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 reset some expectations, people started leaning towards it. Our adoption has taken off.”ERP streamlining, product visualizations Gold Bond, Inc. — not to be mistaken with the skin care company — is one of the largest suppliers in the $20.5 billion promotional products industry, producing custom swag and corporate gifts for 8,500 active customers.Orders, quotes, and sample requests arrive via the website, email, fax, and more — in every format imaginable. “So it gets very messy,” Price said.AI proved a natural fit. Previously, employees manually keyed order details into the ERP. Now, Google Cloud ingests incoming documents and normalizes them, while Gemini and OpenAI extract and structure the fields before pushing a completed purchase order into the system, Price said.From there, Gold Bond expanded into a...