Workday: Businesses Are Leaving AI Gains on the Table

Recently released research from AI platform company Workday indicates that, while AI is delivering productivity gains, many businesses and organizations are failing to fully capture its value.ⁱ The report found that employees are saving meaningful time with AI tools, but often those gains are being absorbed by rework, which includes things like fixing mistakes, rewriting

content, and double-checking outputs from generic tools.

The organizations that actually are realizing the greatest value from AI treat saved time as a strategic resource by reinvesting in upskilling their teams, improving collaboration, and strengthening judgment-driven work. Here’s a look at where the gains from using AI are actually going, based on Workday’s research:

According to the report, the most successful organizations don’t simply deploy AI, but reinvest the time it saves into their people, building skills, redesigning roles, and modernizing how work gets done. These companies turn speed into sustained business impact.

Gerrit Kazmaier, President, Product and Technology at Workday, commented, "Too many AI tools push the hard questions of trust, accuracy, and repeatability back onto individual users. At Workday, we’ve spent years delivering AI as simple, human‑centered solutions – not raw technology – so customers aren’t left to wire things together and fact‑check every answer on their own. Our philosophy is that AI should do the complex work under the hood so people can focus on judgment, creativity, and connection. That’s how organizations turn AI‑powered speed into durable, human‑led advantage."

Eighty-five percent of employees responding to Workday’s survey reported that they save one to seven hours per week using AI. However, much of that time is offset by rework on low-quality AI-generated content, creating a false sense of productivity and return on investment. According to Workday, AI is doing its part by increasing capacity but, often, roles, skills, and processes haven’t evolved to turn that capacity into consistently better results.

According to the report, about 40 percent of AI time savings are lost to rework, including correcting errors, rewriting content, and verifying outputs from one-size-fits-all AI tools. Only 14 percent of employees reported getting consistently clear, positive net outcomes from AI. Frequent users feel the most strain. Though employees who use AI every day appear to be overwhelmingly optimistic (90 percent believe it will help them succeed), 77 percent say they need to review AI-generated work just as carefully as work done by humans, if not more so.

The research found that employees aged 25 to 34 make up nearly half (46 percent) of those dealing with the most AI rework, spending their time checking and fixing AI output. Meanwhile, 66 percent of leaders cite skills training as a top priority, but only 37 percent of employees are getting access to this skills training.  Workday says this reveals a clear disconnect between leadership intent and employee experience.

The research also found that jobs haven’t kept up with AI. In 89 percent of the organizations surveyed in the report, fewer than half of roles have been updated to reflect AI capabilities. Employees are using 2025 tools inside 2015 job structures, leaving them attempting to reconcile faster output with unchanged processes or systems.

Thirty-nine percent of companies polled are more likely to put AI savings back into technology, while 30 percent are more likely to put the savings into employee development. Instead of using the time saved to build skills, 32 percent have increased workload.

Workday offered the following checklist for AI readiness to help businesses have a more positive AI experience:

Organizations realizing the greatest value from AI treat saved time as a strategic resource.  According to Workday, employees with positive AI outcomes are far more likely to use saved time to increase the value of their work through deeper analysis, stronger decision-making, and strategic thinking, rather than just taking on more tasks. Additionally, these employees are also far more likely to have had increased skills training.