Ask most employees what they use AI for at work, and the answers cluster around the same few tasks: drafting emails, summarising meetings, generating a first cut of a document. Useful? Absolutely. Transformative? Not quite.
This is the central tension in enterprise AI right now. Organisations have made the investments, rolled out the licences, and run the training sessions. Yet the value being unlocked remains stubbornly surface-level. The tools can do far more than most people ask of them.
Speaking on the UC Today AI & Productivity Show, Andreas Welsch, founder and chief AI strategist at Intelligence Briefing, offered a framework that cuts to the heart of this problem. He describes three concentric circles of AI value, each one broader and more impactful than the last.
"Tools like Microsoft Copilot and other AI assistants have done a really great job at elevating the conversation and raising awareness that we can do so much more with the help of technology. But most of the time, users are limited to: let's draft an email, let's summarise the meeting minutes. The basic things."
Circle one: Personal productivity
The innermost circle is personal productivity. This is where most organisations currently live. AI acts as a personal assistant: faster drafting, quicker summarisation, smarter search. The gains are real at an individual level, and for many employees this is their first meaningful experience of AI doing something genuinely useful.
Mark Nixon, AI Business Solutions go-to-market lead at Microsoft UK and Ireland, pointed to the scale of adoption underway. Microsoft reports paid Copilot seats grew more than 160% year over year, with daily active usage up tenfold. Those who engage with it are finding enough value to return.
But Welsch argues that personal productivity, while valuable, is only the starting point. For many organisations, it has become the ceiling.
He puts part of the blame on structure.
"Part of it is lack of knowledge and lack of hands-on experience. But part of it is also organisational and cultural. We need to be AI-first, we tell people to do a lot more with AI, and then we leave them up to their own devices to figure out what they should do."
Circle two: Operational excellence
The second circle moves from the individual to the team. Here, AI stops being a personal tool and starts driving process improvement. It automates the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drain teams week after week.
"What are the repetitive tasks that you work on every week, every month, every quarter that you can automate with the help of AI?" Welsch asks. "Go broader than just how can I optimise my own day."
This is where the practical examples start to land. Welsch shared one from a multinational manufacturing organisation. A plant manager pulled data exports from multiple systems, covering manufacturing execution, orders, finance and logistics, and tasked a research agent with finding correlations. Within a couple of hours, the team identified customers ordering the same parts multiple times a week. That opened a consolidation conversation that could cut transportation costs significantly.
Tom Arbuthnot, co-founder of Empowering Cloud and Microsoft MVP, makes a similar point.
"There's so much capability to improve processes right now. It doesn't have to be we've changed the entire business. It can just be lots of these little manual gaps that we can close."
Nixon points to Vodafone's RFP agents as a concrete example. Automating the manual process of compiling and responding to RFPs helped sellers handle two to three times more per week. For more on which productivity use cases are delivering results in 2026, UC Today has covered the workflows saving the most time across IT, HR, sales and operations.
Circle three: Strategic differentiation
The outermost circle is where the conversation shifts from efficiency to advantage. This is about creating things that were not previously possible: new products, new services, new offerings built on data and insights the organisation already holds.
