AI Is Giving Us Time Back.
What Are We Going to Do With It?
AI can help Learning & Development, Organisational Development and Organisational Effectiveness work faster, but if it creates capacity, where should that capacity go — more output, lower cost, or work that creates different value?
Elaine Wright · Simply Wright · October 2026
There is a lot of conversation at the moment about what AI might mean for Learning & Development, Organisational Development and Organisational Effectiveness. Much of it, understandably, is about what AI can help us to do more quickly.
We can use it to create learning content, analyse information, draft communications, summarise feedback, research, develop resources and produce first versions of reports or presentations in a fraction of the time some of those activities might previously have taken. I am already seeing the difference in how quickly some work can be done, and it is difficult to imagine that this won't continue.
The question I keep coming back to, though, is not simply what AI can do for us. It is what happens to the capacity it creates.
What are we going to do with the time AI gives us back?
The productivity dividend has to go somewhere
There are several possible answers.
We might use the time to produce more. If content, analysis, reports and resources can be created more quickly, it becomes possible to increase the volume of what we produce without increasing the resource required to do it.
Organisations might look at the same productivity gain differently. If work that previously required five days can now be completed in four, it is reasonable to expect questions about whether the same work could be delivered with less resource.
There is another possibility, though, and it is the one I find most interesting. What if we deliberately reinvested some of that capacity in work we have often said we would like more time to do?
Things such as:
-
spending more time understanding what is actually happening in the organisation before responding;
-
working alongside leaders on the problems they are trying to solve, rather than simply responding to requests for an intervention;
-
looking more closely at performance, capability and the conditions in which people are working;
-
following work through to understand whether it has made a difference;
-
evaluating, learning and adapting rather than moving immediately onto the next piece of work;
-
exploring some of the more complex organisational questions that do not necessarily arrive with an obvious solution.
None of those things is new. In fact, we have been talking about many of them across L&D, OD and OE for years. Perhaps what AI changes is our capacity to actually do more of them.
Where our time goes is not necessarily where our value lies.
Some of our most valuable work is difficult to see
A lot of the work that takes our time is also very visible. A course exists. A toolkit can be shared. A report can be circulated. A presentation can be delivered. A communication has been sent. We can point to those things and say, there is the work.
Some of the work that may create greater value is much harder to see.
Spending time trying to understand why two apparently similar teams are experiencing very different outcomes may not immediately produce anything tangible. Working with a leadership team to explore why an issue keeps recurring may initially create more questions than answers. Looking properly at why learning is not transferring into practice may lead us away from learning altogether and towards workload, process, incentives, leadership, technology or the way work has been designed.
Sometimes good organisational work may even result in us deciding not to produce the thing we were originally asked for.
That creates an interesting tension. If AI gives us additional capacity, it is probably not enough to say that we will use it to do "higher-value work". We need to be much clearer about what we mean by that, why the organisation needs it and what difference we expect it to make.
What happens to the fifth day?
Imagine that AI enables a team to complete in four days what would previously have occupied five.
The fifth day might become a cost saving. It might allow the team to take on additional work. It might create space for deeper work that has previously been squeezed out by delivery pressures.
Or, perhaps more likely in some organisations, demand simply expands until the space disappears.
That possibility is worth paying attention to because it would be very easy for AI to help us produce more, faster, while leaving the underlying pattern of our work largely unchanged. The diary fills again, expectations increase and the additional capacity is gradually absorbed.
A year later, we may be producing considerably more than we were before while still saying that we do not have enough time to step back, understand what is happening or evaluate whether our work is making a difference.
AI could make us more productive without necessarily making us more effective.
What have we been wanting more time for?
For years, many of us working across L&D, OD and OE have argued that our contribution is bigger than the things we produce. Within L&D, there has been a long-running conversation about moving beyond courses and becoming more focused on performance and capability. OD has increasingly emphasised the importance of understanding organisations as systems rather than reaching immediately for an intervention. Organisational Effectiveness asks us to consider how structure, leadership, capability, culture, processes and ways of working interact to influence organisational performance.
Across all of those disciplines there is a familiar frustration: we know we should spend more time doing some of this work, but the demands of delivery get in the way.
AI may start to remove some of that pressure. If it does, it also leaves us with a slightly uncomfortable question: what exactly have we been wanting more time for?
It is easy to say that we want to become more strategic, work more closely with the organisation or focus on higher-value activity. Those phrases only really mean something if we can explain what we would do differently and why it would matter.
If technology removes some of the work that has traditionally occupied our time, it may force us to become clearer about where our distinctive contribution actually lies.
Perhaps that is the bigger opportunity.
Making the choice consciously
I don't think the most interesting AI conversation for L&D, OD and OE is about how quickly we can create a course, write a report or produce a set of resources. Those things matter, and using technology well should make some aspects of our work easier.
The more interesting opportunity is what becomes possible when some of that work takes less time. We might produce more, reduce cost, or allow the space to be swallowed by additional demand. We might also deliberately use some of it to get closer to the organisation, understand problems more deeply, work differently with leaders, evaluate what happens and spend more time on the complex work that technology cannot simply complete for us.
There probably isn't one answer, and different organisations will make different choices. I do think we need to make that choice consciously, though. Otherwise, we may find ourselves celebrating the hours AI has saved while quietly filling every one of them with more of the work we were already doing.
Perhaps, then, the question is not simply how we can use AI to do our work faster, but what we want to have more time for when AI gives some of that time back.
If AI gives us some of our time back, what do we want to have more time for?
And, perhaps more importantly, can we demonstrate why that is a better use of it?