In the business world, there are few areas that artificial intelligence hasn't touched. Many industries are rushing to adopt AI, and the technology is changing how employees collaborate and complete tasks.

Generative AI is a major buzzword for business leaders. But actually integrating AI can be a different story.

"A lot of our clients have dozens of AI pilots everywhere," Jack Azagury, the group chief executive for consulting at Accenture, said at one Workforce Innovation roundtable. "Very few have a coherent business case and a true reinvention and transformation."

How do companies move forward as the novelty of AI wears off? Business Insider's Julia Hood asked members of the Workforce Innovation board how they transitioned their AI pilots into real-world use cases. Board members shared five major ways their companies were moving AI from theory to operations.

"Before we go and tell our clients to embark on AI fully, we want to be an AI-first organization," said Anant Adya, an executive vice president, service-offering head, and head of Americas delivery at Infosys. "We want to show our clients we are using AI, whether it is in HR when it comes to driving better employee experience or when it comes to recruitment."

Members also highlighted employee training and peer-to-peer learning opportunities.

The roundtable participants were:

• Anant Adya, an executive vice president, service-offering head, and head of Americas Delivery at Infosys.
• Lucrecia Borgonovo, a chief talent and organizational-effectiveness officer at Mastercard.
• Neil Murray, the CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL.
• Justina Nixon-Saintil, a vice president and chief impact officer at IBM.
• Marjorie Powell, a chief HR officer and senior vice president at AARP.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Identify early adopters, like human resources

Nixon-Saintil: Because we provide these platforms and solutions to clients, we are usually client zero. We implemented AI across our business and multiple functions, and one of the first things we did was our AskHR product, which I think answered over 94% of questions employees had.

HR employees now spend time doing higher-order work and partnerships with business units instead of answering basic questions that a virtual assistant can answer. I think that's when you start seeing a lot of the benefits of it.

Borgonovo: HR has been leading the way in terms of embedding AI to enhance the employee experience end to end, right before you hire somebody all the way to after they leave the organization. There are tons of opportunities to improve performance and productivity and provide greater personalization.

Invest in ongoing training

Adya: There are certain AI certifications and courses that everybody has to take to be knowledgeable about AI. So we are driving education in terms of what is the impact of AI, what is gen AI, what are LLMs, and how you look at use cases. And certainly educating everybody that it's not about job losses but about amplifying your potential to do more.

Powell: We have hands-on skill building. This past year we posted over 20 AI workshops helping teams integrate AI into their work. We really encourage our staff to participate. We have a product we're using behind our firewall, so they can engage and play with it. We're just telling them go ahead and try to break it, so they can give us feedback on what's working.

There was a team of people who said we want to see how you could use AI with PowerPoint or Excel. And they're finding, well, it's not so good in those things. But as it continues to grow, they'll be ready for that, and they'll know what it was able to do and what it wasn't. I think it's just making it fun, and that way it's not so scary.

Murray: Our internal large language model is now a widget on everybody's dashboard that is accessible on your landing page. Training is super important here to make people comfortable with it. Even if it's just an online module, you have to get people comfortable.

Nixon-Saintil: We've also done companywide upskilling. We had two Watsonx challenges. Watsonx is our AI data platform. This is one of the ways we've upskilled a majority of the organization. The outcome of that is there are some great ideas that employees actually ideated, and they're now implementing those ideas and solutions in different functions.

Borgonovo: Employees want to use AI, and I think they're eager to learn how to use AI to augment their jobs. For that, we built a three-tiered learning approach. One is democratizing access for everybody and building general knowledge of AI.

The second tier is much more role-specific. How do we drive new ways of working by having people in different roles embrace AI tools? Software engineering, consulting, sales — you name it. And then something we definitely want to build for the future is thinking proactively about how you re-skill people whose roles may be impacted by AI so they can become more comfortable doing high-level tasks or can shift to a different type of role that is emerging within the organization.

The other piece is where we're seeing the greatest demand internally, which is for knowledge management. It's gathering information from a lot of different sources in a very easy way.

Another job family that is very eager to get their hands on new AI technology is software engineering. We have taken a very measured approach in deploying coding assistants within the software-engineering community. This year we did a pilot with a subset of them using coding assistants. The idea is to just learn and, based on our learning, scale more broadly across our software-engineering community in 2025.

One of the really interesting learnings from this pilot was that the software engineers who were using the coding assistants probably the best were people who had received training. What we're learning is that before you start rolling out all of these technologies or AI-specific platforms for different job families, you have got to be really intentional about incorporating prompt training.

