AI Adoption Across Departments: Breaking Silos for Growth

AI adoption is expanding beyond leadership—but silos are slowing progress. According to WSI’s 2025 AI Business Insights Report, more departments are experimenting with AI, from sales and IT to operations. Yet, most organizations still lack budgets, training, and strategy—keeping adoption fragmented.

The result? Isolated gains instead of company-wide transformation. With AI now influencing everything from search visibility to customer decision-making, the urgency is clear: businesses that unify adoption across teams will accelerate insights, collaboration, and growth. The real opportunity isn’t just leadership-driven AI—it’s empowering every department to use AI as a driver of resilience and competitiveness.

WSI's AI Business Insights Report

Over the past few months, we have been covering our 2025 AI Business Insights Report and its three main takeaways, assessing the extent to which AI is being adopted by businesses, both large and small, across all sectors.

This year, we surveyed over 600 business leaders worldwide. The majority of these leaders (90.2%) are involved in small or medium businesses. The survey's results form the core of the 2025 WSI AI Business Insights Report.

The results reveal a growing awareness of AI, with more teams outside of leadership and digital marketing adopting it. Yet for most businesses, adoption is still informal. And without budgets, training, or strategy, AI remains stuck in departmental silos.

The survey unearthed three main takeaways:

1. Many businesses know that AI is important, but they have not yet set up any action plans to integrate it into their workflows. They are certainly not allocating any significant portion of their budget to it. Confidence is growing, but action plans and budgets have not caught up.
2. Businesses and individuals are quickly becoming familiar with AI, but formal training still lags.
3. Whereas AI adoption used to be confined to company leadership, this is no longer the case. AI is now being used across departments—from operations to sales. However, progress is still slow in this regard, as silos form within business structures, preventing widespread adoption. If you're enabling your teams with AI, you're missing out on performance gains in all parts of your business.

In this blog post, we will focus on this third takeaway and how AI is no longer confined to leadership and communications staff. It is also being adopted by other departments within businesses. This is great news, but the progress is still slow.

TAKEAWAY #3: AI is Expanding Beyond Leadership—But Silos Are Slowing Real Progress

The data reveals that AI adoption is gradually expanding beyond its traditional strongholds, though significant disparities between departments persist. Management (54%) and Marketing/Communications (43%) continue to lead AI implementation, with Marketing/Communications adoption remaining consistent, while Management shows a slight decrease from 58% in 2024.

Encouragingly, Sales (33% from 23% 2024), IT (26% from 19%), and Operations (24% from 15%) have all increased their AI usage markedly since last year. These substantial year-over-year increases suggest that AI is starting to penetrate operational departments, which can lead to significant efficiency gains and process improvements.

Other departments are still lagging behind, however. Only 9% of HR and Finance departments are using AI, along with only 19% of Customer Service and Frontline Staff. Growth in these departments is minimal.

Across industries, Marketing and Management lead, while IT adoption lags. As for HR, Sales, and Finance, staff in these departments are likely not aware of how AI and machine learning (ML) can assist them in their work. There is a need for AI adoption to break out of these silos, or perhaps more appropriately, to break into the silos that have been resistant to it.

Even better: get rid of those silos altogether.

Why Is AI Adoption So Important For All Areas of Your Business?

McKinsey reports that companies integrating AI across departments can boost profitability by up to 20%. Marketers and managers quickly caught on to AI's ability to automate routine tasks and help with data-driven decision-making, predictive analytics, strategic planning, and more. However, other departments have evidently been soldiering on without these advantages.

In businesses that have only partially adopted AI, just a few individuals and teams enjoy the technology's efficiency and cost-saving benefits—leaving others behind. This creates AI silos within businesses—pockets of innovation surrounded by areas of minimal technological advancement. This can lead to serious asymmetries within an organization, which fragment company cultures and limit growth. And that means that the business as a whole is not reaping the full benefits, which include:

• Better decision-making
• Process automation
• Cost reduction and improved efficiency
• Personalization and enhanced customer experience.

Benefits of AI Adoption for Business Owners and Marketing

👉 Want to see how AI could work across every department in your business? Our AI Consultants can map out opportunities tailored to your operations.

What To Do Next: Making AI An Essential Tool Throughout Your Organization

When departments operate at different levels of AI adoption, data sharing becomes more difficult, processes remain disconnected, and the full potential of cross-functional AI applications remains unrealized.

The data suggests that different departments face unique barriers to AI adoption:

Customer Service and Frontline Staff (19%): Adoption remains low as these teams work to balance automation with maintaining a human touch, especially in interactions that require high levels of understanding, personal interaction, and empathy. Teams still struggle to integrate AI into fast-paced workflows, but the opportunity is there for all to see: well-implemented AI can enhance service consistency, response time, and customer satisfaction without sacrificing personalization.

Finance/Accounting (9%): Security, compliance, and accuracy standards make AI adoption in this area especially rigorous. These teams demand high-precision tools and ironclad data governance—non-negotiables in financial environments. That said, AI-driven automation in tasks such as forecasting and reconciliation is beginning to prove its value, yielding measurable time and cost savings.

Human Resources (9%): Ethical considerations and measurement challenges have kept AI adoption in HR tentative at best. However, interest is rising as AI tools for recruiting, onboarding, and employee engagement start to show real ROI. For HR leaders, the key is choosing solutions that enhance human judgment, not replace it, while ensuring fairness, transparency, and clear business value.

The solution: partner with an AI expert to break silos and drive adoption across every department. This is where WSI’s consultant-led, collaborative approach comes in. We help organizations break down silos and align departments around a unified AI strategy. WSI’s philosophy is that the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, which applies perfectly to cross-departmental AI integration.

Beyond Silos: The SEO Connection

AI adoption isn’t just an internal efficiency play—it directly affects how businesses are found online. With Google’s AI Overviews and other AI-driven search platforms, success is no longer just about clicks. Businesses must optimize for:

• Impressions and citations. Being referenced in AI-generated results boosts authority and visibility—even without direct clicks.
• Adaptive SEO. Structured data, clean site architecture, and E-E-A-T signals make content more AI-friendly.
• Search everywhere. Visibility on Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatGPT is now as important as ranking on Google.

How Can A WSI AI Consultant Help?

Partial adoption leads to partial results. WSI consultants help businesses unify their AI strategy so every department moves forward together. Our approach includes:

• Cross-functional AI working groups to share knowledge and accelerate the adoption of AI.
• Department-specific value propositions to highlight ROI and practical use cases.
• Phased adoption plans that build on quick wins before scaling complex solutions.
• Unified AI Roadmaps to ensure one cohesive strategy, not isolated experiments.

By aligning leadership, frontline teams, and back-office departments, WSI helps businesses unlock exponential growth—not just incremental gains.

Don’t let AI adoption stall in silos. With WSI’s AI Adoption Roadmap, you can unify your teams, streamline processes, and unlock growth across your entire organization. Book a call with a WSI AI Consultant today—and make AI work everywhere in your business, not just in leadership.