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A new Boston Consulting Group report shows employees are saving time with AI but lack guidance on how to use it. Companies are also cutting back on AI usage incentives after costs rose sharply.
citizen.co.zaBoston Consulting Group’s 2026 Global AI at Work report found that 42% of nearly 12,000 surveyed frontline employees saved eight hours per week through regular AI use. The same survey showed 66% received limited or no guidance on how to spend the saved time, and half said they were not applying it to more strategic work.
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in a blog post earlier this year that AI appears in daily work but not in macroeconomic statistics.
“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data,” Slok stated, noting the absence of measurable effects in employment, productivity, and inflation figures. David Martin, global leader of BCG’s People & Organization practice, told Fortune that senior leaders struggle to define AI strategy.
“Senior leaders are really struggling to articulate what the vision and strategy is on AI,” Martin said.
He added that unclear direction increases employee fear and slows adoption. Several companies reported sharp rises in AI-related computing costs. Microsoft canceled much of its direct Claude code licenses.
Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in the first four months of the year. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told Bloomberg that Anthropic’s services are too expensive and the company is seeking alternatives. Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios that compute costs for his team exceed employee costs.
The Financial Times reported last month that Amazon employees engaged in “tokenmaxxing” to meet internal AI metrics. Meta introduced an AI user leaderboard.
Davidson, previously told Fortune that incentives tied to token counts increase usage but produce little else. “If you tell people they’ll succeed if they use a resource more, of course they’ll use it more,” Luria said. Last week Amazon discontinued its internal AI usage tracking after employees deployed bots on unproductive tasks, according to the Financial Times.
At the Fortune COO Summit this week, Okta COO and President Eric Kelleher said managers remain focused on headcount and reporting lines rather than AI outcomes. Rakuten International COO Adrienne Down Coulson wrote in a Fortune commentary that C-suites pushing for more AI use lag behind their workers.
Martin noted that treating AI agents as digital employees rather than tools increased employee fears of displacement, according to recent BCG research.
He said comprehensive upskilling programs help reduce those fears and encourage knowledge sharing across teams.
Claude Guillemot, 69, died Friday when the Cessna 421 he was piloting crashed near La Baule-Escoublac Airport in western France. A flight instructor on board was also killed.
The Japan TimesChinese customs data show zero shipments of certain tungsten types, dysprosium and terbium to Japan last month. A broader rare-earth category reached its lowest three-month rolling total since 2023.
New York PostA Los Angeles County report estimates the $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger could eliminate 2,500 local jobs and 6,000 positions worldwide. The combined company carries an $82 billion debt load and plans $6 billion in savings through consolidation.