Case study · Industrial Surface Protection Services
Integrated Global Services: 15 AI Initiatives Across Seven Business Functions
What began as a series of AI Action Workshops became a portfolio of AI workflows: 15 outcome-based initiatives launched across HR, recruiting, sales, field operations, operations management, engineering, and safety, with every resolved engagement verified successful by the IGS leader who owns the workflow.
- Client
- Integrated Global Services (IGS)
- Industry
- Industrial Surface Protection Services
- Engagement
- October 2025 – Present
The challenge
A global industrial services company constrained by manual processes, tribal knowledge trapped in silos, and organizational caution toward new technology. Once early wins landed, a second challenge emerged: turning scattered enthusiasm into a portfolio of production systems the business actually owns.
The solution
A two-chapter partnership: rapid AI Action Workshops proved value in hours and created internal champions; then a portfolio of outcome-based engagements delivered production AI capabilities department by department. Each had a named business owner and pre-agreed success criteria, and every engagement that reached resolution was owner-verified as successful.
Key results
Portfolio outcomes
- 15 outcome-based AI initiatives launched across seven business functions in eight months
- Every resolved engagement client-verified as successful against pre-agreed criteria
- Actionable staffing and training insights surfaced by manpower analytics
- AI sales coaching deployed across the full field sales motion: a rep one month into the role now produces reports leadership judges equal to a senior veteran's
- 97% measured extraction accuracy on the validated end-to-end recording that turns spoken field safety talks into structured Salesforce data, using wearable hardware selected at a fraction of the cost of the original headset approach
- From the workshop phase: a significant improvement in first-week retention, lower contract-review risk, and meaningful time recaptured in finance
Executive Summary
Integrated Global Services (IGS), a global leader in industrial surface protection, engaged GSD at Work in 2025 to bridge the gap between AI's potential and practical, value-driven implementation. The first chapter, a series of rapid, hands-on “AI Action Workshops,” delivered immediate wins: a significant improvement in early retention, lower contract-review risk, and meaningful time recaptured in finance. That story was published here in December 2025.
This update covers what happened next, and it is the more important story. In 2026, the partnership evolved from workshops into a portfolio of outcome-based engagements: 15 initiatives running in parallel at peak, each scoped to a single painful workflow, each with an executive sponsor and a named business owner who had to verify pre-agreed success criteria before the engagement was counted as successful. Every resolved engagement was verified successful. IGS now runs AI-assisted workflows in the field, in the sales motion, in engineering, in recruiting, and in the HR back office. Most are deployed in IGS's own Azure environment, owned by IGS teams, and several have already been extended by IGS employees without GSD in the loop.
About Integrated Global Services (IGS)
Headquartered in Virginia, Integrated Global Services, Inc. (IGS) is an international provider of on-site surface protection solutions. With over 35 years of experience helping customers solve metal wastage, reliability, and energy efficiency problems in mission-critical equipment, IGS operates across dozens of countries with a global field workforce. Its growth agenda requires disciplined execution and scalable systems. Learn more at integratedglobal.com.
Chapter 1: Proving It with AI Action Workshops (Fall 2025)
The engagement began against a familiar backdrop: growth constrained by time-intensive manual processes, decades of specialized “black art” knowledge locked in the heads of a few senior experts, and understandable caution about putting company data “out in the AI sphere.” Rather than propose a top-down transformation roadmap, GSD ran rapid, collaborative AI Action Workshops that solved real departmental bottlenecks live on the call:
- Legal & Commercial: In a two-hour workshop, the legal team built a custom “Contract Review Assistant” trained on IGS's review criteria, reducing recurring software costs, accelerating weekly review, and lowering human-error risk.
- Human Resources: A multi-month attrition analysis was completed in a single session, confirming that a new retention program had significantly improved first-week retention.
- Field Safety: An AI-powered voice assistant let field technicians phone in safety observations in natural language: the seed of what would later become a production field-data pipeline.
The wins were shared at a company-wide “AI Power Hour” that drew employees from across the business, creating a viral loop of internal demand. As CEO Rich Crawford put it: “you're creating really nice value on calls... you're actually getting things done on calls which is really great.”
Illustrative image of industrial surface protection work (AI-generated)
Chapter 2: From Workshops to Working Systems (2026)
Workshops create believers; they don't create infrastructure. In early 2026, IGS and GSD restructured the partnership around scoped, outcome-based engagements, each targeting one workflow, with success criteria negotiated up front and a named IGS business owner, not GSD, deciding whether they were met. Client verification became the basis for closing each engagement. The portfolio was tracked transparently on a shared platform that IGS leadership, including IT, could inspect at any time.
The model kept attention on adoption and measurable outcomes rather than shelfware. By March 2026, 15 initiatives were running in parallel. Every engagement that reached resolution was verified successful by its IGS owner. Here is how the portfolio developed, department by department.
Field Operations: A Manpower Intelligence Platform
IGS coordinates a global field workforce across concurrent projects, and allocation was run from a manually highlighted spreadsheet. Building a demand forecast required a time-consuming manual Excel process. Across several phased engagements, GSD built a live manpower platform using IGS's enterprise data. It brings forecasting, workforce planning, qualification visibility, and manager-reviewed allocation into one governed workflow while preserving human approval and auditability. Verified phases are in production, and the broader platform continues to evolve under IGS ownership.
An early working dashboard demonstrated the value of the approach. The data gave leadership earlier, clearer visibility into staffing needs, training priorities, and capacity constraints. The qualification layer improved visibility into certification readiness. Manager demand for access followed quickly.