Unlock peer-to-peer learning

Powell: We have idea pitch competitions and a year-round idea pipeline program where people can put in ideas on how to use AI and share what they've learned. It sparks a lot of peer learning and creativity on our digital-first capabilities to help us with our digital transformation.

Then we collaborate through community. We have a generative-AI community of practice. This is somewhat like how companies have employee resource groups; we have communities of practice as well. They give employees a space to share their techniques and learn from each other and stay ahead of evolving trends. They meet monthly, they have an executive sponsor, and they have all kinds of activities and learning opportunities.

Murray: As we monitored AI use and what sort of questions were being asked, we identified super users across all departments — so the people who were capable of developing the most evolved prompts. I suppose those prompts are now appearing in pull-down menus to help people who maybe aren't as advanced in their use of it, because prompting is a really important part of this. And so the super users are driving everybody else to show them what's possible across the organization.

Find customer pain points to solve

Borgonovo: One of the use cases that drives not only knowledge management but also efficiencies is around customer support. Customer support is probably one of the areas that has been leading the way.

We have a customer onboarding process that can be very lengthy, very technical, involving hundreds of pages of documentation and reference materials. It was our first use case for a chat-based assistant that we processed in terms of streamlining and creating greater efficiency and a much better customer experience.

Reinforce responsible leadership

Powell: We want our leaders, people leaders particularly, to guide employees to use AI effectively and responsibly. We want to make sure they're emphasizing privacy, policy, and efficiency. So we encourage managers to point the staff toward training that we offer, and we offer quite a bit of training.

When new employees join Patagonia, they're handed a copy of "Let My People Go Surfing." The company's founder, Yvon Chouinard, who wrote the book in 2005, said it was intended as a "philosophical manual for the employees of Patagonia."

In the book, Chouinard declares that treating employees well is a key corporate responsibility. "One thing I never wanted to change, even if we got serious: Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis," Chouinard wrote. "We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family."

Since its founding in 1973, Patagonia has positioned itself as a workplace nirvana — a community more so than a company, one that prioritizes the well-being of the Earth and of its employees above all else. But in the past few years, as sales have slowed, the outdoor-apparel brand has buckled down, cutting redundant jobs, tracking performance metrics, and banning long-standing practices such as letting sales representatives sell Patagonia samples to friends and family on the side.

It has also started to respond to customers' demand for delivery at Amazon speed. The rejiggering is a means of survival, a necessity, Patagonia says, to provide for its 3,000-plus employees. But the retailer is now dealing with the fallout from disappointed staffers who say the new rigidity feels antithetical to the company's ethos.

"It's always been a self-critical culture," Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, told Business Insider. "Whenever the company does something that's not well understood to be part of the values, you get a lot of internal reaction to it."

Patagonia is a billion-dollar company with more than 70 stores worldwide. The brand's $130 vests and $280 jackets are just as likely to be sported on Wall Street as in the great outdoors — earning it the nickname "Patagucci." Patagonia's commitment to do good is integral to the brand. Over the years it has donated the equivalent of $226 million to environmental causes, and in 2001 it created an Earth tax, pledging 1% of sales to preserve and restore the natural environment.

Patagonia's sales soared during the pandemic. From summer 2020 to summer 2022, sales grew at a rate of about 20% to 25% companywide, Alan Adams, a former US regional sales rep for Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska, told BI. Adams, who left the company in 2023, said COVID-19 restrictions led to an "unsustainable" boom, adding that the renewed interest in outdoor activities had people stocking up on all-weather gear and apparel. For a period, as California ports faced major backlogs, Patagonia relied on planes to transport about a third of its goods. (Before the pandemic, about 80% of Patagonia stock was shipped by barge, a decidedly more environmentally friendly option.) A Patagonia spokesperson told BI that it uses less air freight now than it did before the pandemic.

Patagonia started to attract a new customer base less attached to its green credentials and more demanding of superspeed delivery.

"What we do to make the customer happy and to save ourselves from backlash is not environmentally sustainable," said a current customer-service, or CX, manager who has been at the company for multiple years. "If someone doesn't like their repair, it doesn't match perfectly, then we ship them a new item overnight."

The Patagonia spokesperson said it had been tricky to navigate the demand for instant gratification. "What I don't know is how do we support our customer-service team when customers are like, 'Well, Amazon sends it to me overnight. Why can't Patagonia?'" the spokesperson said. She added that Patagonia has an "ironclad guarantee" to give customers a new item if they don't like a repair. While overnight shipping is an option, Patagonia tries to direct customers away from that choice with pricing and messaging, she said.

Workers said Chouinard, now 86, was typically one to challenge decisions that prioritized profit over sustainability. Adams recalled that at an event in about 2013 in Idaho, Chouinard seemed shocked at how large Patagonia's sales representatives' trucks were. He kicked a tire and asked one rep: "Why do you have this huge truck? That's not what we're about."

