
10 to 20%
The expectation, in every department, set by its own leadership once its people are fluent: more work completed and better work delivered, inside the same workflows. Nobody’s job is redesigned to get there.
What it pays
Margin now. Capacity for the second track.
Productivity shows up as profit margin, department by department. Kept as people rather than banked as cost, the same 10 to 20 percent is the capacity that staffs the transformation, and the people who leaned into fluency and built things are the ones who redesign the work when that day comes.
The second track is the centralized one, and AI Business Transformation carries it.
Two tracks, two payoffs
Track one · DecentralizedProductivity, which shows up as profit margin
Track two · CentralizedTop-line growth, which compounds at the far end
Run on purpose, the first pays for the second.
Get startedStart with one department,
Start with one department,
and its own work.
Bring us the department whose people already have the tools. We sit with them, walk the work as it is, build the first solutions together, and set the expectation with its leadership. The next step is smaller than it looks.