Copilot has changed a lot in the 3+ years I run those projects. Started as a vision and a complete new approach how we would work in the future. From the first announcement we got now Work IQ, Copilot Cowork, Agents, Skills and so on. But one thing that hasn’t change: C-Level wants to see and understand where does the value show up.
Therefore we’ve run hunderds of Business Value Analysis. Started 3 years ago where we’ve tried to map saved time to a potential return on investment. Turns out the number was incredibly high, but CFO wasn’t happy at all. Why? Because the amount of CHF or EUR he/she spent wasn’t still decreasing, well actually it was even higher, because they had additional licensings on top.
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So when your usage dashboard says 90% monthly active user, and your pulse survey confirms that people love it. You’ve done the first step right. But when your CFO ask
What changed in numbers?
and you can’t answer, here are two things for you:
You’re not alone, many organization still struggle to show or prove this
This episode is for you, I try to elaborate why it happens
McKinsey just confirmed it
If you’re a heavy AI-user it’s probably not suprising, but 80% of respondents reported that AI has improved their personal productivity and 50% say that AI helps them to make better decisions. That’s one of the key messages of McKinsey’s latest State of AI 2026 report.
A twist for this high numbers, only 37% of respondents say AI has contributed anything at to their organization’s EBIT. While the high performers, the ones where AI attributed at least 5% of EBIT to AI, call the impact “significant” sits at 6%. McKinsey mentioned that those numbers are unchanged from a year ago.
That means another twelve months of AI or in the era of Microsoft Copilot Wave 3, Agents, Cowork and millions of paid seats resulted in a increased “individual feeling” whereas the enterprise result stayed flat. McKinsey's conclusion:
"These individual gains have yet to translate into broad financial impact for organizations."
In my opinion that’s a pattern we see quite often. People feel the benefit, it is not that “AI doesn’t work”, but the effect disappears somewhere between the individual and the P&L.
Three Places Where the Feeling Gets Lost
After years of business value analyses, I think we see a pattern where three breaks over and over. While a first instinct could be “that must be technical issue” I see it more like management gap.
The saved minutes get absorbed
Ask yourself or someone in your organization:
How much time Copilot saves you per week?
You will get a number. Ask them as a follow up:
How did you spend that extra time?
You may get shrugged. The minutes got absorbed into the next email, another meeting or just the next fire. I don’t blame the person for that, it happens to me as well (and quite often to be honest). I think it’s important to be aware of that, what happens with freed capacity. I wrote about this from my own Sunday-morning perspective. So my working hours didn’t drop, but my output changed dramatically. In most organization nobody makes a decision for the team.
The time saved is real, but it stays invisble. You can’t put “absorbed” on a management-presentation.
Productivity Lives with the Employee, Value lives in the Process
Measuring the impact has two key challenges
Most organization do not have a baseline to compare later (and they never cared before)
Survey measures the individual like “Do you feel more productive?” or “Does Copilot help you in your daily work?”
And as you know, EBIT does not live with the individual. It’s in your quote-to-cash process, in the claim process or in the time it takes to answer a customer.
Holding against the Copilot rollouts: Most organization start with Copilot on personal productivity (individual) level. And of course we can’t find the direct correlation to the business processes. The process owner was never part of the Copilot rollout.
So after a successful rollout you have hundred or thousands of individually faster employees inside a process that runs excately as before. With that said: Faster inputs into an unchanged system produce the same output, just earlier.
Remember my episode about the Work Trend Index 2026? I highlighted the insight, that Microsoft made it visible, that only one third of AI success is related to individuals. So 2/3 is the organizational setup, that allow you the reach the goal you’ve set.
So what have the 6% high performers done differently? It should be your key take away: High performers fundamentally redesign workflows, rather than just add an AI-layer to the existing ones.
Faster is not (always) better
This may seem contradictory and it also questioning the productivity feeling itself. One of the biggest questions we have these days: When AI helps us to do the stuff juniors could do, how does juniors become experts? And this challenge also underlines a Harvard Business School researcher from March, run at a global trading firm with 78 employees and real work tasks. Thanks to genAI the writing time dropped by around 75%, which sounds impressive in the first place. However, when a technology specialist used AI to do the analysts’ job, their output scored 13% lower in quality, than the ones who actually do that job every day.
In this particular case speed went up like crazy, but at the same time quality went down for everyone that wasn’t an expert.
So you can feel more productive because you’ve done your job faster, but at the same time the quality need to be at least on the same level.
Where the Impact Chain Breaks
One of the key concepts I have on my website are the tactic boards, where I explain some rules of the game in an easy understandable way. One tactic board is explaining the impact chain: Activation, Behavior Change, Business Impact. Is Copilot being used? Do people demonstrably work differently? Does measureable value arrive? The full method is in my Copilot ROI-Guide including the tactic board, so I won’t repeat it here.
Today I want more to put the lights on where organizations actually stand on. So at this point, most organizations are still measure the first link (activation), which is of course a good first indication. However, as we’ve learnt, just because someone uses AI (at least) once a month, there’s absolutely no indication if they benefit from it or even if there’s a behavior change.
A few organizations can show the second link (Behavior Change) and have documented how AI changed their work: A task that’s not necessary anymore, fewer review loops, report that is built in a few hours instead of days.
But barely no one has evidence for the third link, which is interesting, because once you can proof the business impact, there’s no more budget discussions.
McKinsey's Tara Balakrishnan puts it in one sentence: "The limiting factor is increasingly the organization's ability to absorb change."
A Copilot license is the gym membership → doesn’t need to result in visits
Activation is the amount of gym visits → doesn’t need to result in more muscle
Behavior change is your routine → doesn’t need to have a great execution
But to this date, most organizations are still standing at gym receptions and show their membership & how often they visit the gym and wonder why they haven’t built new muscles.
A starting point, but not what you need
The productivity survey is a good starting point, keep it running. However do not use it as an evidence that you’re driving impact. Instead start to have conversation to come from a ‘feeling’ to an understanding in the first place. For example: Instead of “How much time does Copilot save you?” (which produces a feeling), ask: “What do you do differently now and which process notices?” (which is a trail you can follow). Now it’s maybe your job, or at least the job of the process owner to start to dig deeper. Start to reflecting how you run the process today and reimagine the future state and where you can AI-infuse it.
Pick one process to start, where you know the baseline, focus on one behavior you expect to change and then measure one number that would move if it did.
Are you on the right Path?
If you bought Copilot three years ago, you were early. Last year many organization could say “we are early”. But looking back a year ago, Copilot Wave 3 was not here, Copilot Studio was more like a demo and vision, rather than a enterprise ready tool and last but not least Cowork or even Scout wasn’t even on the agenda.
Looking to today, the exuse is gone and as we’ve learnt the numbers haven’t moved. Which tells me the missing piece was never the product. It was the willingness to measure something harder than a login. Well in fact, do not focus that much on measurement, but rather on how to radically transform we way we work, rethink it and actually implement it and make it to production.