How we took an 80-year-old manufacturer from zero AI use to a team building its own skills and automations in about six weeks.
Background
Airsan Corporation is a privately held industrial air filter manufacturer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with more than 80 years in operation and customers across defense and military, oil and gas, power generation, and industrial distribution.
As part of a broader modernization effort, they wanted to bring AI into daily work across sales, operations, and leadership. Most of the team had never used an AI assistant, and there was no framework yet for where it could help or how to apply it safely. The day to day ran on manual effort: repetitive spreadsheet work, manual email monitoring, and cross-referencing data by hand across disconnected systems. One clear example sat in the CRM, which held roughly 4,000 contacts and 1,593 companies, but only 434 of those companies, about 27%, had complete data. Enriching the rest by hand was a large, low-value job no one had time for.
Airsan also carries real complexity, with defense and military customers, compliance requirements, and custom-engineered products. Any rollout had to fit that context, not just hand the team a generic chatbot and hope it stuck.
What We Did
We ran the rollout in three deliberate phases: enable the whole team, discover their real use cases, then layer custom tooling once people were fluent in the fundamentals.
- Licensed the entire core team across sales, operations, and leadership, with organization-level administration so tools, plugins, and settings could be governed centrally.
- Ran a six-week training curriculum, around nine hours of structured, role-specific sessions covering the fundamentals (model selection, projects, file handling, connectors, scheduled tasks, mobile access, and Microsoft 365 integration), followed by dedicated sales and operations use-case discovery and ongoing office hours.
- Built three custom plugins for Airsan: a Productivity plugin that assembles a daily task dashboard from Outlook, a Sales plugin wired to the CRM for deep account research and competitive call prep, and an Operations plugin for capacity planning, compliance, vendor review and comparison, and document generation.
- Deployed an automated CRM enrichment skill that fills missing company fields through Apollo on a schedule, processing 30 companies every three hours and flagging each record complete, clearing the entire 1,593-company backlog on its own.
- Taught the team to build their own reusable skills for recurring Excel tasks.
- Helped staff stand up scheduled inbox-monitoring assistants scoped to their own mailboxes.
- Set up an automated daily news brief tracking key accounts and industry moves.
- Built a weekly customer-file reconciliation that reads the data (never changes it) and drafts a discrepancy summary for leadership.
Impact
In about six weeks, Airsan went from no AI usage to a team that reaches for Claude by default, with tooling built around how they actually work.
With subscription costs only sitting at around $20 to $100 per user per month, the program returned excellent ROI even at the high end. The value today is the combination of new analytical capability, automated research and data work, and a team that now reaches for AI first.
- CRM enrichment went from 434 of 1,593 companies complete (27%) to full coverage, cleared automatically over about two weeks of unattended runs.
- Customer sales analysis that was not feasible by hand, top parts, average sell price, and weighted margin by customer, is now built on demand.
- Account and industry monitoring that was manual and ad hoc now arrives as an automated daily brief across hundreds of accounts.
- A weekly customer-file check that used to mean manual cross-referencing now drafts itself, read-only, every week.
From zero AI use to a team building its own skills and automations
CRM company records enriched automatically (up from 27% complete)
Custom Productivity, Sales, and Operations tooling built for Airsan
Monthly subscription cost per user with strong ROI at scale
“I keep making little skills for the things I used to ask for over and over, so I do not have to repeat myself anymore. And the files all come out organized the same way, instead of me formatting them by hand.”
Software: Claude (custom plugins, skills, and knowledge), HubSpot, Apollo, Microsoft 365
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