Rapid AI Capability Development Is Creating Opportunities for Those Companies With Leadership That Translate Productivity Gains Into Business Value

Only 27% of surveyed managers whose teams use AI for former junior learning tasks said employers had fully redesigned that skill development.

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NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- As AI capabilities accelerate, companies that move quickly to capture productivity gains, prepare their workforces and rethink how they compete for customers stand to gain a significant competitive advantage, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. This is according to The Reality Check: Beyond the AI Hype, Hope, and Hysteria, released today by the Oliver Wyman Forum. The Forum is the think tank of Oliver Wyman, a global management consulting firm and a Marsh business (NYSE: MRSH).

Drawing on deep consumer research, an extensive CEO survey, and the expertise of Quotient, AI by Oliver Wyman, the report identifies the pivotal decisions business leaders must make to unlock the full value of AI. The technology is increasing workforce productivity and efficiency across companies, but in most organizations this benefit is dispersed and uncaptured, leaving a gap between AI-driven gains and measurable business results, and presents an opportunity for leaders who drive organizational change and accountability among managers.

The Reality Check found most of the time saved by AI is unaccounted for, making measurable ROI on investment difficult to quantify. Only 8% of workplace AI users say their organization has a company-wide standard for what happens to the time AI saves. Over half surveyed (54%) say either individual employees decide what happens to AI-saved time or no explicit decision is made. This presents a significant opportunity for organizations to identify where AI is freeing up time, rethink how work gets done, and reshape their workforces around emerging needs. The report recommends organizations assign senior leaders to each major AI investment initiative who are accountable for understanding where efficiencies are generated, what the program costs, and what operational changes are needed to translate time savings into measurable financial returns.

“AI is everywhere in most companies except the P&L,” said John Romeo, Managing Partner and CEO of the Oliver Wyman Forum. “AI creates capacity, but this time isn’t a return until someone decides what to do with it. That is a leadership decision, not a technology one, and most companies haven't made it explicitly yet.”

The AI payoff relies on decisions beyond the technology

The gap between AI adoption and organizational direction extends well beyond decisions about saved time. Only 37% of white-collar executives, and 11% of non-managers, say leadership has set a clear AI ambition and keeps them informed of progress.

The companies generating the strongest returns appear to be taking a different approach. CEOs reporting AI-driven returns above 10% are 4.4 times as likely as laggards to have deployed AI at scale in new products, services and revenue streams – 40% compared with 9%. The findings suggest the emerging divide is not simply between companies that use AI and those that do not, but between those treating it primarily as a productivity tool and those redesigning their businesses around the new capabilities and time saving it creates.

That redesign extends to how organizations develop and manage talent. Eighty percent of daily AI users say AI taught them as much as or more than their manager over the previous 12 months, including 47% who said they found AI more instructive. Seventy-four percent of white-collar respondents at middle management level or above said AI was already doing at least some of the tasks junior employees previously learned from them. Of those respondents, only 27% said their employer had fully redesigned how AI helps junior employees develop the same skills.

“Leaders are investing in AI at real scale, but the capacity it creates still has to be claimed by someone,” said Ana Kreacic, Partner, Chief Knowledge Officer and Chief Operating Officer of the Oliver Wyman Forum. “AI often shifts bottlenecks before eliminating them. And while leaders figure out how to turn time savings into productivity gains, employees are asking a more personal question: What does this mean for my job? If leaders don't clearly explain how that freed-up time will be claimed, employees may assume the goal is to eliminate their roles.”

Worryingly, the report identified a looming morale problem. When employees are asked what should happen if AI doubled their team’s output, employees ranked “fewer people on the team” last, but when asked what they expect will happen, they ranked "fewer people” first. Sixty-eight percent said they would give up part of their salary to work somewhere that guaranteed never to replace people with AI, and 47% would give up 10% or more. Sixty-two percent of daily AI users are masking gains, saying they have played down how good they are with AI at work.

Governance presents a similar paradox. When approved AI is easy to reach, clearly governed and built into everyday software, 88% of workplace users report productivity gains, compared with 52% where those conditions are largely absent. But tighter rules alone do not appear to be the answer: where AI rules feel too strict, 63% of employees use non-approved AI tools, compared with 38% where the approach feels right. Effective guardrails, the research suggests, can accelerate adoption rather than constrain it.

Across the report’s five dimensions – return on investment, workforce and leadership, agentic commerce, governance and risk, and sovereignty – the same pattern emerges: technology deployment is running ahead of leadership decisions about the productivity gains it unlocks. Success in the next phase of AI adoption will depend on leaders making explicit choices about how AI-created capacity becomes growth, how roles and skills evolve around it, how employees are brought along, and how organizations manage the new dependencies AI creates.

About Marsh
Marsh (NYSE: MRSH) is a global leader in risk, reinsurance and capital, people and investments, and management consulting, advising clients in 130 countries. With annual revenue of $27 billion and more than 95,000 colleagues, Marsh helps build the confidence to thrive through the power of perspective. For more information, visit marsh.com, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

About the research
The report draws on more than 25,000 responses from two waves of the Oliver Wyman Forum Global Voices Survey, conducted in April and August 2026 across 15 markets, and the Oliver Wyman Forum x NYSE CEO Agenda 2026 survey of 415 CEOs. It also draws on the expertise of Quotient, AI by Oliver Wyman, including insights from client engagements on agentic AI, value realization, operating-model change and governance.

The full report is available here.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261014382652/en/

Media contact:
Danielle Arceneaux
+1 929 215 8732
Danielle.Arceneaux@oliverwyman.com

Source: Oliver Wyman