How Enterprises Are Redirecting Hours Saved by Gen AI

“Managers using Gen AI are saving up to two hours and 50 minutes per week.”
- Harvard Business Review

That’s not just time saved, it is an entire strategic opportunity for enterprises.

In an enterprise, where productivity is king and time is often the scarcest resource, saving nearly three hours per employee per week is nothing small. These are not just efficiencies at the margins, they show a shift in how organisations operate, innovate and grow in 2025.

The question for enterprises is no longer whether Gen AI saves time. It’s now: What will you do with the time it saves?

In this article, we explore how enterprises are redirecting the time saved by Generative AI to improve overall business operations.

Time Lost to Manual, Repetitive Tasks

Before the AI wave, much of an enterprise team's bandwidth was tied up in routine tasks such as data entry, summarisation, report generation, answering internal queries or analysing raw information. While important, these tasks rarely contribute directly to strategic growth or innovation.

For example, let’s consider:

• Analysts spend hours combing through unstructured data before they can begin forming insights.

• Customer service teams are overwhelmed by routine tickets and FAQs.

• Marketing team spend days tracking ad performance and building reports manually.

• Developers wait on time-consuming documentation processes or slog through repetitive code writing.

In this environment, high-value work like long-term strategy development, product innovation, customer experience and competitive analysis often takes a back seat. Not due to a lack of talent or ambition but simply because of time constraints.

How Gen AI Frees Up Time for What Matters

Generative AI does not just automate tasks, it helps enterprises boost workflows. By integrating Gen AI into everyday business functions, enterprises can accelerate repetitive processes and shift human attention toward work that requires creativity, critical thinking and innovation.

According to Deloitte, 45% of organisations plan to reinvest time and cost savings from Gen AI into driving innovation, while 43% aim to improve core operations. This dual approach addresses both sides of the value equation such as expansion and efficiency.

In short: the time saved is not going to waste. It’s being redirected to power the future.

How Enterprises Are Reinvesting Time Saved Through Gen AI

Let’s break down the three core areas where time savings from Gen AI are being reinvested:

1. Driving Innovation

With Gen AI taking over routine cognitive tasks, more employees have the freedom and capacity to think creatively, experiment and explore new opportunities.

• Ideation and Prototyping: Teams can rapidly brainstorm and test ideas using AI-generated mockups, text, designs, or code. This significantly shortens the time between concept and execution, enabling faster go-to-market cycles.

• Accelerated R&D: In industries like pharma, finance, and tech, Gen AI supports research by summarising whitepapers, simulating outcomes, and identifying patterns across vast datasets. Researchers can move from exploration to validation far more efficiently.

• Creative Campaigns: Marketing and design teams use Gen AI to generate visual concepts, ad copy variations, and A/B testing options, helping them run more experiments faster.

L’Oréal used AI-driven tools such as BETiq to improve how advertising and promotions are measured and optimised. The result? It reported a 15% increase in marketing ROI, allowing marketing teams to spend more time on creative ideation and campaign strategy.

2. Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making

One of the most critical and often time-starved functions in any enterprise is strategic planning. With Gen AI stepping in to handle data gathering, reporting and summarisation, leaders now have more bandwidth to focus on higher-order thinking.

• Faster Insights for Faster Decisions: Instead of spending hours sifting through dashboards or lengthy reports, Gen AI tools can summarise trends, flag anomalies and suggest actions, helping leadership teams to make decisions with greater speed and confidence.

• Scenario Planning and Forecasting: AI models can simulate various business scenarios, projecting how decisions might play out. This reduces risk and strengthens the quality of long-term planning.

• Managerial Time: Harvard Business Review reports that managers using Gen AI save nearly 2 hours and 50 minutes per week. This time is increasingly being redirected into strategy sessions, competitive analysis and aligning cross-functional efforts- areas that traditionally fell to the wayside due to operational overload.

Bloomberg uses AI to automate up to 80% of an analyst’s workload, especially around parsing unstructured data like financial reports or market insights. This means analysts can now focus more on interpretation, trend-spotting and delivering insights that shape investment or corporate strategy.

3. Improving Core Business Functions

From customer service to software development, generative AI is helping businesses with operational efficiency by freeing human teams to focus on value-adding tasks that require judgement, empathy or creative problem-solving.

• Customer Experience: AI-driven chatbots and assistants handle routine queries, reducing response times and allowing support agents to focus on complex, high-touch interactions that improve customer satisfaction and retention.

• Administrative Automation: Gen AI automates tasks like drafting emails, filling reports, scheduling, and document classification areas that previously consumed large chunks of knowledge workers' time. For instance, a government agency deployed Gen AI to automate processes at scale, saving over three million operational hours. 

• Software Development: Engineers are using Gen AI to write boilerplate code, detect bugs and generate documentation. This lets them spend more time on architecture, innovation and performance optimisation. 

Did You Know?

Airbnb used LLM-powered automation to migrate 3,500 test files in just six weeks—down from an estimated 1.5 years. This helped them migrate code from months to weeks. Learn more here. 

Conclusion

Generative AI is changing the way enterprises work and win. Whether you're streamlining operations or innovation, the key is to reinvest the saved time for long-term value. If you're unsure how to find the right generative AI solution or where to begin, consider partnering with our experts.

NexGen Labs is the consultancy and R&D division of NexGen Cloud, providing advanced Generative AI Strategy Consulting to businesses on their journey into artificial intelligence. Whether you're exploring Gen AI, strategising deployment or optimising existing processes, NexGen Labs offers expert guidance and cutting-edge research to ensure you stay ahead with the right Gen AI solution.

FAQs

What is Generative AI and how does it help enterprises?

Generative AI automates cognitive tasks like summarisation, content creation and data analysis, helping enterprises save time and refocus on strategic and creative work.

What are enterprises doing with the time saved by Gen AI?

Companies are redirecting saved time toward innovation, strategic planning, customer experience, talent upskilling, and core business optimisation for long-term value.

Can small teams benefit from Gen AI just like large enterprises?

Yes, small teams can leverage Gen AI for automating repetitive tasks, freeing up time for growth-oriented activities and improving operational efficiency.

Is Gen AI only useful for technical departments?

Not at all. Gen AI is widely used across marketing, HR, finance, customer support, and leadership for automating tasks and enhancing strategic impact.

How can NexGen Labs support my Gen AI journey?

NexGen Labs offers expert consulting, strategy development, and AI R&D to help businesses identify, deploy, and scale generative AI solutions effectively.