Leadership AI Adoption
AI fluency, built from the top down.
Brilliance LED makes AI a daily habit across its entire leadership team.
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How Avolis embedded with a national lighting manufacturer, coached its CEO and department heads desk by desk, and turned AI from a curiosity into the way the leadership team works, with week-long tasks now finished in an hour.
Client
Sector
Professional LED lighting manufacturing
Engagement
Embedded partnership, ongoing
Scope
AI readiness, leadership enablement, workflow automation
01 · The Company
A national lighting brand, run by a lean leadership team.
Brilliance LED has designed and manufactured professional landscape lighting in Carefree, Arizona since 2008. Its lamps, fixtures, and smart controls are engineered for extreme desert heat and sold to landscape lighting contractors through a national network of distributors and representatives.
The company runs on roughly thirty people and a small leadership team led by CEO Bryan Gold. Each department head carries a wide scope: sales, manufacturing and procurement, finance, marketing, operations, and contractor training. Every hour those leaders spend inside an inbox or a spreadsheet is an hour taken from customers, product, and growth.
The Industry
Brilliance competes in a growing category. The global landscape lighting market was valued at roughly $13.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $22 billion by 2030, with LED as its largest technology segment. Manufacturing, meanwhile, is early in its AI curve: in early 2026, only about one in eight US manufacturers reported using AI at all. For a company of Brilliance's size, that gap is an opening. The manufacturers whose leaders learn AI first set the pace for everyone else.
$13.2B
Global landscape lighting market, 2024
8.9%
Projected annual market growth through 2030
~13%
Of US manufacturers using AI, early 2026
Market figures: Grand View Research. Manufacturing AI use: US Census Bureau Business Trends and Outlook Survey.
02 · The Starting Point
Leaders who knew AI mattered, and needed someone to show them how.
Bryan had watched AI reshape how work gets done and knew his team needed to learn it. He also knew what most companies Brilliance's size run into: no one on the inside had the time or the expertise to lead the way.
Meanwhile, the leadership team's week was full of work that software could carry:
Inbox overload
The VP of Sales estimated that email consumed 80 to 85 percent of his time.
Documents built by hand
Bills of materials, board decks, and training presentations were assembled line by line and slide by slide.
Slow reporting
Internal purchase order tracking and sales activity reports could take hours or days of spreadsheet work.
Manual data cleanup
Contact directories arrived in every format and had to be reformatted by hand before every upload to the CRM.
Uneven buy-in
Some leaders were eager. Others were skeptical, stretched thin, or unsure where AI fit into their day.
Bryan's vision was clear: AI as an assistant to every leader, four to five hours a week back for each person, and departments that run with more autonomy. He also made the decision that shaped the entire engagement.
He would learn alongside his team.
03 · How the Engagement Took Shape
An embedded partner, working desk by desk.
The partnership began with an AI Readiness Evaluation. Avolis assessed the business, identified the workflows carrying the most manual effort, and matched each one to a tool a leader could start using right away.
From there, Avolis ran the program the way it runs every engagement: embedded with the team, accountable for adoption, and working inside each leader's real daily work. Every session was built around the tasks already on someone's plate.
The Operating Cadence
Group sessions
One-hour workshops that gave the whole leadership team a shared plan and introduced each new tool as it rolled out.
One-on-one coaching
Desk-side sessions with each leader, finishing real items from their own to-do list with AI, live.
Executive strategy
Dedicated sessions with Bryan on priorities, delegation, and what to roll out next across the company.
The Path
01 · Diagnose
AI Readiness Evaluation and rollout plan.
02 · Launch
Team workshops introduce the core AI stack.
03 · Coach
One-on-one coaching across leadership.
04 · Build
Custom CRM data pipeline and reporting workflows.
05 · Expand
AI email assistant for high-volume inboxes.
06 · Sustain
Internal AI champion and ongoing partnership.
04 · What Avolis Built
A focused AI stack, fit to every seat.
Avolis kept the toolset deliberately small, so every leader could master it, and fit each piece to the work on a specific desk.
The Core Assistant
An enterprise AI assistant became the center of the stack. The team set it up with Brilliance's catalog, values, and products, and the VP of Sales taught it to write in his own voice. The assistant connects directly to the company's email, and the institutional knowledge captured along the way is becoming a company knowledge base that every assistant can draw from.
Voice-First Work
AI voice dictation came to every leader's desktop and phone, integrated with the company's email and office tools. Leaders speak their email, notes, and prompts, and voice has grown into a shared team workspace of eight.
The Custom Build
For marketing, Avolis built a custom contact-data pipeline that reads directories in any format, from lists to tables, and turns them into clean, CRM-ready records. Refined through rounds of feedback with the marketing team, it removed manual reformatting from the pipeline entirely.
Company-aware assistant
An AI assistant set up with Brilliance's catalog, values, and each leader's voice.
Voice-first workflow
Dictation on every device, feeding email and AI prompts directly.
Clean data, automatically
A custom pipeline that turns messy directories into clean CRM records.
