Crowe's Schrock explains how to adopt AI at your firm

Maybe a mindset shift is needed away from looking at AI as just a way to boost efficiency at certain tasks. Instead, it’s a transformative technology that could analyze and change your company’s whole business strategy. Sound fanciful? Well, according to Doug Schrock, managing principal of AI at public accounting and consulting firm Crowe, that possibility exists right here in 2025. The question is, how do you do it?

I had a chance to see Schrock’s presentation at the SMA/MSCI Annual Meeting earlier this month in Frisco, Texas. He gave clear evidence of what AI can do and actionable steps about how companies all along the steel supply chain can think about adopting and incorporating it into their business. I thought it would be great to share some of his insights with our readers, so I sat down with him this week to discuss.

An industrial engineer, Schrock has been working with traditional ERP systems and technology inside manufacturing companies and distributors for his entire career, spanning more than 30 years. He’s been in his position at Crowe for a little over a year, and he said a primary focus is: “How do you actually implement AI to make a meaningful difference?”

More than just the old ChatGPt

If we look at the last couple of years, Schrock calls Generative AI, like the original ChatGPT, a sort of “DIY” phase. With this, you could “generate content, interpret a document, summarize something. So that was last year.

“What we’re seeing now in 2025 is what I would call the more professional Agentic AI,” he added.

What’s Agentic AI?

“Agentic AI can take multiple steps, chain them together. It uses what’s actual reasoning, and it will think through what it tells us.
It will make decisions on its own, prioritize on its own.
It’s doing much more complicated tasks.”

So last year was about “a lot of little personal productivity tasks, save an hour here and save four hours there,”

This year, “we’re starting to solve real business problems and making big changes in the amount of labor that goes into some of these knowledge worker tasks.”

“So, it’s a really interesting shift,” Schrock said. “I think this year in 2025, you’ll see a little bit more hitting the mainstream, and if you go through 2025 and you haven’t really explored AI, you’re probably going to be a little bit behind.”

Security

A big worry with AI is how secure any proprietary data is.

“Number one, choose your tools wisely,” Schrock explained. “So for example, Crowe is a partner with OpenAI. It’s a blue chip organization.”

He said there are low-cost alternatives, but “it’s not completely clear where, how your data is being handled.”

Schrock advises clients to do their due diligence before picking certain tools.

“The second thing is, is using the right version of the tools,” Schrock continued.

This could mean choosing between the consumer version of something like ChatGPT, which might use data to train the model continuously. That compares with the Pro version, which has a “more secure structure and it does not train the data, so it has the same security as your Microsoft documents do.”

Three quick steps

Once you choose the AI tool for your company, Schrock outlined three quick, actionable steps to integrate it into your workflow.

“So number one, just get some education,” Schrock said. That could mean talking to the company you bought your product from or doing online research.

At Crowe, he said they do a “90-minute lunch and learn” where you bring in 15 people from across the business and say, “Here’s 15 or 20 ways people are using AI.”

And then other people in the company may say, “Oh, we have that problem,” or “We could also use it like that.”

The second thing would be to find a problem in your company and set up a “use case.”

Schrock said you “do a short four- to six-week proof of concept. Build it and show it working in your environment, with your data, your documents, your team.”

“And then you create believers. So you’ve got to get some quick wins with meaningful use cases,” he continued.

The final step would be to “lay out a structured plan” that could be ever-evolving. Making that plan could involve using AI itself towards that end.

That’s an important thing to remember; it’s not necessarily your IT team that has to handle this.

“It’s language,” Schrock said, meaning you’re just speaking to AI as if it was another employee. “I’m communicating to a digital co-worker that can now do the knowledge tasks. I didn’t have to write a program.”

Elevator pitch

For those still on the fence, I asked Schrock what his elevator pitch would be for your company to adopt AI now.

“You owe it to yourself and your company to understand what it does. So get educated on what is possible,” he said.

“Then you should think about can this capability help my business?” he continued.

“I’m not selling a product, not selling a certain widget,” Schrock emphasized. “I’m selling this as an emerging capability that you should make sure you’re leveraging so you can outperform the competition and serve your customers better.”

Concluding, he said, “This is not crypto. It’s not blockchain. It’s not NFTs. This is oxygen. This is good. This is going to be a part of your everyday life and part of everything.”