Productivity is the consolation prize

Every business I have worked with on AI this year has come in thinking about growth. New revenue, new capabilities, things they could not do before. I have started to realise this is unusual.

Right now the AI story in the news is redundancies. 150,000 tech jobs gone this year, with AI cited as a reason in nearly half of those cuts. Your board is asking about headcount. Your CFO is asking about cost per output. The entire ambient signal is that AI is a shrinking exercise.

PwC published two studies on this recently. Buried in the productivity data is a more important finding: 74% of all AI economic value is being captured by just 20% of companies. And those companies are not the ones with the most aggressive efficiency programmes. They are the ones pointing AI at growth.

It is not about the tools. It is the question they started with. The leaders asked: what can we do now that we could not do before? Most of us are asking: how do we do what we already do more cheaply? IKEA’s Billie chatbot saved them €13 million in call centre costs. Instead of cutting the 8,500 people it freed up, they repurposed them as remote interior design consultants. The same exercise generated €1.3 billion in revenue - because they asked what those people could now do that they couldn’t before. Both approaches work in the short term. One of them is building a lead the other will struggle to close.

The redundancy headlines are not wrong. Plenty of businesses are using AI to cut costs and it is working. What the data shows is that this is the floor, not the ceiling. The companies treating it as the ceiling are the ones falling behind.

PwC 2026 AI Jobs Barometer — the finding worth your time is the entry-level data: junior roles requiring AI skills grew 35% since 2019, while other entry-level roles shrank 10%. What that means for how you build a team in the next two years is almost entirely underreported.

Take your AI roadmap - or if you do not have one, the last three AI tools or projects your business has invested in. For each one, answer one question: does this open something we could not do before, or does it make something we already do cheaper or faster? The ratio is worth knowing. Most people find it more lopsided than they expected.