Supporting tools cover research, high-volume inbox management, and process documentation.
05 · Winning Adoption
Adoption is earned one finished task at a time.
The tools were the easy part. The harder part was a busy leadership team changing how it works, and two moments show how Avolis approaches it.
The Director of Manufacturing and Procurement had set AI aside during a heavy stretch of work. In a one-on-one, the Avolis consultant asked for a real item from his to-do list, then finished it with him using AI, live. The reaction was immediate. He said he was going to clear the rest of his list right away. Weeks later, an internal purchase order status report that used to mean spreadsheet work took him about two minutes.
The company's national technical support and training lead started as one of the team's most skeptical users. He became its sleeper power user, emailing Avolis to report that an annual task that used to take him a week had taken one hour. When Bryan asked him to turn a set of training modules into a 45-minute presentation that same week, he handed the material to the AI assistant and had a working deck in about twenty minutes.
“He goes, ‘This took me like 20 minutes.’ … That's how powerful this is.”
Bryan Gold, CEO, Brilliance LED
Every convert on the team started the same way: watching AI finish a task from their own list.
06 · The Work, Seat by Seat
Every department, measurably faster.
Avolis coached seven leaders one-on-one. Here is a sample of the work they now hand to AI.
CEO
Dictates email by voice on desktop and phone, with spacing and bullet formatting handled as he speaks.
A tremendous amount of time saved on email
Director, Manufacturing & Procurement
Turns raw internal purchase order data into a clean status table, and dictates with only occasional edits.
Purchase order status report in about two minutes
Chief Financial Officer
Reviewed a contractor program with AI, rating every issue red, yellow, or green, and now runs AI-generated daily sales reports that surface key numbers right in the email body.
Clearer priorities and better reporting for the sales team
Senior Director, Marketing
Runs contact directories through the custom pipeline Avolis built for her team.
Zero manual reformatting before CRM upload
National Technical Support & Training
Compressed an annual task with AI, then built a training presentation from existing modules.
One week of work in one hour, and a 45-minute deck in 20 minutes
07 · The Outcome
A leadership team that works with AI every day.
1 wk → 1 hr
An annual task, compressed with AI
7
Leaders coached one-on-one, CEO included
8
Team members on a shared AI voice workspace
What Changed Underneath the Numbers
An AI program that sustains itself
Brilliance named an internal AI champion to drive daily use, with Avolis supporting behind the scenes. A company knowledge base is next, giving every leader's assistant the same foundation.
“The people that put the work in got out of it what they wanted to.”
Bryan Gold, CEO, Brilliance LED
The partnership continues with monthly strategy sessions with leadership, dedicated support for the internal champion, and an open line for the whole team, ready to scale back up as new projects come online.
08 · In Bryan's Words
From the CEO's chair.
“That was some of the biggest value that I got out of your help. Company-wise, obviously, but personally, that one-on-one time was great.”
Bryan Gold
Co-Founder & CEO, Brilliance LED
“I think the way we did it was great. I wanted to do it alongside my team.”
On learning with his leaders
“The one-hour group sessions you did are great. They get everybody to a high level: here's the plan, here's the new tech we're rolling out.”
On the group sessions
“It's like trying to learn a language. If you don't use it every day, you forget it.”
On daily practice
“There's a lot of companies out there our size that know they need to learn this stuff, but there's nobody within their company that's doing it or showing them what to do.”
On why it matters
09 · What the Engagement Replaces
Five separate providers, one embedded partner.
A company assembling this program piecemeal would be hiring across five separate markets. Benchmarked against current national market rates for each function, the typical alternatives look like this:
Function & Typical Alternative
Est. Market Cost
AI readiness evaluation and rollout plan
~$5K–$25K
AI strategy consultancy
Leadership group training
~$15K–$40K / engmt
Corporate AI trainer
One-on-one coaching for seven leaders
~$63K–$147K
Executive coach · 7 six-month programs
Custom contact-data pipeline
~$2K–$5K + upkeep
Freelance developer
Ongoing AI program leadership
~$94K–$156K / yr
Fractional Chief AI Officer · at $7.8K–$13K / mo
Assembled independently, first year
~$180K–$370K
And the dollar figure understates the gap. Each provider stops at the edge of its own deliverable: the consultant leaves a roadmap, the trainer runs the workshop, the developer ships the tool. Avolis delivered the full scope as one embedded partner accountable for adoption, including the part where a leadership team changes how it works every day.
The comparison is deliberately conservative: it reflects functional coverage rather than actual purchases, uses published market ranges, and excludes software licensing and the cost of coordinating multiple vendors.
10 · The Toolkit
The capabilities, in daily use.
AI
Enterprise AI assistant, set up with Brilliance's catalog, values, and each leader's voice, and connected to company email.
Voice
AI voice dictation, a shared team workspace on desktop and phone.
Automation
Contact-data pipeline built by Avolis, turning any directory format into clean records.
CRM
Existing CRM, fed with clean contact data automatically.
Research
AI research workspace for market research and internal reference.
AI inbox assistant for high-volume inboxes.
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