The Best AI Results Come From Better Collaboration, Not More Delegation

InnovationThe Best AI Results Come From Better Collaboration, Not More DelegationByEmily Lewis-Pinnell,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 18, 2026, 09:15am EDTEmily Lewis-Pinnell, Driving AI Adoption at Evaila. GettyOne of the most important signals in enterprise AI right now is not just that the technology is improving. It is that more experienced users are getting better results from it.That matters because it challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in the market: that the path to value is simply handing more work over to AI. The latest research points in a different direction. Anthropic’s March 2026 Economic Index found that high-tenure users were more likely to take on higher-value tasks and more likely to get successful results. OpenAI’s "The State of Enterprise AI" 2025 report shows a similar pattern inside organizations: The workers reporting the greatest time savings were not just using AI more often but using more tools, applying it across a wider range of tasks and working with it in more advanced ways.That suggests the real divide is not between organizations using AI and those that are not. It is between organizations helping people become better collaborators with AI and organizations still treating AI as a shortcut.It also reinforces a point I made in a prior article on broad enablement versus deep transformation. The strongest AI strategies do not choose between the two. Broad enablement builds fluency and surfaces opportunities across the business. Deep transformation redesigns workflows so AI can create measurable value. The organizations seeing the strongest results are doing both.The Anthropic and OpenAI findings sharpen that argument. Access matters because people need practice to move beyond novelty. But transformation is where more advanced AI habits get translat...