The question most businesses haven’t asked yet

AI is doing what it promised.

Faster research. Cleaner analysis. First-draft everything. The tools work, and the productivity data is starting to confirm what early adopters already knew: this isn’t incremental improvement. McKinsey’s 2024 research found that businesses using AI effectively are seeing productivity gains of 20–40% in knowledge work. Not efficiency gains. Productivity gains. Same people, significantly more output.

But here’s the question most businesses are skipping straight past: what are your people actually doing with the capacity that’s being released?

Because if you haven’t thought about that deliberately, the answer is probably: more of the same.

The transactional layer isn’t where your value is created

Most knowledge roles carry a significant load of work that is, if we’re honest, transactional and repeatable. Coordinating. Summarising. Formatting. Chasing. Preparing. Updating.

This isn’t wasted effort, it keeps things moving. But it’s not where the value is created. Value is created in the thinking, the relationships, the judgment calls, the creative problem-solving, the decisions that require context and experience and genuine understanding of the business.

The uncomfortable truth is that for many businesses, the people best placed to do the high-value work are spending a disproportionate amount of their time on the transactional layer. Not because they’re inefficient. Because the transactional layer has always been part of the job.

AI is changing that. The question is whether businesses are changing with it.

A 2023 study from MIT found that AI tools reduced the time workers spent on routine cognitive tasks by up to 37%. That’s significant capacity. But capacity without direction doesn’t become productivity , it can get quietly refilled with more transactional work, or people spend it on things that feel busy but don’t move the business forward.

What are you planning to do with that 37%?

Most businesses don’t have a clear answer because they haven’t done the planning

This is where workforce planning becomes urgent rather than academic.

Workforce planning is the process of understanding what your business needs in terms of skills, capabilities and behaviours, not just now, but 12, 24, 36 months from now and making deliberate decisions about how you get there. Who you develop. Who you hire. What the shape of roles looks like as the work evolves.

Most scaling businesses haven’t done it properly. Many haven’t done it at all.

The CIPD’s Good Work Index found that only 30% of SME employers have a clear workforce plan that connects to their business strategy. The rest are making hiring decisions reactively, filling vacancies as they appear, rather than shaping the workforce toward where the business is going.

That was a manageable gap when the pace of change was slower. It’s a significant risk now.

If you don’t have a clear view of what skills and capabilities your business needs to deliver its next phase of growth, you can’t answer the AI question properly. You don’t know which roles are likely to change shape, which new capabilities you’ll need, or where the highest-value human work actually lives in your business.

You end up deploying AI tools on top of an unreconstructed workforce model and getting mixed results.

What happens when you get this right

The businesses getting the most from AI aren’t just the ones with the best tools. They’re the ones who are being deliberate about what the human role is.

They’ve thought about which work requires human judgment, creativity, relationships, and context and they’ve designed roles and teams around that work. They’ve freed their people from the transactional layer not as a cost exercise, but as a capability exercise. Because when people are doing the work they’re actually good at, the work that requires them to think, create, build relationships, solve problems, they are more productive, more engaged, and more valuable to the business.

This isn’t a theory. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report consistently shows that employees who feel their strengths are being used are significantly more productive and significantly less likely to leave. The businesses that design for this, that are intentional about where human capability is focused build teams that compound in value rather than plateau.

The reverse is also true. Businesses that use AI to do more of the same, without redesigning what the human layer is for, tend to find that the productivity gains are short-lived. The capacity gets absorbed. The people feel underutilised. The competitive advantage disappears because everyone has access to the same tools.

The advantage isn’t the technology. It’s what you build on top of it.

The questions worth sitting with

If you’re a founder or leader of a scaling business, here are the questions I’d encourage you to take seriously:

On your workforce:

Do you have a clear view of what skills, capabilities and behaviours your business needs to deliver its strategy over the next two years?
Are the right people focused on the high-value work, or are they carrying too much transactional load?
How would your roles need to change if 30% of the routine cognitive work disappeared?

On your use of AI:

Are you using AI to do more of the same, or to do different things?
Where in your business is AI releasing capacity and is that capacity being redirected deliberately?
Which roles in your business are likely to change shape significantly in the next 24 months, and are you planning for that?

On your human layer:

What is the work in your business that genuinely requires human judgment, creativity, and relationship?
Are the people best placed to do that work actually doing it?
What would need to change for them to spend 80% of their time there?

These aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re the questions that determine whether your business is building competitive advantage or drifting toward irrelevance, not because of AI, but because of what you decide to do with it.

Where to start

The place most businesses need to begin is with honest workforce planning. A clear-eyed look at where the business is going, what it needs from its people to get there, and whether the current workforce model is designed to deliver that.

That conversation usually surfaces some uncomfortable truths. It also usually surfaces significant opportunity roles that could be redesigned, capabilities that are being underused, people who are capable of more but are being kept busy with the wrong things.

If this is a conversation you haven’t had yet, it’s probably overdue.

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