AI won’t drive the productivity leap – people will
Artificial Intelligence is often associated with technological disruption, even though the real transformative shift happens elsewhere. Technology enables change, but it is people who make it impactful, Katri Kolesnik argues.
How do organisations that use AI as a competitive advantage differ from other companies? The decisive difference lies in how they lead change, develop competencies, and build a work community that encourages learning. This becomes clear in our recent market study on the use of AI, which shows that instead of a technological shift, we should be talking about a leadership transformation.
According to the study, nearly half of organisations feel they have achieved a competitive advantage through AI. At the same time, the data also reveals that the gap between frontrunners and those waiting on the sidelines is widening rapidly.
The most significant difference concerns how AI has been implemented within companies. Among the ones still waiting, AI use has remained as isolated experiments, whereas among the frontrunners, AI is already part of structures, processes, and the division of work. In these organisations, job roles have started to transform, and entirely new roles have emerged on the business side, combining business understanding, data, and change leadership.
The true core of the transformation, therefore, lies in culture, not technology.
What does a succesful AI-first company look like?
In our market study we asked decision makers and leaders about what separates successful AI companies from others. Download the study and see where your company stands.
A safe environment determines success
I believe the importance of culture is visible especially in learning. Although most organisations have already arranged individual training sessions, only a few have built a continuous, large-scale learning model. Occasional training sessions are no longer enough now that AI is already reshaping the basic logic of how work is done.
As AI continues to evolve, skills must evolve at the same pace. Learning must be all employees right, not a privilege for a few. Here, too, the frontrunners show the way: when learning is tied to business goals and a safe, experimentation-friendly environment, a culture emerges where new technology is not feared but used boldly and purposefully.
Leadership sets the direction
Leadership plays a key role in building a safe and positive atmosphere.
The market study clearly shows that organisations that define the direction of AI based on strategic business priorities, and whose leaders commit to the change through their own actions, advance faster than others. In these cases, AI does not remain the responsibility of IT alone. Instead, the transformation flows through the entire leadership team and then through the whole organisation. When leaders use new tools themselves and participate in learning, employees naturally follow the same path. Leading by example guides more powerfully than any instructions.
As a result of the third wave of AI development, the division of labour within organisations will change. In the future, agent-based solutions will take on an increasing number of tasks previously handled manually. However, agents will not reduce the role of humans. They will change it.
As AI frees employees from routine tasks, value will arise increasingly from people’s ability to interpret complex situations, make decisions, create new ways of working, and develop customer value. For organisations, this means that work must be designed in a completely new way while at the same time developing a deeper understanding of which tasks are best handled by humans and where AI can work alongside them.
Future productivity grows from culture, not code
The transformation ahead is massive – that much is clear. Yet it also opens up an opportunity to build a competitive advantage that is not based on individual projects but on the organisation’s entire way of operating.
When learning is continuous, when the use of tools is guided by clear principles, and when everyone has the opportunity to use AI in their own work, technology no longer remains an isolated force. It becomes a shared capability within the work community and part of everyday work.
I believe it is justified to say that the productivity of the future will not be created by the amount of technology but by how wisely and creatively an organisation enables its people to use it. Companies that succeed in building such a culture will not only keep up with the pace of change – they will shape the future with their own solutions.
Katri Kolesnik leads Business Technology Forum, a non-commercial company within the Sofigate Group that develops and shares the open Business Technology Standard (BTS) framework for business technology management. Katri is passionate about helping people and organisations find a common language and shared ways of working to support the achievement of organisational goals enabled by technology.
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