Most UK business leaders (85 percent) say that their productivity efforts are being held back by economic headwinds, employee stress and difficulty implementing new productivity tools. That’s according to a survey of 500 UK business decision-makers conducted by Opinium for process intelligence company Celonis.
These insights come at a challenging time for UK businesses. National Insurance rates are scheduled to rise in 2025 and a majority of companies (57 percent) report turnover challenges, according to ONS data.
As businesses adjust to these headwinds and explore new ways to improve productivity and drive growth, AI was top of mind for the surveyed decision-makers. More leaders (39 percent) said better support for AI implementations would increase economic growth in the UK compared to reducing red tape (36 percent) or cutting business tax rates (35 percent). Additionally, 46 percent said they felt AI-led technologies, services and solutions would help their employees be more productive in the future while less than twice as many cited return-to-office mandates (19 percent). Nearly half (48 percent) said their companies were investing in AI-driven solutions to improve productivity.
Explore related questions
Despite the strong interest in and support for AI, many UK businesses aren’t getting the most from their AI spend. According to the report, the vast majority (94 percent) of respondents said they were getting some value from their AI investments, but only one in five were getting the maximum possible value. The rest were struggling to maximize the value (36 percent), getting minimal value (1 percent), getting value less than (4 percent) or equal to (17 percent) of the amount they had invested. These results show a disconnect between AI’s promise and what it’s delivering for companies.
Giuseppe de Giacomo, professor of computer science at the department of computer science, University of Oxford, discussed this gap, and the need to overcome it, in the report: “The kind of AI currently being deployed, while surprisingly capable of accomplishing tasks that require language fluency, lacks the deep conceptual reasoning capabilities that people possess.
“Its understanding remains somewhat shallow and is unable to replace the strategic or empathetic parts of work that are so crucial. Bringing this understanding gap is important for business leaders, as is ensuring they are able to measure the effectiveness of their AI implementation.”
“Yet, there’s a gap between AI’s promise and its ability to deliver tangible results,” said Rupal Karia, country leader UKI at Celonis, in the report. “Process Intelligence closes this gap. It provides a unique class of data and business context that enables process improvement across systems, departments and organizations. Process Intelligence ensures AI has the knowledge to understand how the business runs and how to make it run better.”
All in all, AI is seen as the most promising future driver, potentially significantly boosting productivity. As AI adoption grows, businesses expect to see better morale, faster processes and a shift towards higher-value tasks for employees.
