AI Can Cut Your Costs And Still Leave You Behind

The larger competitive advantage comes from turning cheaper thinking into faster experiments, decisions and improvements that customers value.

By John J. Sviokla

A CEO can make a great deal of money using artificial intelligence to reduce labor costs. We should acknowledge that before arguing about what comes next.

In June 2025, C.H. Robinson reported that its AI orders agent was interpreting emailed shipping requests and building orders in about 90 seconds. The company said the agent handled 5,500 truckload orders a day and saved 600 hours of daily labor. Those are company estimates of work saved, but the economic opportunity is easy to see.

Now imagine two competitors capturing similar savings. One improves its margins. The other also invests in understanding customer problems, testing solutions and changing how the business works. Over successive cycles of improvement, their capabilities can diverge even if they use the same models.

That is the strategic issue I’m exploring in my book, The Generative Organization. AI gives companies a chance to learn faster than the competition on things that matter to customers. Labor savings can help finance that advantage.

Cheaper thinking changes what a business can attempt

Computing has been getting cheaper for decades. What makes this period different is the range of thinking that can become economical.

People can describe what they need in their own language, inspect a result and refine it while the details are still fresh. An expert’s knowledge has a shorter journey into a working artifact. Models can also connect words, images and other forms of information that were expensive to analyze together. And they can explore enough alternatives to make previously impractical experiments worth trying.

For a CEO, the interesting possibility is that more people can consider a problem across functional boundaries. Useful expertise becomes easier to bring into a decision.

The management cycle has to accelerate too