AI has given you a day back. Now what?

What would you do if AI gave everyone in your business an extra day a week?

Would you spend more time with clients? More time on research? Or would those hours gradually disappear into more 'busy work' - meetings, emails and admin?

Speaking at the AMC Leadership Forum, Dr Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics pointed to research suggesting AI can already save professional workers as much as a day a week.

That's great for productivity, but, as the discussion at the Forum made clear, saving time is the easy bit - turning it into something useful is much harder.

Where does the time go?

Making one person quicker at a task does not necessarily make the organisation more productive.

Lordan cited data suggesting that while 90% of organisations are now using AI, only 6% are achieving transformational growth from it.

This gap raises an obvious question: if an analyst can now complete in three hours something that previously took five, what happens to the other two?

Her research suggests around 20% of the time saved through AI is being used by employees to improve their work-life balance. For the other 80%, employees appear to be creating more tasks.

Unless firms actively decide where they want that time to go, there is every chance it simply gets swallowed up elsewhere.

"This is our mistake: busy work," Lordan said. "We absolutely should pay attention to busy work."

Start with the job, not the AI

One of the clearest messages from the Forum was that firms need to get much more specific about where AI fits into people's jobs, and that means breaking roles down into the tasks people actually perform.

Which ones are repetitive? Which could be done more quickly with AI? Which could be improved by it? And, importantly in investment management and insurance, which still require an experienced person to make the call?

Businesses may need to look into training that is tailored to certain roles: the work of an analyst is very different from that of a portfolio manager, relationship manager or someone working in operations.

Dr Lordan pointed to the small group of organisations already achieving transformational growth from AI. What sets them apart, she said, is job redesign. "They're looking at their jobs, the tasks that are within the jobs, and providing training that allows people to use artificial intelligence to do those tasks faster and to augment them."

Just as importantly, those firms are thinking about what employees do with the capacity they create.

Faster isn't always better

There is also a danger in assuming that every task that can be made faster should be.

Dr Lordan highlighted research in which people using AI performed better on around two-thirds of the tasks they were given. But for the remaining third - tasks involving high levels of uncertainty - those working without AI performed better, while the AI-assisted group could get the answer "spectacularly wrong".

That distinction is significant in a fiduciary business. AI can help an investment professional pull together information, interrogate data and test an argument. But someone still needs to understand the recommendation, know when to question it and ultimately be accountable for the decision.

A different productivity conversation

This changes the conversation leadership teams need to have about AI: counting licences, prompts or hours saved can tell a firm whether the technology is being used. It tells them much less about whether it is making the business better.

The more useful measures may be harder ones: has the quality of research improved? Are investment decisions better informed? Do people have more time with clients? Are experienced employees spending more time developing others?

If AI can remove a meaningful chunk of work from people's weeks, organisations have choices about what fills the space. Some will undoubtedly look at headcount, but there is another possibility: use that capacity to get more from the expertise already sitting inside the business.

AI may well give firms back a day a week. The more important question is whether they know what they want to do with it.