This question was posed in a LinkedIn survey. It was a fascinating post, questioning whether AI is really saving time. Yet we are inundated with announcements: jobs are being eliminated because AI does more work in less time.
My feeds are filled with “success stories.” People using AI for emails for both prospecting and responding. Others promote AI that does all the research, all the reporting, manages calendars. The stories talk about hours freed up, work eliminated.
Interestingly, most of the discussion is about time saved, headcount eliminated, and spending reduced. Very little is focuses on changed outcomes: revenue increases, more wins, improved customer results. I don’t see posts about “AI helped drive 25% growth in revenue” or “AI enabled us to enter a new market worth millions” or “AI drove higher customer engagement resulting in 30% improvement in retention.” The success metrics are almost exclusively about inputs. The results are seldom discussed.
Personally, when I look at the areas people are hoping to save time, I’m skeptical. Managing my calendar takes less than 15 minutes a day. I’ve used tools for years, so that’s not where my time goes. Most of my time in managing my calendar is thinking about where I want to invest my time.
Reading emails, drafting responses? How does AI know what I want to accomplish? The emails I feel compelled to respond to are few, and each one requires genuine thinking. How do I move this conversation forward? Are there ideas worth challenging? How do I build a stronger discussion? That’s not time AI can reclaim.
What about outbound prospecting? I use AI there, but it actually takes me longer. Each message is highly tailored to the recipient. AI may provide an initial draft, but I iterate, asking for changes, refining the angle, getting the tone exactly right. The quality of the message is much better. The time investment is higher, but the responses I get are far better.
Which means “how much time is AI saving you?” is the wrong question.
Implicit in that question is the assumption that the things we’re investing our time in are worth doing faster. It assumes the emails we were sending generated great responses, so more emails will generate far more interest. It assumes we were building high-impact decks, so more decks will drive greater engagement. It assumes our proposals are winning, so more proposals will multiply results.
But the results tell a different story. Email opens and response rates have plummeted. Deck and proposal conversion continues to fall. We weren’t generating the outcomes we wanted before AI, and yet the great excitement is about producing more of the same work at greater speed. We seem to be in a race to accelerate mediocrity.
The deeper problem is that most organizations aren’t asking whether what they’re doing is right. They are focused only on how to do it faster. More prospecting emails into a market that isn’t buying. More proposals into a pipeline that was never properly qualified. More decks into conversations that were never really conversations. The increases in activity looks impressive, but produces no improvements in outcomes.
What would it look like to actually use AI differently? It might mean asking why your win rate has been declining for three years before you build one more piece of sales content. It might mean doing a genuine audit of which customer problems you actually solve versus which ones you claim to solve. It might mean discovering that the segment you’ve been chasing isn’t the one that actually values what you do. None of this is about speed or saving time, it focuses on changing outcomes and results.
In my own work, the most valuable AI interactions take more time, not less. Blog posts like this one take me two to three times longer than they used to. But the quality of thinking is higher, and I see it in readership, comments, and engagement. Those who’ve followed me for years probably notice the change. I used to see something, react, write about it. Now I do a deeper dive. I find things I was missing. I discover frameworks I’d ignored and alternatives I hadn’t considered. AI hasn’t made my writing faster. It’s made it better.
I see the same pattern in client work. We use AI not because it saves time, but because it helps us think differently, exploring risks more deeply, considering alternatives we might have missed, questioning assumptions. Our objective isn’t efficiency in conducting the project. It’s the quality of the outcomes produced.
I ask people: What are you doing with the time AI is saving you? Usually, I get blank stares. When I finally get an answer, it’s not that they’re working differently. It’s that they’re doing even more of the same things. More emails, more demos, more presentations, more proposals. The results aren’t changing. In fact, they’re going in the opposite direction. Customers who ignored your fifteen touches will continue to ignore thirty. You haven’t changed or improved anything. You’ve produced more of what wasn’t working.
The winners in the AI era won’t be the organizations that focus on how to do more of what they were already doing. The winners will be the organizations that use AI to question whether what they were doing was right in the first place. They are the organizations that explore, “Should we be doing this at all? Should we be doing things differently? What changes might drive profoundly better results?
Winners won’t measure the impact by the volume of activity, the time, or the headcount saved. They will be looking at transformative improvements, driving better and more differentiated outcomes.
Unfortunately, too many organizations are avoiding this, focusing on time and headcount savings. They are actively avoiding the hard work of questioning their strategies.
The right question isn’t how much time AI is saving you. It’s what AI is making you capable of that you couldn’t do before. If everyone else focuses on how they do more of the same things, the organizations that stand out will be those who are changing and doing things differently.
The choice is using AI to think differently or automate your way to the same results faster. Most are choosing the latter. That’s not a technology decision. It’s a leadership one.
Afterword: This AI generated discussion of this post takes some fascinating twists. It is, perhaps, much better than the original article. Enjoy!
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