Even as companies make big bets on AI transformations and as employees at all levels feel increasing levels of AI anxiety, satisfaction is sinking.

In a Bain survey of 100 CEOs, roughly 80% said they are dissatisfied with the progress of their AI programs, despite the heavy investment and high expectations. And it isn’t only the CEOs who aren’t happy with AI transformations. According to ADP’s Today at Work 2026 report, only 18% of skilled task workers felt their job was safe.

The problem isn’t the technology but that it’s not reaching the people who matter. We call them champions: the people on the front lines who stand to make the biggest contributions if their performance could be augmented with AI. It’s a group that feels particularly anxious as they watch their companies spend millions of dollars on AI efforts to boost productivity in the organization without knowing how or when they could be impacted.

Automating and simplifying activities performed at scale have become table stakes because all companies have access to the same tools. Augmenting frontline champions, on the other hand, creates something proprietary. It enhances your people, your processes, your data, and your customer relationships in ways that competitors can’t easily copy.

In consumer products, that could be key account managers and brand managers. In retail, that could be store managers, and category managers. In industrial companies, that could be field service engineers and technical sales teams.

The common thread across all of these: Frontline champions are where human judgment, relationships, and domain expertise intersect with high-value outcomes. AI doesn’t replace them; it gives them superpowers.

That’s why the best companies are now reaching frontline champions with tools that can minimize the non-value-added parts of their jobs while improving the parts that matter most for performance.

They’re strategically placing such bets instead of defaulting to fragmented uses. These companies identify a handful of high-value roles where AI can meaningfully shift market share, reshape the economics, or create a new customer experience that competitors cannot easily copy.

Consider a global technology company that broke away from the pack by treating AI as a growth engine, not just an efficiency tool. Rather than limiting the use of AI to automating and simplifying activities, it zeroed in on a core value domain: its salesforce. The ambition was explicit—to double customer-facing time and lift revenue per rep by 30%.

By redesigning how reps prepared for meetings and accessed content, AI tools reduced the time spent searching for product material by 25%, freeing capacity for higher-value selling. Sellers showed up better prepared, responded faster, and won more deals.

Combined with other AI-enabled changes across the sales motion, the company increased revenue per headcount by more than 50% and translated those gains into a 30% uplift in earnings per share in the first two years of its journey.

Achieving such results starts by comparing the benefits to be gained by focusing on uses or frontline champions. Too many companies spread their AI investment across dozens of point solutions—a chatbot here, a document summarizer there—that deliver incremental efficiency but never shift performance. The alternative is to concentrate on your frontline champions and transform how they work end to end. For key account managers in consumer products, for example, the objective is to help them make better decisions, spend more time with clients, sell more effectively, achieve better pricing and margins, and deliver superior customer service.

To get there, you need to work on how they operate in a comprehensive way, across people, process, and technology. There are three areas of focus. First, deploy the right technology supported by proprietary data—AI tools embedded directly into how they work, streamlining preparation, and supporting them with insights and better decision making. Second, redesign the workflow to guide their approach from preparation through negotiation and execution. Finally, upskill the people so they can work effectively alongside AI tools.

The most powerful version of this starts with your best performers. In the consumer products example, that means augmenting your top key account managers by giving them faster data, better insights, and integrated workflows. Then use what you learn to bring every other key account manager up to that same level of performance leveraging the standardized workflow, tools, and proprietary data. A key account manager who walks into a negotiation with AI-generated insights into the retailer’s margin pressure and category trends isn’t just saving time. They’re performing at a level that wasn’t possible before. The distinction matters because productivity gains are easy to measure but hard to get people excited about, while augmentation creates genuine pull.

Where to start

It’s important to choose a posture that fits your strategy and your culture. For sure, empowering frontline champions isn’t always the right starting point. Much depends on the industry sector and culture. In banking, for example, there’s typically more value to be created by automating and simplifying activities and companywide processes. That’s also the case for companies across industries that aim to be the lowest-cost producer in their competitive set.

Select your priority areas for building a new level of competitive advantage. Companies can prioritize frontline champions and processes by considering their technology readiness and the potential value that can be delivered (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Make the “buy vs. build” decision. There are some areas in which you will need to lead your industry by building proprietary tools and processes. In others, you will be able to use off-the-shelf tools embedded in industry standards like CRM or ERP. Building proprietary AI-augmented workflows for your front line is precisely where sustainable competitive advantage comes from, whereas buying off-the-shelf tools will be good enough for standard activities.

Like elsewhere in the organization, frontline managers are concerned about how AI tools will be used in their jobs, and many fear the worst. The answer: Show them how they can use AI technology to outperform.

It’s time to think about how AI can deliver sources of competitive advantage. Although your competitors are still focused on automating and simplifying activities, the window is open to build something they can’t easily copy. The companies that move first to augment their front line will set a pace others will struggle to match.