Human performance

Challenge:

Faced with intense public scrutiny, declining trust and regulatory pressure, the organisation lacked alignment between individual behaviours, wider culture and operational metrics.

Solution:

EY teams partnered to make culture operational, not aspirational – mapping cultural gaps, co‑designing a practical culture change plan and embedding values‑based behaviours. We helped implement a new measurement approach which tracks culture across multiple long-term metrics.

Outcomes:

100% of participants reported confidence in applying organisational values in day-to-day work. The programme has embedded culture into systems, reinforcing that values only drive behaviour when they are integrated into everyday processes and ways of working.

Transformation value often leaks in the gap between deployment and adoption. Whilst organisations may successfully implement new technologies, value is only realised when people adapt the way they work, make decisions and develop new capabilities. Common signs of value leakage include slower-than-expected adoption, technology investments failing to deliver the expected benefits, and skills gaps that constrain transformation progress.

The AI-value gap is the difference between the value organisations typically target from AI and the value that is actually available. Many organisations focus on efficiency gains, but these represent only an estimated 20-25% of AI's potential value. The remaining 70-75% comes from reimagining how work is done across the enterprise, combining human and AI capabilities and reducing siloed work to create new sources of value.¹

This gap matters because AI investment continues to grow. Whilst 80% of CEOs plan to increase AI investment,² only 5% of employees use AI in ways that fundamentally transform how they work.³ In many organisations, the challenge is no longer adoption but realising value at scale.

Sources:

1. “How agentic AI can help unlock enterprise value at scale”, EY, accessed 18 September 2026
2. “Can disciplined ambition unlock growth in a volatile global economy?”, EY, accessed 18 September 2026
3. “Can AI advance toward value if workforce tensions linger?”, EY, , accessed 18 September 2026

Organisations can close the AI-value gap by shifting from technology-led adoption to performance-led transformation. This means moving beyond automating individual tasks and focussing on redesigning how work is performed across the enterprise. It also involves combining human judgement with AI capabilities, embedding AI into decision-making and measuring long-term business value rather than short-term efficiency gains alone.

Many leaders recognise the scale of this change. Nearly half of CEOs (44%) anticipate redesigning roles to combine human and AI capabilities.¹ When organisations focus solely on efficiency, they risk standardising processes and outputs rather than creating new sources of value. The greatest returns are realised when AI is used to enhance human performance, strengthen decision-making and unlock new ways of working.

Source:

“The CEO Imperative Series: Can disciplined ambition unlock growth in a volatile global economy?”, EY, accessed 18 September 2026

Leadership capability plays a critical role in how effectively organisations adapt, make decisions and execute change. When leadership capability does not keep pace with increasing business complexity, organisations can experience slower decision-making, reduced agility and weaker transformation outcomes.

Culture plays a critical role in determining whether transformation efforts succeed. It often evolves more slowly than strategic, operational and technological change, creating friction that can limit adoption, slow progress and reduce the value realised from transformation initiatives.

Common warning signs include new priorities failing to translate into day-to-day behaviours, leaders sending inconsistent cultural signals, and teams struggling to adapt to new ways of working. Culture becomes a driver of performance when change is embedded into decisions, routines, systems and reward mechanisms, and its impact is measured and reinforced over time.

Performance is constrained by operating friction, decision latency and misaligned ways of working. Sustained high performance requires organisations to assess whether the conditions for success are in place, strengthen the culture and capabilities that support them, and establish decision-making processes and operating models that improve the speed and quality of decisions across the organisation.