Every hour AI frees up gets spent somewhere. Leave it to default, and it will go wherever your culture already points.

The hours are already going somewhere

Only 24% of the time AI frees up is reaching innovative work. That figure, cited at the Gartner HR Symposium in London this October, was (in my opinion) one of the most significant pieces of information shared.*

The rest of that freed-up time is being absorbed back into the day or banked as savings, and neither is paying off. Some 97% of organisations said cutting costs with AI had proved difficult, according to figures shared at the conference, and even the strongest performers saw savings of around just 2.7%.

The organisations pulling ahead are doing something different. They redesign the work and redirect the gains into growth, which makes them nearly four times as likely to beat their revenue goals (CV Viverito and Arj Bagga, Gartner).

Time goes where you reward it

Freed-up time doesn't drift towards innovation on its own. It flows to whatever the organisation already rewards.

If people are judged on output, the hours fill with more output. If caution is what gets promoted, the hours go on checking and rechecking. Plenty of leadership teams encourage experimentation in the strategy while still rewarding the safe choice in practice. AI makes that contradiction expensive, and it's why time savings can look impressive while returns stay thin.

I saw a say-do gap at every level of this. Leaders say capacity is an asset, then manage it as a cost. They say human judgement is their edge, while their job ads ask for less of it: Gartner's analysis of 41.7 million US job postings shows demand for creativity falling. People notice those gaps, and they draw their own conclusions about whether AI is an investment in them or a way to get more for less.

The value gets lost in the doing

As we’re all (painfully?) aware by now, AI is speeding up decisions. But the way those decisions turn into action hasn't sped up in parallel. Interact's session at the Symposium (Tom Walters, VP Product, Interact Software) put it plainly in their session: the bottleneck has shifted from deciding to doing. Their test is simple: time how long it takes to get from “we're making a change” to people working differently.

Managers sit right in that bottleneck. Only 39% of employees said their manager gives clear developmental feedback, and 41% said their manager helps them prioritise. Ask those managers to redeploy freed-up time without support, and the familiar becomes the easy default.

This is where our adaptive change proposition work sits. Strategy and technology teams can define where AI should create value. The harder work happens between that intent and adoption, in the behaviours leaders model and what managers make visible day to day.

Decide where the time goes before it’s freed up

Gartner's keynote advice to CHROs was to treat capacity gained as an asset to deploy. That starts with deciding where the hours should go before they appear, and with executives visibly spending their own freed-up time that way first.

It means looking inside before looking outside. Only 38% of CHROs (Gartner research) said employees have the skills they'll need, and Siemens' CHRO pointed out that hiring for in-demand roles takes over 100 days. The fastest organisations redirect the expertise they already have to plug that hole.

It also means changing what you count. Docusign's CPO argued for ignoring logins and licence counts. The better measure is whether people’s work has actually changed: less time on routine tasks, more on the work that moves the business forward. Few organisations can say that today. Until they can, the default wins.

Value creation starts with alignment. Agree as a leadership team on the few places where AI can create value for your organisation, then be ruthless about freeing up people’s time and directing it there. The hours AI frees up are the first evidence people get of whether the strategy means what it says. Spend them on purpose, and make sure people can see it.

Our full briefing from the symposium covers the four places intent and action come apart, and what the strongest organisations are doing about each. Get your copy of the briefing by emailing Nicole at Nicole.faubel@twodegreesbelow.com.

*Unless referenced otherwise, figures are from Gartner research presented at the Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo, London, 6 October 2026. They’re reported from session notes, not published research. Job posting data is US-only.