Adoption Is the Only AI Metric That Matters Now — A Conversation With POLYWOOD’s Chief Digital Officer

Most digital transformation budgets fund tools nobody ends up using. Benjamin Spiegel built his current strategy around that exact failure point, spending less energy on new technology and more on getting his own organization to open and use it.

Spiegel is Chief Digital Officer at POLYWOOD, one of the leading outdoor furniture brands, and he came to the role from advising other companies on this same problem. He used to counsel private equity portfolio companies on digital transformation from the outside. Now he runs it from the inside. At eTail Boston, he told a room of retail executives that his title change from CIO to Chief Digital Officer was really about getting his organization to adopt what already existed.

“The traditional CIO role has always been about building capabilities, building technology, building information systems,” Spiegel said. “What I’m focusing on now is the adoption of it.”

Adoption spreads sideways, not from the top

Spiegel doesn’t run change management as a mandate. He finds the people already curious about AI in their own lives and lets them pull others in. POLYWOOD is an outdoor furniture manufacturing brand, so its functions range from marketing to the factory floor, which means champions can emerge from almost anywhere.

“I used to always call it, ‘How do we make it viral?'” he said. “Not in the social way, but in the way of, ‘Have you seen what Tom is doing over on extrusion? Let’s try to do the same thing over here.'”

Budgets get approved before anyone plans the rollout, and that’s usually where adoption stalls. Spiegel’s approach works because champions who already use the tools recruit everyone else, rather than leadership pushing a mandate from the top.

The metrics that look good can be lying to you

POLYWOOD’s eTail Boston session carried the title “Proof, Not Promises.” It leaned on real performance numbers: repeat purchases up from 1.5 to 1.8, engagement up 20%. Even so, Spiegel admitted some of those numbers were misleading on their own.

“I think today, in the world of personalization, engagement and number of pages viewed doesn’t always mean a good thing,” he said. Too many options and too many chat windows can slow a customer down instead of moving them forward. “If you can give them the quickest way to checkout, that’s what drives the highest conversion.”

Repeat purchase behavior required more patience, since POLYWOOD isn’t a weekly-purchase category. Spiegel’s team built a longer sequencing strategy instead: an entry product first, what he calls “the appetizer to the brand,” followed by a second recommendation shaped by data about the customer’s home and outdoor space.

In-House Creative Meant Selling the Brand to Talent First

 

Spiegel doubled POLYWOOD’s in-house creative team after a career in agency leadership, and the harder cost showed up in recruiting. “Attracting top talent to a brand that isn’t always sexy from the outside,” he said. “We’re not a concert venue, we’re a furniture brand.” Finding people willing to work in that category took real effort, and the overhead of more in-house talent showed up right away.

The payoff came from something specific to POLYWOOD’s brand: customers need help imagining what to do with unfamiliar space. A small patio can become a reading nook or a dining spot, and that kind of storytelling is easier to control in-house. “For a brand like us, which isn’t an easy-to-understand brand, it’s a bit of a weird category,” Spiegel said. “In-house creative, any day.”

The advice he’d no longer give

Spiegel’s past life advising private equity portfolio companies left him with a stock answer he no longer believes. “A year ago I would have said buy versus build,” he said. Buying used to be the safer, faster call, but coding agents and code creation tools have shifted that math. Now Spiegel leans toward building for POLYWOOD, a business built on vertical manufacturing integration. “I have a team that builds new applications faster than we could onboard one of the enterprise solutions.”

What ties P&G, agency leadership, and furniture together

Spiegel’s career runs through P&G, agency leadership, private equity advisory, and now an outdoor furniture brand. On paper, these categories look unrelated. The thread that connects them, though, is proximity: staying close to the product itself.

“I have an outdoor office that I spend most of my time in,” he said. “We have every dinner outdoors on our POLYWOOD furniture.” He assembled the furniture himself. At P&G, he said, the company trained that same instinct into him early: use the laundry products, use everything the company makes, and you’ll understand what the customer experiences.

“The thing that matters most is truly deep consumer understanding, living the brand,” he said. “Do what your consumer does, live their lives, and you’ll understand how to create value.”

What this means for senior marketers

Spiegel’s answers keep circling the same idea from different angles: the deciding factor is whether the organization puts a tool to work, and whether the person setting strategy really lives inside the product. AI investment, creative structure, and buy-versus-build decisions all get evaluated by that same test.