AI saves workers a day a week, but they don’t know what to do with it

A report released Wednesday by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) indicates that many organizations are having difficulty converting efficiency gains that are AI-driven into any sort of measurable value.

The fourth edition of the consultancy’s annual Global AI at Work Survey reveals 42% of frontline employees who use AI on a regular basis save upwards of a full day each week; however, 66% are not given guidance on what to do with time they save, and “more than half don’t redirect it to strategic work.”

The report, AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools, is based on a global survey of 11,749 employees in 14 markets, from industries ranging from financial services to the healthcare sector.

David Martin, global leader of people and organization work at BCG, and the report’s lead author, said via email that the number of employees lacking the required guidance is surprising, “but it also tracks with what we see in many AI transformations. Companies have moved quickly to give people tools, but many have not yet redesigned the work around those tools.”

Saved time, he added, does not automatically become value. If a frontline employee saves a few hours a week, but has no direction on whether to use that time for customer service, quality improvement, innovation, or faster execution, “that value can simply leak out of the organization”

The fix is for leaders to change the scoreboard, Martin said: “Don’t just measure AI adoption or hours saved. Decide where that time should go, measure whether it is being reinvested, and give managers clear guidance on how to help teams use it. This is where AI transformation becomes a management challenge, not just a technology rollout.”

In fact, said Vinciane Beauchene, a managing director and partner at BCG and one of the report’s five co-authors, “the first wave of AI focused on individual productivity. The coming wave will need to transform collective work.”

“Everyone is talking about AI replacing work,” she said, “but it is in fact really about rethinking the human value-add inside.”

A managerial revolution underway

According to Beauchene, “this is the role of leaders. Our survey reveals a true managerial revolution in the age of AI; 65% of managers and leaders now believe agents will take over at least half of their job in the next three years, and frontline workers see their jobs evolving towards more managing and directing AI.”

A BCG release stated that the survey also highlights the continued emergence and maturity of AI agents, with 30% of respondents saying that agents are already integrated into workflows, more than double the number from last year’s report (13%).

Other key findings revealed that AI adoption among frontline workers has surged, with 74% saying they now use it daily or a few times a week, which is up 23 percentage points from a year ago. In addition, six out of 10 people believe that, within the next three years, AI agents could do at least half of their jobs.

And a survey slideshow released by the company pointed out, “the AI ‘honeymoon’ won’t last unless leaders bring strategic clarity driving sustained impact AI’s novelty and cognitive stretch fuel enjoyment early on. But sustained joy comes from strategic clarity. Employees thrive when the direction is real and the message reaches them with strong CEO involvement.”

Strategic clarity is a key differentiator

The report suggests that CEOs take a holistic approach to AI transformations by focusing on business outcomes as opposed to AI usage, investing in “redesigning work end-to-end, not in more tools,” placing people at the heart of that redesign, and governing AI not as a one-off program, but as a moving target.

Overall, BCG says that strategic clarity, “more broadly emerges from the survey as the most crucial differentiator in sustaining AI’s impact over time as organizations are moving past simply implementing AI tools in use case deployment initiatives.”

Increasingly, it adds, “the focus is shifting to redesigning end-to-end workflows and processes to reimagine functions, as well as to building and innovating new business models and products to drive growth, which have nearly doubled year-over-year.”

Global leader of BCG’s tech build and design unit BCG X Sylvain Duranton, also a report co-author, added, “employees don’t push back on AI intensity; they thrive when the strategy is clear, the direction is real, and the message reaches them.”

He added, “Business value and employee enjoyment aren’t trade-offs. The organizations capturing the greatest business value are the same ones where employees enjoy work the most.”

Despite the opportunity, the report notes that only one-third of frontline employees say that leadership’s communications about AI are clear, and only 28% “see a strong connection between what leaders say and what the organization actually does.”

However, Martin said, management can’t deal with this situation on its own. “CIOs have a critical role, but this is not a problem they can solve alone, and I would not frame it as something IT created by itself,” he noted.

Many organizations, he said, “started with the natural first step of getting tools into people’s hands safely and at scale. That was necessary, but it is not sufficient.”

The next phase “has to be much more cross-functional,” he said. “CIOs should help set the technology foundation, governance, data model, and measurement systems, but they also have an important role in creating strategic clarity. Employees need to understand why the organization is using AI, where it is meant to create value, and how it should change the work.”

Martin pointed out that CIOs should also pay close attention to cognitive load, especially on technology teams, as those teams are often the heaviest AI users.

“This means they may be among the most exposed to the mental strain that can come with reviewing outputs, managing AI tools, and keeping up with constant change,” he observed. The biggest gains come when technology strategy, workforce strategy, and employee experience move together. If AI remains only an IT program, companies will “undercapture” the value.

New expectations

The abundance of AI activity is also having another effect, in that 60% of respondents say the bar for work that counts as ‘good enough’ is now higher.

That, said Martin, is because AI is changing expectations. “If a tool can produce a first draft, summarize research, generate options, or automate a routine task, then ‘good enough’ moves up the value chain,” he said. “People are being asked to spend less time producing basic output and more time exercising judgment like checking quality, improving the answer, making decisions, and applying context.”

While that can be a good thing, he said, because it can make work more interesting and more valuable, “it also explains why employees are feeling more mental strain. The work that remains is often more complex. Leaders need to recognize that AI does not just make people faster, it changes what excellence looks like. That means companies need to update training, performance expectations, and management support accordingly.”