Roughly 20% to 30% of operating expenses will come from spending on agents versus humans in the next three to four years, according to a new report summarizing the views of C-suite leaders from consultancy Bain & Company. Businesses looking to get a leg up on competitors say they are under pressure to use the most advanced AI products, but costs are rising (new models like Anthropic’s Fable are double the cost of OpenAI’s most powerful model). Bain’s answer is a mix of models whose capabilities (and price) matches the task — a bet also made by Perplexity and several open source model makers.

For their part, workers say AI saves 11 hours a week on average, according to a separate survey of 6,000 full-time digital workers in the US, UK, and Australia from AI startup Glean. While 87% of workers use AI at work, only 13% say AI has significantly improved their organization’s performance. And it turns out the employees getting the most out of AI are those who tend to break the rules: More than half of users who say AI has improved their work use unapproved tools — or authorized tools in unapproved ways — and more than a third hide from their manager how much AI helps them.