There’s so many headlines about AI productivity gains and associated layoffs (if you’re USA oriented) or headcount reduction (for a more European bit of jargon monoxide), you’d be forgiven for fetching your pillow at this point.
Almost every AI conversation in your boardroom collapses into “how much will this save us.” That’s tier one. There are two more. One of them is where your competitor may already be winning
So what are the three tiers of value that could be unlocked by AI? Let me talk you through them.
1, Productivity aka Do the same faster/ with less effort.
This is where most teams start. And it’s a good place to start. You might automate routine tasks: for example, I have a morning brief drop into my email with outstanding actions, my agenda for the day and priorities. You might have an agent to research potential sales prospects or prepare for sales calls. And the most prolific use case – AI assisted coding whether that’s with Claude Code or Codex or another tool.
Now, just like previous waves of technology, automation is not a piece of magic that’s going to reduce your workforce in itself. Indeed, it might also mean that consumers find it easier to make complaints or ask more of your business. But there’s a line of sight between activity and cost and payback is short.
But of course, this sort of optimisation is open to you and your competitors. Long term it’s a parity trap.
2. Decision Making aka Do the same better
This is the trick that I think many are missing. All the things that your business currently does via a rule of thumb, because the decision time-frame is too short to do a proper analysis… the technology is now here to support better decision making. You’ve always been able to do this analysis but it was too expensive or too slow and so didn’t add value.
So, that might mean analysing hundreds of written safety walkabout submissions for patterns and trends on a daily basis, when you might previously have only categorised monthly manually. It might help you respond to a supply chain disruption with additional options to reoptimise. It might enable better rework of a construction schedule to accommodate an unforseen issue.
Not only is the potential value unlock here bigger – more revenue, cost avoidance, more proactive safety management. But this is less of a parity trap as you’re leveraging your organisations tacit knowledge, experience and commercial strategy. This can drive advantage against your competition.
3. Rebirth aka Do entirely new things
I do think this is on the leadership agenda filed under some vague notion of everything being disrupted by AI. Or perhaps “the robots are coming. We’re doomed.” Excuse the mixed sci fi metaphors. But that’s difficult to turn into tangible action.
It’s true. It is the existential marketplace disruption risk. An AI-native company without your legacy baggage might come and eat your lunch. Here the question of “who might we be if we were born today?” comes to the fore.
For example, if you’re a research company build around commissioning reports in the format of long written documents, as that was the most effective way of disseminating information, you need to think beyond an AI chatbot to interrogate your report. Instead, you might explore how the role of new and contrarian insights can be valuable in a world of AI slop. How might there be assurance around trusted information? How might there be new ways of generating research to be more responsive to individual client queries?
These are the debates that your board might want to take forward, while your leadership team is delivering results.
Suggested workshop exercise – take the slide below and map your existing AI initiatives against the three to understand your current portfolio. There’s no right or wrong. The inconvenient truth is “it depends” on maturity level and business strategy. But it helps you take a strategic view to how you allocate resources, as there will always be more ideas than capacity. And it’s a good way to help you link your AI projects back to things the business really cares about. And a useful tool in our AI for competitive advantage toolkit to take you from noise to signal.
P.S. It doesn’t just work for AI projects – lots of tech can be viewed through this lens.
This essay first went to subscribers of The Hard Part, my weekly newsletter. The Hard Part about adopting new digital tools and AI is almost never the technology, it’s changing the way people work. Never more than a 5 minute read: helen-dawson.kit.com/the-hard-part