Paysend, a payments technology company headquartered in London, requires employees to earn the right to use artificial-intelligence tools. CEO Ben Chisell, who described himself as a "very cynical man" about AI hype in a CNBC interview, said the firm now produces roughly a quarter more engineering output with the same staff size.
Chisell limits AI access to his highest-performing engineers, granting tools only after they demonstrate concrete value. He warned that AI could amplify negative habits such as laziness and poor judgment, and called his cautious approach "unglamorous" but essential, according to CNBC.
Other British firms are taking the opposite route. Lloyds Banking Group has issued 40,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, with 97 % of recipients actively using them. Sage reported that its AI coding utilities saved hundreds of thousands of work hours, while Grant Thornton UK has encouraged all staff to adopt Anthropic’s Claude as part of a £500 million AI investment.
Government research released in January indicated that three-quarters of UK businesses using AI saw productivity improvements, yet 77 % reported no change in revenue, suggesting that efficiency gains do not automatically translate into financial growth.
Lokdeep Singh, chief executive of enterprise-software provider Unily, echoed Chisell’s view that AI should be treated as a "superpower" for top talent and cautioned against universal distribution as a cost-cutting measure. At Paysend, new hires receive a month to experiment with AI and must report tangible outcomes, a practice that recently led a SEO lead to propose a dedicated content-brief agent instead of a general tool.
CoreView pursued a broader rollout, with CEO Simon Azzopardi describing an early "very gung-ho" phase that equipped software engineers with AI for log analysis, documentation, and onboarding. The company now coordinates teams of AI agents to handle back-end and front-end coding, quality assurance, and documentation, shrinking tasks that once took weeks into days, though Azzopardi warned that misuse can create an illusion of efficiency.
When onboarding a major client in the UK National Health Service, CoreView added only a single engineer while maintaining other project deliveries, illustrating how AI-augmented capacity can support hiring rather than layoffs. The firm has continued to expand staff, leveraging the extra productivity to take on additional work.
Chisell believes firms will thrive by helping displaced workers transition into new roles rather than replacing them outright. He highlighted the lasting value of customer-service expertise and argued that technology should augment, not replace, human responsibility.