Where Company AI Value Actually Comes From

Every organization is investing in AI. Not every organization is getting anything back from it. Ian Kahn has visibility into both groups.

As a PwC Partner and Global Leader for its Customer and Commercial Excellence platform, Ian leads a team of almost ten thousand practitioners helping organizations build stronger customer relationships. In twenty-seven years at the firm, he has lived through the internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. He told The AI Report podcast this one is different from all of them.

The 20-75 Split

Here is the number worth understanding: right now, twenty percent of companies are capturing seventy-five percent of the value from AI deployment. The remaining eighty percent are investing just as hard and have access to the same tools, but the returns have not followed.

Ian is direct about why: it is not a technology problem. Access to AI is not what separates the two groups. The issue is that change is hard, and most organizations have not yet done the harder work of actually changing.

When people inside a company see new technology coming, there is a natural resistance. Ian thinks the responsibility for unlocking that resistance sits squarely with leadership. Leaders need to set a vision, explain why the change matters, and give people a way to participate in what is being built. When that happens, the value follows. When it does not, the investment sits there idle.

Ian's view is that frictionless, conversational AI is closer than most organizations realize, and that most organizations are still catching up to where their most sophisticated customers already are.

The Question Leaders Get Wrong

The specific mistake Ian describes is not unusual: leaders explain what AI is and how to use it, but skip the why.

If you tell a team that AI is about automating routine tasks and making certain work go away, you will get a lukewarm response at best. That message does not motivate anyone. But if you explain that the goal is to build better customer relationships, to grow the business, to take the organization somewhere it could not go before, you give people something to get behind. The technology becomes a means to an end they can actually believe in.

Ian leads by example on this. He consistently gets new certifications, runs his own agents, and has made voice his primary way of interacting with technology. His philosophy as a leader is that he does not ask his team to do things he is not willing to do himself.

The why behind AI adoption, Ian says, is the part most leaders underinvest in.

The Workforce Dividend

One of the cleaner frameworks Ian uses to reframe what AI actually does inside an organization is what he calls the workforce dividend.

In a typical client-facing role, somewhere between thirty and forty percent of someone's time goes to routine administrative tasks. Scheduling, documentation, follow-ups, reporting. AI agents can handle the vast majority of that. The time that gets freed up is the dividend. The question is what you do with it.

At PwC and with its clients, Ian says, the answer is to reinvest that capacity into building stronger customer relationships. Not to cut headcount. Not to reduce the team. To redirect effort toward the work that actually requires human judgment and human connection. Getting that message right, Ian says, is one of the most important things a leader can do when rolling out AI to a team.

Watch the full conversation with Ian Kahn on The AI Report podcast.

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