I've been doing workflow automations for many organizations for the last two years, and here is what I see:

1. every business unit and department was neglecting a best practice due to lack of investment in their organization. it has always been that way for decades and always will be that way because it isn't economically viable for it to be any other way. the workflow automations and agents we create act as digital workers that either do that neglected part, or let the rest of the organization do that neglected part.

2. the whole company always starts the year off with a bunch of goals, and by Q3 most of them are cancelled. now less of them are cancelled.

both factors mean that anyone just looking at "worker productivity" or "did we save money" is going to get the answer of no. everything is costing you the same, or the AI itself is costing you more. whatever contract I'm working under is definitely going to cost you more, if you don't cancel all those enterprise SaaS seats we told you to cancel.

I see a path to savings, but I don't think that's necessarily the metric to focus on. you need to look at the whole corporate structure, why are you still doing certain things, because those pressures will just make the org do more things because nobody is empowered to say "wait, maybe this is dumb"