Field Safety: Spoken Toolbox Talks Become Structured Data
Every IGS crew shift opens with a spoken safety briefing, but documentation was hand-written after the fact: inconsistent, late, and analytically useless. GSD built a hands-free pipeline on a lightweight wearable AI recorder selected at a fraction of the cost of the original headset approach: the shift lead presses record once, and AI extraction against a structured hazard taxonomy pushes human-reviewed records into Salesforce Field Service. Measured extraction accuracy on the validated end-to-end recording: 97%. The senior HSE leader who verified the outcome rated the tool 5/5, and field crews on a live overseas project started asking for devices unprompted. IGS is now planning the scale-up across business units.
Sales & Business Development: AI Coaching Across a Large Sales Pipeline
IGS's field sales reps log a steady stream of site visits every week across a large, active opportunity pipeline, but preparation quality and post-visit reporting varied enormously by rep and region. GSD built a two-part AI skill with the sales leadership team: dynamic pre-meeting battle cards drawing on Salesforce history, product collateral, and competitive intelligence; then a post-visit coach that debriefs the rep, drafts the visit report in the rep's own writing voice, and, only after explicit human confirmation, writes the report and follow-up tasks into Salesforce through a locked-down, zero-autonomy integration that cleared corporate cybersecurity review.
The pilot paired two operators from opposite extremes: the most senior, top-performing rep and a rep roughly one month into the role. Both cleared the success bar, and sales leadership judged the new hire's AI-coached reports as good as the veteran's. The junior rep rated it 5/5: “I was mad that it was gone... I can't do anything without it.” The executive vice president who reads every rep's visit reports, in writing: “I like the coaching and commentary... it provides a great supplement to coaching, and also makes it easier on the managers to prioritize what to spend more time on.” More reps voluntarily adopted the skill during the pilot, and IGS's own team has since taken the workflow and is rolling it out org-wide on their standard enterprise AI platform. That is exactly the kind of ownership the engagement was designed to produce.
Engineering: 35 Years of Institutional Knowledge, Searchable in Plain English
IGS's long-running engineering archive includes image-heavy historical records that conventional keyword search often missed. GSD built natural-language search over the legacy archive, deployed inside IGS's Azure environment, with machine vision to extend the index across those records. The engineering lead verified the outcome and highlighted the tool's ability to surface relevant connections and potential testing gaps during routine searches.
Operations Management: Technician Performance Moves to a Dashboard Refreshed from Salesforce
A technician performance platform replaced manual tracking with a dashboard refreshed from IGS's enterprise systems. Operations leaders can now run reports, identify training needs, and assess performance across groups of technicians from one view. The day-to-day owner expected the platform to materially reduce manual work, and both primary Operations stakeholders verified the outcome.
HR & Recruiting: From Manual Analyses to Same-Day Answers
The HR workstream that anchored Chapter 1 went deepest. An AI-assisted compensation review now produces a multi-tab calibration workbook the executive runs herself and uses to guide manager conversations. (“This whole workbook is what it produced with all these tabs on it, which is just amazing... it's telling me what to go look at.”) Recruiting added AI-supported candidate review and personalized interview questions, enabling faster outreach to qualified candidates. The recruiting manager's verdict: “We're totally at a five... These questions are spot on.” A custom approval-workflow application replaced the email-and-spreadsheet requisition process with enforced approval chains, a real-time dashboard, and an immutable audit trail in IGS's Azure tenant.
Portfolio Metrics
The Real Product Is Capability
The most durable outcome isn't any single system. It's that IGS people now build and own AI workflows themselves. The Senior Director of Operations, after working alongside GSD on the manpower platform, started building his own dashboards. As Margie Cain, SVP of Human Resources and the engagement's executive sponsor, described it: “He has now created five different dashboard things in Claude, and he keeps showing them to me. I'm astonished and asking, ‘Where? How are you making the dashboard piece?’ He said, ‘I just told Claude to make it and it makes it for me.’”
- An HR analytics manager completed AI-assisted coding knowledge transfer and began extending a production application.
- Selected code repositories were transferred to IGS-owned infrastructure, with IGS staff trained as maintainers.
- HR built its own AI hiring tools, one of which recruiters called “amazing” (“this made our job so much easier”), and the sales organization is independently porting the visit-report skill to its enterprise AI platform for company-wide rollout.
- In June 2026, IGS held a company-wide “State of the Union on AI,” with the entire company invited, and stood up internal AI governance: executive sponsors now gatekeep a growing queue of AI project requests from inside the business.
Internal demand continues to grow: department leaders bring scoped project ideas to the program's sponsors, and the partnership continues to launch follow-on work from a foundation IGS controls.
Direct Quotes
“I don't even know how you did this. You just like speaking to an AI thing and it just quickly modifies your program to throw this up... This is awesome. More than I expected.”
“All the managers want access to this, and at the moment, I'm the only one with access.”
“I was really surprised when people were like, man, this is awesome. We need more stuff like this.”
“Five for sure. I'd even rate it a 10... How quickly Hayden got through his... the speed is key here.”
“A six [out of five]. I would have figured this out eventually, but it would have taken me a million hours... this was just exactly what I need.”
Conclusion: From Cautious Curiosity to a Portfolio of AI Workflows
In under a year, IGS moved from carefully worded questions about data security to operating AI-assisted workflows in the field, in sales, in engineering, and in HR; developing internal champions; holding company-wide AI literacy events; and establishing governance for new requests. The through-line was never technology for its own sake. It was verified outcomes, one painful workflow at a time, with the people who own the workflow deciding what counts as success.
“Most AI discussions feel like brainstorming with no finish line. This has been the opposite; every session turns ideas into action. The focus on outcomes, not just options, has made it easy for our leadership team to embrace AI with confidence and purpose.”
