BCG Survey: 42% of Employees Save Full Workday Weekly With AI, Though Many Lack Guidance on Next Steps

Boston Consulting Group’s 2026 Global AI at Work report surveyed nearly 12,000 frontline employees and found that 42% saved eight hours per week through regular AI use. The same survey showed that 66% of respondents received limited to no guidance on what to do with the saved time, and half said they were not applying it to more strategic work.

David Martin, global leader of BCG’s People & Organization practice, told Fortune that senior leaders are struggling to articulate a clear vision and strategy for AI.

He said the absence of direction increases employee fear and slows adoption and usage across organizations. The report places these workplace findings against a backdrop of rising AI costs. Microsoft canceled much of its direct Claude code licenses, and Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in the first four months of the year.

Mustafa Suleyman told Bloomberg that Anthropic is too expensive and the company is seeking alternatives. Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios that for his team the cost of compute now exceeds the cost of employees.

Davidson, said incentive structures that reward higher token use simply produce more token use. The Financial Times reported last month that Amazon employees were “tokenmaxxing” to meet internal AI metrics, and Meta established an AI user leaderboard. Last week Amazon ended its internal tracking of AI use after employees deployed bots on tasks with no output, according to the same report.

Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told staff not to use AI just for the sake of using it. David Martin said the tokenmaxxing approach has probably run its course and is now affecting companies’ cost bases. He added that many firms gave AI access broadly and are now reassessing who should have it and what business cases justify continued use.