Brown Strauss

Brown Strauss has been one of the biggest distributors of steel on the West Coast since 1905 — ten facilities, 32 states, 120,000 tons in stock, and 100% employee-owned. Being an ESOP, every conversation about changing how work gets done is a personal conversation with the owners. Brown Strauss engaged AFITA for a 12-week AI adoption program. We interviewed teams across the business to identify manual work, slow processes, and areas that depended on knowledge held by a few employees. We then led an executive workshop, identified 45 process issues, and established a cross-functional AI Council to manage the work.

AFITA helped Brown Strauss introduce AI agents across sales, operations, finance, purchasing, and HR. The program included employee training, communications, an AI readiness assessment, and a plan for continued adoption. We were able to drive AI usage in the company fivefold in the first few months. A finance report that previously required about an hour of manual work could be completed in five to ten minutes, while sales tools reduced hours of data entry.

Brown Strauss and AFITA have continued the engagement through an AI Transformation Office focused on putting AI into regular business processes. Current work includes inventory optimization and truck routing, supported by discovery, measurement, development, testing, training, and rollout. AFITA also developed a three-year scale plan covering the data, security, reporting, governance, and technical foundations needed to support continued AI use.