Home topics news pexels News News How to capture the productivity gain AI is already delivering in your business Yajush Gupta April 1, 2026 Buying AI tools was the easy part. Capturing the return is where most small businesses are falling short. Here is the practical fix. Why this matters : For small business owners, nine hours per worker per week is a meaningful return on the investment made in AI tools. But capturing that return requires more than buying the technology. It requires deliberate decisions about where that time goes, and most businesses have not made those decisions yet. Most small business owners adopted AI tools expecting a productivity leap. According to new research from RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics, the leap already happened. The problem is most businesses cannot see it. The report, based on a survey of 2,025 members of the Australian labour force conducted in January 2026, found that AI saves the average worker nine hours per week. Millennials save 11 hours. Even Boomers, the least confident AI users, save six hours weekly. At those numbers, a small business with five staff is potentially recovering more than 40 hours of productive capacity every week through AI tools already in use. That is effectively a full-time employee’s worth of time, generated without a new hire, without a pay increase and without additional overhead. The question is where that time is going. Where the time is actually going The research is direct on this point. Nearly half