Beyond AI adoption: what it takes to deliver measurable business value
81% of UK knowledge workers now use AI weekly. That’s adoption. What it isn’t, is transformation.
Most organizations have layered AI onto broken processes and fragmented systems and called it progress.
Meanwhile, 82% of UK IT leaders have absorbed unexpected AI cost increases, and 58% report high adoption with limited measurable productivity gains.
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Christina Francis
We have a usage problem dressed up as a strategy.
Here’s what’s actually going wrong and what needs to change.
Adoption without redesign is theatre
AI doesn’t fix bad processes. It accelerates them. If your data is fragmented, your ownership is unclear, and your workflows are inefficient, deploying AI makes those problems faster, not smaller.
Real value requires asking harder questions: Where do decisions actually get made? Which processes should fundamentally change? Who owns the outcome? Until you answer those, you’re generating AI activity, not business impact.
Own the outcome or don’t deploy
Nearly two-thirds of UK IT leaders say they’re fully accountable for AI-driven business outcomes, while AI deployment is spreading across departments, often outside governance structures. That’s a recipe for accountability without visibility.
IT management sets the framework. That’s necessary. But every business leader who owns a process needs to own how AI changes that process. What does success look like? Who monitors it? Who’s responsible when it goes wrong?
If you can’t answer those questions before you scale, don’t scale.
Shadow AI is a signal, not just a risk
One in four UK workers use unapproved AI tools. The instinct is to lock it down. The smarter read: your people are telling you your current tools create friction, and they’ve moved on without you.
Restriction isn’t a strategy. Channel that demand toward trusted tools with real governance, then use governance as an accelerant, not a brake. The organizations moving fastest are the ones that treat low-risk use cases as low-risk, and reserve serious scrutiny for high-stakes applications.
Context is the missing layer
Nearly half of UK IT leaders say AI initiatives stall because AI lacks organizational context. That’s not a technology problem, it’s a work infrastructure problem.
Think about how you’d onboard a new hire. You’d give them the org structure, the priorities, the decision rights, the rules. An AI agent needs the same. Without it, even capable models produce output that someone has to spend 30 minutes correcting, which is exactly what’s happening.
The fix is connecting AI to where work already lives. Not asking employees to reconstruct context every time they open a prompt.
Measure outcomes, not usage
If your AI metrics are licenses purchased, prompts submitted, or hours theoretically saved, you’re measuring the wrong thing. The question is whether the work is improving.
Are customer issues resolving faster? Are teams spending less time searching for information? Are the right decisions getting made with better speed? At Asana, we built an AI seller assistant and measured its impact on the sales process, response rates, net-new meetings booked. That’s the bar.
The accountability question is only going to get harder
Agents are coming. Systems that act on behalf of people, not just assist them. When that happens, organizations will need to know: which agents exist, who created them, what they can access, what they’re authorized to do, and how their performance is tracked.
This isn’t a future problem. The organizations building that discipline now will be the ones who can scale agentic AI without the governance catching up after the fact.
The businesses pulling ahead won’t be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones who’ve connected it to clear ownership, proportionate governance, and the workflows where execution actually happens.
Adoption is table stakes. Value is the real work.
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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
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81% of UK knowledge workers now use AI weekly. That’s adoption. What it isn’t, is transformation. Most organizations have layered AI onto broken processes and fragmented systems and called it progress. Meanwhile, 82% of UK IT leaders have absorbed unexpected AI cost increases, and 58% report high adoption with limited…
