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Your Team's Saving Hours With AI. Where Are They Going?

A smiling marketing coordinator relaxes at her desk by a sunset window overlooking a small downtown. A large wall clock marked with the Swix AI logo glows beside her laptop and a notepad labeled 'Strategy,' suggesting AI giving her time back for higher-value work.
AI is finally handing destination marketing teams real time back. Here's the strange part: for most teams, that time is already gone, and nobody noticed it leave.

The stat that stopped me

BCG just released their fourth annual "AI at Work" study, almost 12,000 people worldwide. One number jumped out. Forty-two percent of frontline employees who use AI regularly now save at least a full workday every week. In marketing specifically, it's even higher, at 60%. That's not a rounding error. That's a whole day, and then some, for the people who do our kind of work.

The time-to-value gap: AI frees up hours, but for most teams they never become strategic work. (BCG, 2026)
The time-to-value gap: AI frees up hours, but for most teams they never become strategic work. (BCG, 2026)

But the finding underneath it is the one that actually matters. Two-thirds of those same people got little or no guidance on what to do with the time they saved.

More than half didn't redirect it toward anything strategic. It just quietly refilled with more of the same.


BCG calls this the gap between "time saved" and "value captured." I'd say it plainer. Saving time isn't the win. It's the setup for the win. And most teams are stopping at the setup.


It's not really a tool problem

Here's the reframe I keep coming back to. The hours AI saves are just raw material. What matters is what your team turns them into. BCG's headline this year says it plainly: strategy matters more than tools. Employees with a clear plan but limited tools actually outperform those with great tools and no direction.



88% expect they'll need major reskilling; only 36% feel ready today. (BCG, 2026)
88% expect they'll need major reskilling; only 36% feel ready today. (BCG, 2026)

There's a skills piece underneath this too, and it surprised me. In the same study, 88% of people expect they'll need serious re-skilling in the next few years, but only 36% feel properly trained today. That gap has less to do with knowing which buttons to press and more to do with how people actually work. Using AI well is more like building a new set of habits than learning a piece of software once.


Direction plus habits is what turns a saved hour into a better outcome.

If your budget is tight, that's genuinely good news. The expensive part was never the software. It's the strategy, and helping your team build the new habits to go with it. Full disclosure, that's a big part of what we focus on at Swix, less about the tool, more about the way of working around it. It matters here because it's usually the missing piece between "we saved time" and "we did something better with it."


Why this hits DMOs harder

You've been told to do more with less for years, and it hasn't let up. Budgets are flat. Teams are small. So when AI hands one of your people an afternoon back, the gravity of the job pulls it straight into the next pile. Another report. More inbox. A meeting that could've been an email.


Think about your social media coordinator. She used to spend most of Thursday writing next week's posts one at a time. Now an agent drafts the whole week in twenty minutes and she cleans it up. The win looks obvious. But if that reclaimed afternoon just fills with more small tasks, the tool worked perfectly and nothing actually changed. You automated your way back onto the same treadmill.


That's why "we got AI" and "AI is helping us" are not the same sentence. The tool is the easy part.


Here's what got me thinking about this. We're onboarding a DMO team right now, and part of our setup is asking each person one simple question: if we automate the busywork, what would you actually do with the time? The answers stuck with me. The events coordinator said she'd spend it building real relationships with local businesses and partners, and claw back a little work-life balance. The new marketing director said she'd finally get to the big-picture strategy she never has room for. A content creator juggling a young family just wanted to protect her personal time and get back to the creative work she loves.


Not one of them said "more tasks." They all knew exactly where the time should go. So the gap BCG found isn't that people don't know what they'd do with reclaimed time. It's that once the time shows up, nothing helps them actually protect it.


What the best teams actually do

The teams capturing real value do one unglamorous thing differently. They decide, on purpose and ahead of time, where the saved hours go. Three habits can help make it stick:


  • Name the time before you save it. Decide what the freed hour is for before you automate the task. "When the weekly social drafts get handled, that time goes to pitching two local stories to press." If you don't name it, the job names it for you, and the job always says "more tasks."

  • Point it at the work only a human can do. The real storytelling. The stubborn stakeholder relationship. Actually visiting the new business that wants to be featured. That's where a reclaimed afternoon earns its keep.

  • Protect it like a meeting. Put it on the calendar. Unprotected time doesn't survive a busy week, and you know that better than anyone.


Whose job is this, really?

Here's the part that took me a while to see. Redeploying that reclaimed time is really a leadership job, not something to pin on the coordinator. If nobody at the top decides the freed hours go to strategy, they default to whatever shouts loudest, and that's almost always more email.


I saw a sharp take on this recently (hat tip below) describing a project inside one of the largest companies in the world. They were getting steady productivity gains from AI, which sounds great, but not the breakthrough gains leadership expected. The reason was painfully human. People got time back and just refilled it with more small tasks. Productivity, it turns out, can quietly become the enemy of innovation. Someone has to own the redeployment, or it doesn't happen.


For a DMO, that someone is usually you: the director, the CEO, whoever sets the week's priorities. It's a small shift. Instead of celebrating that a tool saved the team five hours, ask where those five hours actually went, and then protect the answer.


Part of why it slips away

There's a structural reason too. BCG found the organizations seeing real gains aren't the ones that bolted AI onto a single task. They're the ones that redesigned the whole workflow, and that kind of rethink-the-process work has nearly doubled since last year.


For a lean DMO team, the lesson is to not just automate the annoying step. Step back and ask what the whole process is even for. If you automate one paragraph of a board report but the report still takes three rounds of email to pull together, you saved a paragraph and kept the mess. Rethink the process, and the time you free up is actually yours to keep.


You don't need a big rollout to start. Pick one task your team automated, or is about to. Decide where that hour goes before it disappears. Then guard it.

The time is already there for a lot of you. The only question left is whether you spend it, or it spends you.


-Jason


Credit where it's due: the data here is from BCG's "AI at Work 2026" report, "Why Strategy Matters More Than Tools": https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/ai-at-work-why-strategy-matters-more-than-tools. And a hat tip to Conor Grennan, whose LinkedIn post on the study sparked the leadership angle: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conorgrennan_i-freakin-love-studies-that-match-with-reality-share-7479904231047667712-saIp

 
 
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