The potential of AI for productivity is boundless, but only if your company is ready to adopt it.
According to the Q3 2025 Vistage CEO Confidence Index, digital engagement varies across individuals and teams in small and midsize businesses. Those actively engaged in AI include CEOs (70%), leadership teams (61%), employees (55%), and specific workgroups (39%). Part of those discrepancies are due to varying investments; 47% of small and midsize businesses are investing in AI training, while only 41% have implemented enterprise licenses or subscriptions.
In other words, digital engagement looks different for every business, depending on who’s behind the wheel. Two Vistage members share how they’re integrating AI into their businesses — one using a top-down approach and the other working from the bottom up — and what it’s meant for their knowledge workers, productivity, and growth.
In November 2022, a cloud hung over the writers and designers at Mix Consulting Group.
The release of ChatGPT made the team "really depressed," recalls Kathryn Courtney, president and CEO of the creative firm, which develops B2B marketing campaigns, sales materials, thought leadership, and other content for tech companies. "We had to trudge through a lot of anxiety and confusion about what this technology meant for us and what it means to create."
Courtney didn't let her team wallow in those feelings for long. "We recognized our industry was going to change, and our choice was to get ahead of it or fall behind," she says. By January 2023, she hired a director of marketing innovation to lead the team's AI adoption.
More than three years later, Mix has become the epitome of an AI-powered creative firm. Nearly every workflow has been deconstructed and strategically rebuilt with the integration of AI tools. Employees have an advanced understanding of how AI systems work, giving them the flexibility to work with a broad range of AI tools. Teams routinely tap into Mix's centralized workspace — playfully called the "AI Burrow" and adorned with mascots Floppy and Bot — containing how-to guides, demonstrations, and best practices for using AI. Mix also has two dedicated spaces online for AI discussions: one for airing grievances and another for sharing successes.
"Little by little, the people who started out saying, 'I don't touch this stuff,' are now using AI in their jobs and feeling more optimistic about it," says Courtney.
Efficiency gains are encouraging this sunnier outlook. Using AI-powered tools, the team has reduced production time by roughly 60% for case studies, around 80% for value-proposition workshop materials, and approximately 75% for monthly invoicing. With this freed-up time, employees can focus on higher-value work such as creative problem-solving and building client relationships.
AI is also democratizing roles in Mix, allowing employees to take on creative tasks that previously fell outside their wheelhouse. For example, the firm recently tasked a project manager with creating a 90-second explainer video using AI-generated visuals from Midjourney, which were then animated using Runway ML, and the client was thrilled with the result.
Since joining Vistage in June 2025, Courtney has gained leadership insights that complement her hard-won AI expertise. "In every meeting, I take away a long list of things to implement," she says.
For example, at a recent Vistage event, she learned about the leadership practices of Horst Schulze, former president and CEO of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. At the start of every hotel shift, 365 days a year, Schulze required his employees to talk about the ways they live the company's 10 core values.
"So we implemented that at Mix," says Courtney. "We reworked our values into 28 behaviors, and we talk about one every week at our team meeting. It has really enriched the ways we live and work. Now the job and the values are intertwined."
This shift in thinking comes at the right time, she adds: "In the face of AI, we need to develop our humanity; we need to go bigger on our humanity. We're going to need it."
Arrie Oliver knows how the "Big Five" tech companies — Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — are getting their employees to adopt AI.
"I have friends who work for some of those firms, and they are mandated to use tools like Gemini or Copilot for all of their work," he says.
Oliver rejects that approach. "I don't want to fall prey to the gold-rush mentality of using AI right now," says the general manager of Copper Sky Design + Remodel, a high-end interior design and construction firm based in Atlanta. "I'm a personal believer that the future is technology and AI. But at the same time, I don't believe it's 100% of the future."
At Copper Sky, those beliefs have played out in a bottom-up approach to AI. At a firm with little role redundancy, Oliver has encouraged his employees to determine their own best use cases for AI, giving them freedom to experiment with a variety of tools. However, employees must stay within a set of guidelines, especially these three:
- Use AI as a thought partner, not a thought creator.
- Do not use any AI-generated communication with people internally or externally.
- Own the output of your work.
"We are in a heavy creative field, so I don't want AI to design or lead our marketing efforts," explains Oliver. "I think that really harms our brand, as we're trying to carve ourselves out as a place that delivers custom, elevated designs for homeowners."
By giving employees agency in how they use AI, Copper Sky has realized the greatest productivity gains in tracking tasks, analyzing HR documents, summarizing financial documents, and supporting other administrative functions. For example, an employee with HR and administrative responsibilities has gained about 20% productivity by using AI to edit documents and perform other routine tasks. Similarly, AI saves a project manager between 15 and 30 minutes on weekly client updates and an hour on time logs.
While Oliver appreciates this "efficiency by a thousand cuts, I'm trying not to build over reliance on these tools," he says. "I'm not saying that'll never happen; we're all going to be subject to market demands. But I want to make sure we're intentional about how we apply these tools."
At Copper Sky's upcoming strategic planning meeting, Oliver plans to share his team's findings to help inform decisions about future capacity. Having grown its revenues from $4.5 million in 2019 to $11.7 million in 2025, the firm is striving to break $35 million by 2035.
As he works toward this 10-year goal, Oliver says he's learning that many of his Vistage peers have climbed similar mountains before and feel invested in his success.
"In what'll be the next big chapter of Copper Sky, having access to a wealth of experience through Vistage is a critical thing that I want to get right," Oliver says. "Who better to learn from than the people who have been there, done that?"
