Companies are buying AI tools. That doesn't mean they know what to do with them.
Companies have spent the past two years racing to deploy chatbots, coding assistants, and AI agents to their workers. Two new reports, however, suggest that deploying AI tools is the easy part.
The hard part is using them well.
Ramp, a financial technology company, and Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence platform, studied company behavior across nearly 22,000 US firms. They found that companies making sustained, high-intensity AI investments saw greater workforce gains than firms using AI more lightly.
The report defined “high-intensity adopters” as those who spent an average of about $34 a month on AI, compared to those who spent an average of less than $3.
High-intensity adopters grew faster. They saw their head count grow more than 10% over the first 24 months after adopting AI. Entry-level head count rose 12%.
The high-intensity adopters have some advantages. “They are larger, more technical, and faster growing before adoption,” the authors wrote.
The key to their success, however, is not just adopting AI but knowing how to leverage it effectively. The authors wrote that the benefits of AI adoption require “complementary investments, organizational change, and learning inside the firm.” In other words, a few enterprise chatbot subscriptions may not be enough to move the needle.
That divide — between having access to AI and knowing how to turn it into value — shows up in a separate Boston Consulting Group survey of workers.
The consulting firm surveyed nearly 12,000 people for its “AI at Work” report and found that AI use has spread widely: 74% of frontline white-collar employees now use AI daily or several times a week, up 23% from 2025.
Among frontline employees who regularly use AI, however, 66% of respondents said they’ve received limited or no guidance on how to use the time they save, and 58% said they are not reinvesting their time in more strategic work.
BCG concluded that strategy matters more than tools. Workers with strong strategic clarity but limited access to AI tools reported greater measurable impact than those with strong tool access but little direction.
About 80% of respondents said they saw a measurable impact when they had a “strong strategic clarity” on how to use tools, even with limited access to them. Whereas only 60% reported seeing a measurable impact when they had limited strategic clarity but strong access to tools.
It’s not enough to bring AI into the workplace, the reports found. It has to be done strategically.