AI in Business: Why Automation Is Winning the First Wave

A new Anthropic report highlights what many of us working in AI already see every day: businesses aren’t using AI to brainstorm, code, or strategize first. They’re using it to automate.

The Key Findings

• Automation is the dominant use case. Most companies lean on AI for repetitive tasks—data entry, scheduling, customer support responses, documentation.
• Knowledge work support is secondary. AI is being used for research, writing, and summarization, but these are still early compared to automation.
• Few companies are transforming workflows yet. Strategic applications—rebuilding processes or business models around AI—remain rare.

What This Means

This tells us something crucial about how AI adoption really happens: businesses start where the risk is lowest and the ROI is clearest.

• Automating repetitive tasks is safe, measurable, and easy to scale.
• Asking AI to reshape strategy, marketing, or customer journeys feels riskier—so leaders hold back.

In other words, we’re in the comfort zone stage of AI adoption.

The Missed Opportunity

Here’s the problem: if leaders only view AI as a way to cut costs or speed up low-level tasks, they’re missing the bigger picture.

The real advantage of AI isn’t squeezing out a few hours of productivity. It’s reinventing workflows: how you sell, how you market, how you serve customers.

That’s where companies will pull ahead—because AI-native competitors won’t just automate, they’ll operate differently from the ground up.

Final Thought

The Anthropic report confirms the obvious: automation is step one. But if you stop there, you’ll plateau quickly.

The next wave of winners will be the ones who ask: How can AI rebuild my business, not just make it faster?