Blog The ROI of Attention: Quantifying the Business Value of Time Saved by AI-Powered Workflows

In today’s high-velocity business environment, time is the ultimate currency. Yet, most organizations are unknowingly paying a heavy “tax on attention.”

This tax is the collective thousands of hours your most talented, highly-paid employees waste on administrative friction — formatting decks, summarizing meeting notes, and drafting routine emails.

The solution isn’t just working harder; it’s working with an AI-powered “do-engine.” While tools like Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise provide the capability to automate these tedious tasks, the true Return on Investment (ROI) isn’t just about the time saved; it’s about how you intentionally convert that reclaimed attention into strategic output.

Quantifying the gain: From busywork to breakthrough

To truly understand the ROI of attention, we must look beyond the initial 10–15% automation baseline and examine how time is actually reclaimed across the organization. Current research and real-world applications show that AI doesn’t just save time, it fundamentally shifts the focus from administrative toil to strategic breakthrough.

Quantifying the reclaimed hour

The most compelling figures emerge when looking at daily and weekly time recovery. While a 10% saving might sound modest, for the average knowledge worker, this translates into significant blocks of high-value focus time:

• The “daily hour” dividend: A 2024 global survey of 35,000 workers found that AI saves the average user one hour every day.
• Reclaiming a full workday: For power users — the top 5% of collaborators — the impact is even more dramatic. Research shows these individuals save a full workday every month simply by using AI to summarize meetings and catch up on missed threads.
• Weekly capacity gains: Studies from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and EY suggest that once AI is integrated into routine workflows, roughly 50% of workers save more than five hours weekly.

Shifting time: From toil to value

The real power of a collaboration suite like Gemini Enterprise is its ability to shift the nature of work. By automating high-toil tasks, employees can pivot to the work that only humans can handle:

• From drafting to reviewing: Workers using generative assistants for drafting are 33% more productive per hour. Instead of starting from a blank page, they become editors-in-chief, refining AI-generated drafts in a fraction of the time.
• From information hunting to blended search: While the average worker wastes four hours a week simply reorienting themselves between fragmented apps, Gemini Enterprise eliminates this Toggle Tax by providing a single pane of glass. By searching across your entire ecosystem — from Jira to Drive — it recovers that lost hour of daily information hunting and turns it into immediate action.
• Deep focus reinvestment: This reclaimed time isn’t just disappearing. According to a recent Adecco report, 28% of users report reinvesting their saved time directly into creative work, while 26% use it for strategic thinking.

Role and sector-specific breakthroughs

The tax on attention varies by industry and role, and so do the rewards of eliminating it:

• Product management: PMs using generative AI have seen a 40% boost in productivity, accelerating product time-to-market by 5%.
• Energy & utilities: Professionals in this sector report the highest efficiency gains, saving an average of 75 minutes per day. By automating high-toil diagnostics and reporting, teams are shifting from reactive maintenance to proactive grid optimization — directly reducing the risk of costly outages.
• Software development: Coding assistants allow developers to finish tasks in half the time, with some organizations reporting a 56% increase in speed for complex tasks like JavaScript programming.

As these figures show, the ROI of attention is exponential. When you clear the 60 minutes of administrative noise from an employee’s day, you don’t just get an hour back — you unlock the mental bandwidth required for the next big breakthrough.

The strategic gap: Saving time vs. reinvesting time

The primary challenge for leadership is that simply saving time is not enough. Without organizational guidance, saved time is often absorbed by low-priority tasks or general disengagement — this is the “strategic gap.” To truly capture ROI, leaders must proactively design a strategy for time reinvestment.

When this gap isn’t bridged, several challenges emerge:

• Low-value absorption: Reclaimed time is often lost to “work about work,” such as attending more non-essential meetings or over-polishing low-priority emails.
• The disengagement trap: Without a clear “what’s in it for me,” employees may interpret efficiency as a threat to their job security, leading to quiet quitting or resistance to further adoption.
• The trust deficit: When leaders fail to provide clear “human-in-the-loop” policies or prompt libraries, employees are left to experiment in a vacuum. A single AI hallucination or bad result can shatter user trust, causing adoption to stall and the potential ROI to vanish before it’s even captured.

Leaders can bridge this gap through intentional planning:

• Human-centered alignment: Focus on the “why” and “what’s in it for me” for every employee to minimize fears and build trust.
• Persona development: Build specific user personas to understand different stakeholder roles and create customized enablement plans that meet people where they are.
• Use-case identification: Host hackathons or discovery events with specific departments to uncover high-value use cases that can be implemented immediately.

The change management key: ensuring strategic alignment

Success with AI is a joint effort that requires a clear, dedicated approach to change management. If you don't connect the platform to essential data sources and connect the reclaimed time to essential business goals, you are left with a powerful engine that has nowhere to go. At Insight, we help leaders bridge the strategic gap by focusing on the organizational prerequisites necessary to ensure time saved is time well-spent.

Our approach focuses on three critical areas:

1. Defining success metrics: To ensure the “attention dividend” is actually paid out, we move beyond simple adoption rates. We help organizations implement a comprehensive measurement framework that tracks value across four critical pillars:

• Business value & ROI: Tracking reported time savings and measurable business process improvements.
• Operational efficiency: Monitoring task completion rates and time to resolution for key workflows.
• User experience & adoption: Gauging success through user sentiment, direct tool feedback, and AI literacy self-assessments.
• Risk & cost management: Ensuring long-term sustainability by tracking risk reduction and the monthly cost per tool interaction.

2. Workflow prioritization: We help organizations identify high-value use cases and redesign processes to ensure newly freed attention is directed toward the highest-value tasks.

3. Leadership consensus: We align executive and departmental leaders on a unified vision. As seen at Pinnacol Assurance, having a board and CEO who “embrace AI and encourage the team to move fast and think big” is a primary driver of successful transformation.

AI adoption is complex and often meets organizational resistance. However, by partnering with a specialized expert to navigate these product evolutions, you can take control of the momentum and leapfrog your competitors.

Connect with us at Google Cloud Next 2026

If you are ready to move from saving time to reinvesting in breakthroughs, there is no better place to start than Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas (April 22–24). Insight’s Google Cloud change management experts will be on-site to help you turn the theory of AI ROI into a practical roadmap for your organization. We invite you to register here and join us to see live demos of these AI workflows in action and speak 1:1 with our team about the specific strategy your business needs to leapfrog the competition.

Register now: Ready to move from saving time to reinvesting in breakthroughs? Join us at Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas to see live demos of these AI workflows in action.