Beyond Individual Gains: Clare Kitching on Driving Team-Wide ROI with AI

In a recent LinkedIn post, Clare Kitching delves into the critical gap between perceived individual productivity gains from AI and the tangible business impact. While 80% of individuals report AI has improved their productivity, Kitching points out that a significant 37% of companies, according to McKinsey, cannot identify any Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) impact from their AI adoption.

Kitching highlights a common pattern observed in discussions with clients and colleagues: the feeling of enhanced personal efficiency with AI tools. “The individual time savings feel obvious with faster drafts, better meeting prep, a second opinion before you send a doc and output you would have never contemplated doing previously,” she writes. However, she cautions that these individual efficiencies often fail to translate into broader organizational benefits.

“But these just stay individual.
That hour you save gets absorbed into another workflow.
You’ve got the same handovers and eight-step approval chain to get through in your wider workflows.”

Bridging the Individual-Team AI Productivity Gap

The core of Kitching’s argument centers on the need to shift focus from individual time savings to systemic workflow improvements. She questions how organizations can begin to demonstrate returns as their teams evolve and processes remain unchanged. Kitching proposes a structured approach to integrating AI at a team level, emphasizing that true ROI comes from redesigning workflows, not just augmenting individual tasks.

Key Strategies for Team-Centric AI Integration

Kitching outlines six key areas for teams to focus on to move beyond individual gains and achieve measurable team-wide productivity improvements with AI:

• Share context: Ensuring everyone works with the same inputs, agreed-upon definitions, and current priorities.
• Cut the translating: Eliminating the need for constant re-interpretation between different departments, tools, or data formats.
• Improve handovers: Defining clear inputs, useful outputs, and assigning ownership for each stage of a process.
• Remove steps: Identifying and eliminating redundant data entry, re-keying, or unnecessary reviews.
• Clarify decisions: Making trade-offs visible, designating a single decision-maker, and setting clear approval processes.
• Use AI together: Encouraging teams to collectively develop prompts, debate AI outputs, and collectively own the final decision.

McKinsey’s Findings on Workflow Redesign

Kitching supports her points by referencing McKinsey’s data, which indicates a stark difference in AI adoption strategies between high-performing companies and others. “McKinsey’s high performers do exactly this: 73% of them have redesigned workflows because of AI. For everyone else it’s 25%,” she notes. This data underscores her central thesis: successful AI integration requires a fundamental rethinking of how work gets done within a team, rather than simply adopting new tools for individual use.

Ultimately, Kitching urges businesses to “Start moving from saving minutes to saving days by considering your team.” By focusing on collaborative AI implementation and workflow redesign, organizations can begin to unlock the substantial business value that AI promises, moving beyond the limitations of individual productivity boosts.