Ruland Manufacturing has been making premium shaft collars, rigid couplings, and motion control couplings out of Massachusetts since 1937 - a business built on precision, where nothing gets shipped until it is exactly right. That same instinct for precision is what led Chris Gumas, Ruland's Director of Customer Experience, to become the company's first user of the Rhythm AI Connector.

Chris oversees sales, marketing, production, and customer service at Ruland, which meant he had spent years living inside Rhythm. Now that he spends most of his time inside Claude and Copilot, the AI Connector was the first thing that let those two worlds actually talk to each other.

The Opportunity:

Meet the Team Where They Already Work

Chris did not come to the AI Connector looking for a new tool to learn. He was looking for time.

What made the bet an easy one was realizing he was not starting from scratch. Chris was already doing the thinking behind his Rhythm priorities inside Claude every day, and the AI Connector just meant that thinking no longer had to be translated and re-typed somewhere else.

"I was already doing a lot of my rhythm-oriented work in Claude or Copilot. So I was able to connect the work I was doing with the updates, which helped me stay on track," said Chris.

And because the Connector works the same way in both tools, Chris and his team never had to pick a side. Claude for one task, Copilot for another - whatever fit the moment.

Once it was set up, the AI Connector worked the same way across both tools Ruland uses - Claude and Microsoft Copilot - so Chris and his team could keep using whichever one fit the task at hand.

From a Wall of Text to a Status Update Leadership Actually Reads

The first place that time savings showed up was in something every leader dreads: the weekly status update. While working through a Q4 inventory project inside a live Claude conversation, Chris asked Claude to pull up the related Rhythm priority, review what had been done so far, and draft an update.

The first pass came back "like a book" - thorough, but nowhere near what a room full of managers wants to read. So Chris asked for the 30,000-foot view instead, and Claude delivered exactly that.

"I asked it to feed that into my Week in Sync too, in a much more concise fashion. I was able to take the priority update and the Week in Sync and drive them through one Claude chat."

What came out the other side did not just save Chris time; it changed how his updates looked to everyone else.

"It formatted my Week in Sync really differently than a traditional one with quick status updates, color-coded. It was really different."

Pictured Above: Ruland's Rhythm KPI view from Claude using the AI Connector

Rhythm in His Pocket (Not His Backpack)

Once Chris saw how much friction the Connector removed from his desk, he started testing how far he could take it away from his desk entirely. The answer? All the way.

Rather than opening a laptop, Chris now speaks directly into Claude on his phone to update Rhythm: from the car, from an airport gate, from wherever the day happens to put him.

For Chris, it is simply the fastest way in. The payoff is a Rhythm that updates in the moment something changes, instead of whenever Chris is next at a desk.

The Real Payoff: Planning That Starts Before the Meeting Does

Smarter planning is where the Connector earned its keep. Heading into annual planning, Chris did not start with a blank page. He asked Claude to help draft next year's priorities by pulling together Ruland's BHAG and Winning Moves with six months of chat history on what he had actually been working on.

Chris says, "It contextually knows what I am trying to do. It pulled everything into a summary of what we might want to do in each department that reflects a Winning Move and moves us toward our BHAG. It was very effective."

The same habit of dictating into Claude on the go paid off here, too. Chris filled out an entire ideas board by talking through it on his drive home, turning what used to be a desk-bound task into something he could knock out before he even walked in the door.

Planning got sharper in a quieter way: Claude became a second set of eyes on the goals themselves, catching a problem Ruland has run into for years.

"We've done this for four years now, and we always have an issue where we look at the green criteria three weeks later and half the room doesn't know what it is. So I asked, ‘Is this scoped correctly, are the criteria measurable?’ Next time I think we can do that live in the planning session instead."

Eager for What's Next

Chris is already looking to what the AI Connector could take off his team's plate next.

"I really think that a lot of the planning, if we are working with the AI at the same time, can be done without us having to do manual entry. I still think the work of planning needs to be done in the room with the individuals and our facilitator, but I think the data and the Rhythm work can basically be outsourced to the AI Connector. It will allow us to focus on the more value-added work."

As for other companies considering the AI Connector, Chris's advice is refreshingly simple: get excited, but get your data and security guardrails in place first.

"It's really important that companies are at least mindful of what their policies and procedures are around data handling when they dive into the AI Connector."

With that foundation set, Chris and his team plan to keep pushing the AI Connector further into their day-to-day, and keep finding new ways to let it do the heavy lifting. The planning and the thinking still happen with the team, in the room. The AI Connector just clears the manual work out of the way, leaving Ruland's team free to spend their time on what no AI can do for them: thinking, planning, and leading together.