Artificial Intelligence
Turn Stagnant AI Savings Into Continuous Growth
Top organizations are escaping the AI value gap by reinvesting gains into key areas. Here’s the roadmap.
Sydney Scott
Editorial Strategist, AI
Workday
Even though 84% of companies have increased their AI spending, there’s a problem that keeps popping up. Most of these projects are getting stuck.
This has created an AI value gap, a divide where early wins are being swallowed by stagnant savings. Even if AI saves an employee an hour, the company still pays the same amount in the end. It feels like running faster just to stay in the same place.
The leaders pulling ahead are those who recognize that the first wave of savings must be intentionally reinvested into the business. They’ve moved on from the experimental phase into a stage where the defining factor is how strategically a company reinvests the gains it has already made.
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C-Suite Global AI Indicator Report: AI Is the Ultimate Level-Up
Moving the Pilot Phase to Recover Value
Moving from a small test to a real-world solution is where most AI value gets lost. This is why having a plan to reinvest is so important. It’s easy to run a small test with a tiny team and perfect data. But making that same tool work for the whole company takes a huge jump in money and effort to keep it running right.
Many leaders get stuck in a loop. They keep spending money on new, cheap experiments instead of doing the hard work of growing the ones that already work. This leads to pilot fatigue, where a company just chases the next shiny toy without a real plan to make it last.
“AI is so exciting, the demos are so cool,” Julia Stiglitz, CEO of Uplimit said during a recent episode of the Future of Work podcast. “It can be easy to be enamored by the technology, but unless the technology is solving an actual real problem for the organization, it won’t get adopted across the board.”
Because of this, a big gap is growing between those who just play with AI and those who actually use it. Deloitte found that only 25% of companies have moved their AI tests into their actual daily work.
The winners break through this by treating their first successes like a flywheel. They don't just celebrate the time they save. Instead, they take the wins from those first projects and use them to pay for the tools and people needed to grow even more. Without this plan, those early wins just disappear into the daily grind.
AI is so exciting. It can be easy to be enamored by the technology, but unless the technology is solving an actual real problem for the organization, it won’t get adopted across the board.
—Julia Stiglitz, CEO, Uplimit
An AI Reinvestment Roadmap
To maximize the impact of AI, companies must be intentional about where they put their newly recovered resources. Consider the following four areas when building an AI reinvestment strategy:
Workflow Redesign
The biggest wins don’t come from just making tasks faster. They come from changing how a whole company works. McKinsey found that workflow redesign has the biggest effect on a company’s ability to see a meaningful boost in its bottom line.
Workday research shows the same thing. We found that companies see huge gains when they stop using AI for small things—like summarizing a single document—and start using it to handle entire jobs in Finance and HR. For example, companies that used AI to manage their bills and invoices saw their finance teams work 37% better.
This kind of big change is why top companies grow their sales and profits much faster than everyone else.
Prioritizing Data Success
Almost half of leaders think their AI plan is ready, but most say their systems are not. As the initial excitement fades, the focus is shifting to the basics. Smart companies are taking the money they save and putting it into a strong digital core built on their own unique data.
Workday spoke to nearly 700 customers and found that the most successful have high-quality data and clear rules for how to use it. By spending money now to build a safe and organized data system, a company can move away from basic tools that everyone else uses. This turns their data into a moat that makes it much harder for competitors to catch up.
Continuous Upskilling
One of the biggest barriers to scaling AI is that people don't have the right skills yet. Teaching employees is the main way companies are fixing their teams.
Rather than just retraining for specific roles, leaders are reinvesting in AI upskilling across the entire organization. This allows teams to combat the hidden AI tax, which Workday reveals cuts nearly 40% of productivity gains when employees spend hours correcting and rewriting low-quality AI output.
By making sure everyone understands how AI works, teams can keep up as the technology changes. They stop just checking off small tasks and start doing work that truly helps the company grow.
Real-Time Governance
The rules for AI are still being written, but the most successful companies aren't waiting for a guidebook. They know that managing AI and digital agents properly is what keeps them ahead of the pack.
New research shows that having a plan for AI is a major boost for business. In fact, companies that use AI governance tools get 12 times more projects out of the testing phase and into the real world. Despite this, only about one in five companies currently has a mature model for overseeing autonomous AI agents.
Smart companies are reinvesting their early savings into a central hub to track every action their AI agents take. By having a clear, permanent record of how decisions are made, they can catch mistakes or unfairness before they cause big problems. This approach turns safety from a chore into a major competitive advantage.
Companies that used AI to manage their bills and invoices saw their finance teams work 37% better.
Making the Gains Permanent
Getting value from AI isn't just about having the best technology anymore. It is about where money and time are spent.
When wins go unmanaged, they usually just disappear into old, slow ways of working. But when those wins are put back into the business, they pay for the big changes needed to stay ahead. This shift turns AI from a tool that just saves money into a growth engine.
The real winners are those who see first successes as the start of the trip, not the finish line. Success comes from finding where time is being saved and moving those gains toward the most important goals. The point is to build a company that doesn't just work faster, but works fundamentally better.
Report
C-Suite Global AI Indicator Report: AI Is the Ultimate Level-Up
AI has been a gamechanger across nearly every industry and marketplace. But realizing the true value of AI requires buy-in between different stakeholders. In this AI Masterclass, learn how you can make the most of AI for finance, HR, and more.