When most people talk about AI in the enterprise, they jump straight to the moonshots, the transformative initiatives that promise to reshape entire departments or even business models.
But here’s the reality: the smartest companies aren’t starting with moonshots. They’re starting with mundane pain points. Other companies need to follow suit.
At XDS, we're helping enterprise clients across healthcare, pharma, and technology integrate AI into their day-to-day operations,not as a replacement for talent, but as an accelerant for momentum. And one insight has repeatedly surfaced:
Enterprise AI isn’t about building futuristic tools. It’s about removing yesterday’s friction.
Learn more about how XDS helps enterprise clients across AI, data, and design.
Here are several practical examples illustrating how enterprises are achieving significant progress by starting small:
The problem: Enterprises typically amass decades worth of documentation such as PDFs, internal wikis, SharePoint folders, and compliance binders, scattered across multiple disconnected systems. As a result, critical information is often inaccessible, poorly organized, and inefficiently utilized.
The AI opportunity: Deploy lightweight, secure AI agents trained specifically on internal documents to:
Summarize thousands of files instantly
Surface relevant insights on-demand
Auto-generate FAQs and quick-reference guides
Provide real-time answers via Slack, Teams, or internal knowledge portals
Real-world insight: Verizon implemented a Google AI assistant to aid customer service representatives, utilizing approximately 15,000 internal documents. This integration led to a nearly 40% increase in sales by enabling agents to respond more efficiently to customer inquiries.
Read more about how we transformed legacy systems for Janssen.
The problem: Standard operating procedures (SOPs), onboarding materials, and operational documentation frequently become outdated as workflows evolve. Most teams only document processes reactively, and only when problems arise.
The AI opportunity: Use conversational data from meetings, Slack channels, email communications, or project debriefs to automatically generate "living documents." With minimal human oversight, enterprises can quickly produce:
Continuously updated SOPs
Accurate and relevant training manuals for new hires
Dynamic checklists tailored for specific tasks
Context-rich guidelines to facilitate smoother cross-team collaboration
Real-world insight: A Harvard study found that management consultants who incorporated AI tools into their work were more productive, completing tasks 25.1% more quickly, an average of 12.2% more tasks in total, and with over 40% higher quality compared to a control group.
Explore our intranet and knowledge management solutions.
The problem: Leadership often lacks clarity about what is happening across multiple teams. Each department, including Product, Operations, and Marketing, operates in silos with fragmented insights. Executives require consolidated views but rarely have the bandwidth to sift through disparate tools and documents.
The AI opportunity: Build an integrative AI agent that automatically aggregates updates from tools such as:
Jira for project and task statuses
Salesforce for sales and customer engagement insights
Notion for team documentation and planning
Google Docs or Office 365 for collaborative content
Slack or Microsoft Teams for real-time communications
The agent then synthesizes a weekly summary, custom-tailored to each executive’s key areas of interest and strategic priorities.
Real-world insight: McKinsey’s research indicates that organizations are increasingly using AI in multiple functions, with the average number of business functions utilizing AI rising to three in 2024. This multi-functional adoption facilitates better cross-team visibility and decision-making.
See how Shockwave Medical improved cross-team visibility with our help.
The problem: Many enterprises, especially in regulated industries, face major roadblocks around deploying AI due to strict data governance, compliance requirements, and internal security policies. These concerns often stall or halt AI experimentation altogether.
The AI opportunity: Start with AI implementations that are inherently secure, auditable, and fully contained within the enterprise’s infrastructure. Key best practices include:
Using self-hosted LLMs or private cloud models to avoid transmitting sensitive data externally
Integrating with SSO and role-based access controls to protect AI access and usage
Training models only on sanitized, permissible datasets to ensure regulatory compliance
Adding AI usage observability via logging and dashboards for traceability
Pro tip: Rather than waiting for an organization-wide AI policy to be finalized, partner with IT and Compliance early. Aligning on a small, approved use case (like internal document summarization) can build trust and establish a replicable security framework.
Enterprise AI isn’t just about capability, it’s about deployability. If it’s not secure, it’s not scalable.
While AI undoubtedly has the power to revolutionize enterprise operations, the true path to sustained AI adoption lies in addressing real, tangible pain points first. Companies succeeding with AI begin with incremental, practical applications, then build upward and outward.
At XDS, our most significant wins haven’t come from massive transformations; they’ve emerged from countless small, intelligent improvements that collectively drive substantial change.
Remember, enterprise AI isn't about chasing futuristic scenarios; it's about practically removing everyday friction, one targeted solution at a time.
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Ready to discover your own practical AI wins? Reach out to XDS, and let’s discuss how to effectively integrate AI into your enterprise today.
The Experience Design Studio is an award-winning digitally native customer experience agency founded in 2017 by two agency veterans, bringing their collective creative, user experience, marketing, technology, and healthcare expertise together.
XDS is a full-service digital agency providing strategy to creation, consulting, design, engineering, marketing, and analytics, with the aim of providing seamless DTC and B2B experiences across all digital touch points, with common sense sprinkled in.