In September 2022, Chouinard, who sits on Patagonia's board, announced that he was giving away his shares of the company to a newly formed trust to fight the climate crisis.

At about this time, Patagonia began reassessing its operations. For the better part of the year, the spokesperson said, the senior leadership team was "locked in a room" figuring out which priorities they weren't achieving and how decision-making could be improved. They also hired consultants to help restructure the company, the spokesperson added.

Many employees felt as though Patagonia's new direction directly threatened the utopia they — and customers — had been sold. A worker from the digital team expressed concern about Patagonia's buy-now, pay-later feature that launched this past June.

"It feels like it's encouraging people to spend more money than they can currently afford, and buy more things that they don't need, which goes directly against Patagonia's mission and anti-consumption message," the employee said.

Stanley, the company's director of philosophy, told BI that growth had brought about "complicated decisions" like how to balance the long-term business health against the company's core values while providing a consistent level of benefits to all employees. Financial stability, he said, was crucial for Patagonia to honor its commitments.

Like many companies in the wake of the pandemic, Patagonia was left with a surplus of staff and inventory, Adams said.

In the past few years, it has tried to rein in costs and streamline business operations. In the fall of 2022, Patagonia said it would stop allowing sales reps to sell extra clothing samples to their friends and family. Adams, who made about $350,000 in 2022, according to tax documents seen by BI, said this was a significant change. He said that even with a promised increase to his base salary and bonus, he would have expected to bring in just under $200,000 in 2023 under the new rules. (The spokesperson said the salary increases and bonuses were meant to fully make up any differences in sales reps' total pay.)

The following year, Patagonia reversed a three-year-old policy of closing for the last week of December. The Patagonia spokesperson told BI that the new policy asked CX and warehouse employees to volunteer for holiday shifts in order to ensure customers received service during the busy season.

In July 2023, Patagonia introduced a career-leveling plan for all US employees to more clearly define roles and match pay grades to the market standard. The company also became more focused on tracking metrics across teams. "It used to be that we would be able to stay on the phone with a customer for an hour and a half and just connect with them and talk to them," the CX employee who has been at Patagonia for multiple years told BI. "And now we get dinged for having long phone calls."

Eventually, though, the company began cutting jobs. In June, Patagonia gave 90 employees on the CX team 72 hours to decide whether they wanted to relocate to one of seven US hubs or leave their jobs. Only four chose to relocate, according to an internal memo seen by BI.

The Patagonia spokesperson told BI that the changes were "crucial for us to build a vibrant team culture" and that the CX team had been overstaffed by 200% to 300%.

Three months later, Patagonia announced that 41 corporate staffers had been let go. In an internal memo sent the day the layoffs were announced, Stanley wrote that the company was experiencing the first sales decline in its history. In a follow-up FAQ about the layoffs, Stanley added that because of the financial strains, travel would be limited, bonuses would be lowered, and hiring would be paused across the company.

After being told for years how important employees' happiness was and even being handed a book expounding these merits, workers were shaken. In "Let My People Go Surfing," Chouinard called layoffs "almost unthinkable" for Patagonia and described a round of job cuts in 1991 as "the single darkest day in the company's history."

Several people said the 72-hour deadline for CX employees was insufficient to make such a major life decision. Another CX worker still at the company said the ultimatum was presented without "dignity or care or anything that Patagonia stands for." During a time when workers more generally were growing distrustful of their workplaces, many felt Patagonia was trying to "quiet fire" staffers, with one employee calling it "an easy way for them to reduce their head count rather than waiting for attrition."

Nick Helmreich, a team lead at Patagonia's store in Reno, Nevada, since 2022, recalled one colleague telling him, "Camelot is truly dead."

Many employees BI talked to said that, despite the recent upheavals, the company still treated its employees better than most corporations. But they said the brand was not living up to the standards with which it markets itself. In March, the 25 employees working at Patagonia's Reno store formed the company's first union. "Pay is really only one of the reasons for organizing," Helmreich said. "Employees aren't going to be excited about protecting the planet if you cannot protect the people doing that work."

The CX worker who's been at the company for years told BI that "the focus appears to be shifting away from the principles of mutual respect and community that Patagonia has long championed."

Patagonia said it takes employees' concerns seriously.

But as Stanley wrote in his internal note in September, the workforce may not always agree with leadership's decisions: "The balancing act is delicate but is not essentially one of compromising between opposing interests (though some horse trading is involved). We are at our best when we can take a single action that benefits each of our stakeholders, or as many as possible."