AI is everywhere. E v e r y w h e r e.
It’s the topic of nearly every technology article, it’s on the agenda of every board meeting, and it dominates every software vendor’s roadmap. Most leadership teams, regardless of company size or industry, are all asking the same question: How can AI help us work faster?
It's a reasonable place to start. The opportunity is exciting and there are already countless examples of AI helping teams generate content, summarize information, automate routine tasks, and improve productivity.
But in our experience, organizations often jump to the technology before taking the time to consider a more important question. Rather than asking where AI fits into today's work, we challenge our clients to ask themselves: What work actually deserves the attention of our people?
This slight shift in framing can lead to much more valuable AI outcomes.
This article expands on my recent conversation with Tina Nelson, Senior Product Strategy Director at Optimizely. If you'd rather watch than read, you can view our full discussion here: ▶ Watch the conversation
Organizations employ talented people because they bring judgement, creativity, experience, and critical thinking to the business. Yet many of those same people spend a surprising amount of their day doing work that requires very little use of those human strengths.
They're searching for information across multiple systems and updating spreadsheets,. They're summarizing meetings, coordinating approvals, or chasing down the latest version of a document. None of these activities are particularly difficult, but they consume valuable time and attention that could be spent solving problems, serving customers, or moving strategic initiatives forward.
This is where AI has the opportunity to create its greatest impact.
The goal isn't simply to help employees complete the same work faster. It's to reduce the amount of routine work competing for their attention so they can spend more of their day applying the expertise they were hired to bring to the organization.
When organizations discuss the ROI of AI, the conversation often revolves around efficiency. How many hours were saved? How many tasks were automated? How many support tickets were resolved?
Those metrics certainly matter, but they're only part of the story. A more valuable metric to understand is what those reclaimed hours make possible.
When teams spend less time on repetitive administrative work, they gain more capacity to think strategically, collaborate across departments, experiment with new ideas, strengthen customer relationships, and solve more meaningful business problems. Those are the activities that create competitive advantage and they're often the first to disappear when employees are overwhelmed with routine work.
The value of AI is in what your team is able to accomplish with the time it gives back, not just in the calculation of time saved.
It's easy to think of AI as another software capability to evaluate alongside the rest of your technology stack. In reality, it presents something much larger: an opportunity to rethink how work is distributed across your organization.
The organizations extracting the most value from AI are thinking beyond task automation and asking which activities genuinely benefit from human judgment and which can be handled, accelerated, or supported by AI. That distinction leads to better technology decisions because it starts with the people and the work, not the tools.
Technology can help organizations move faster, but only when it's aligned with a thoughtful operating model. AI is no different.
As your organization explores AI, resist the temptation to begin by looking at available technology. Instead, gather your leadership team and ask a simpler question: What are our best people doing today that they really shouldn't have to be doing?
The answers provide a far better foundation for an AI strategy than any product demo ever could.
The greatest promise of AI isn't that it helps organizations do more work. It's that it allows talented people to spend more time doing the work that matters most.
If you're exploring opportunities to leverage AI in your organization and want to get the most out of your efforts, we'd be glad to discuss your goals and share additional insights. Reach out here.