A PwC study reveals the leading 20% of companies capture 75% of AI's economic gains. They focus on using AI to identify new growth opportunities and reinvent business models, rather than simply improving efficiency on existing tasks.

The most successful organizations will view AI not as a tool for cost-cutting (doing the same with less) but as an expansionary technology. This mindset focuses on using AI to create new products, enter new markets, and dramatically increase scope, rather than just incremental efficiency gains.

Many organizations miss AI's transformative potential by limiting its use to optimizing current workflows. The real opportunity lies in fundamentally rethinking how work is done, much like AWS enabled entirely new business models beyond just cheaper hosting.

Using AI for incremental efficiency gains (10% thinking) is becoming table stakes. True competitive advantage lies in 10X thinking: using AI to fundamentally reimagine your business model, services, and market approach. Companies that only optimize will be outmaneuvered by those that transform.

Most companies use AI for optimization—making existing processes faster and cheaper. The greater opportunity is innovation: using AI to create entirely new forms of value. This "10x thinking" is critical for growth, especially as pure efficiency gains will ultimately lead to a reduced need for human workers.

Companies can either augment existing processes with AI for incremental efficiency (e.g., co-pilots) or completely redesign workflows. While augmentation is common, the most transformative value and disruptive business models will emerge from a clean-sheet redesign of how work is done.

A more advanced use of AI involves working backward from an ultimate goal. By having AI interview you about your objectives and context, you can uncover opportunities to fundamentally change or eliminate workflows, rather than just making inefficient processes faster. This shifts the focus from productivity to innovation.

The greatest value of AI isn't just automating tasks within your current process. Leaders should use AI to fundamentally question the workflow itself, asking it to suggest entirely new, more efficient, and innovative ways to achieve business goals.

The initial phase of any new technology is applying it to old problems. The transformative phase is creating things previously impossible. The key question for AI is not 'How can we do X faster?' but 'What new thing can we do now?', similar to how Spotify redefined music beyond an online CD store.