How being people-first unlocks the AI potential you’ve already paid for, but not yet realised

You’ve deployed the tools, and most of your organisation now has access to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude or Google Gemini. The business case promised transformation, faster decisions, sharper thinking, cost savings, and a step-change in productivity. However, six months in, the conversation around the boardroom is quieter, more cautious, and far more honest than the original business case stated.

Usage is uneven - a small group of enthusiasts is producing genuinely impressive results, while the majority hover on the edges, curious, sceptical, or quietly overwhelmed. That headline 7% productivity uplift advertised by the hyperscalers feels thin, when the technology was sold as revolutionary. At the same time, a new and unexpected tension is emerging; token usage is climbing fast, costs are becoming harder to predict, and AI is beginning to look less like a productivity engine and more like an expanding line item on the P&L. Shadow AI continues to spread through the organisation, creating risks and behaviours that existing governance frameworks were never designed to contain.

Why a people-first approach really unlocks this AI potential

It is becoming obvious to us and others that the gap between having AI readily to hand, and extracting value from it is not technical, it is human. It is about confidence, capability, and culture, not models, licences, or features. Poor prompting, unfocused experimentation, and low skill levels drive bloated token consumption and inconsistent outcomes. Your best people are brimming with ideas about how AI could fundamentally improve the way they work, but they lack the time, support, or specialist skills to turn those ideas into something production-ready, efficient, and compliant. Your average performers don’t know where to start, and at the same time, your leadership team is being asked to make strategic decisions about a capability they’ve never really had the chance to master themselves.

The untapped accelerators already in your organisation

Somewhere inside your business right now, a small group of advanced users has already cracked it.

They’ve uncovered prompts that collapse hours into minutes, and built agents that quietly erase entire categories of mundane, repetitive work. They’ve even discovered ways to increase their personal productivity by 40%, sometimes even 45%, while using fewer tokens, not more, because their interactions are deliberate, structured, precise, and continuously self-evaluating.

Yet these breakthroughs remain trapped inside individuals or isolated teams, leading to the feeling of ‘pilotitis’ where value is proven in small pockets, but not at scale. So the obvious question emerges; what if those pockets of genius could be captured, refined, and shared at scale? What if the ingenuity already present in your organisation could be professionalised and distributed, rather than rediscovered again and again through expensive trial and error?

This is where real productivity will happen; not in the AI itself, but in the deliberate act of lifting more of your AI use to the level of your best users. When you take the most valuable discoveries from your power users, turn them into hardened, enterprise-grade solutions, and drive adoption at scale, the mathematics of impact shifts dramatically. Productivity rises, while token usage becomes predictable, controlled, and purposeful.

Instead of 5% of your organisation operating at 40% increased productivity, you enable 70% of your organisation to work at 25 to 30% higher effectiveness. meaning that the result isn’t linear. it’s compounding.

A people-first, systematic approach to go from 7% to 30% productivity gains

Valliance exists to bridge this gap through a systematic people-first motion built on four tightly connected elements; accelerate, adopt, educate and govern.

Our ‘agent factory’ accelerates and systematically scales the impact of those proven pockets of AI value across the organisation by being an always-on engine, working shoulder-to-shoulder with your most advanced users to capture and industrialise their best thinking and spread them across the enterprise. The clever prompt your finance director created becomes a robust, tested solution that anyone can use without burning unnecessary tokens. The agent your operations team built is transformed into an enterprise-grade asset, optimised for efficiency, and distributed across the business, safely and deliberately.

We then focus relentlessly on adoption, because productivity and cost-saving tools drive a hockey-stick return on investment as usage grows. Through community, evangelism, and continuous engagement, AI becomes part of how work actually gets done, with higher-quality interactions replacing unfocused experimentation.

It goes without saying that education is key for everyone, but leadership sets the tone, and desperately needs more confidence to meaningfully lead and guide AI initiatives, so it’s where we start. We build genuine AI fluency in your leadership team through practical, hands-on enablement in a psychologically safe environment. This is not abstract theory, but real confidence forged through real application, including an understanding of how intelligent usage directly affects cost, risk, and return.

Now with increased fluency in both the possibilities, and risks of AI, we can help your leadership team establish governance that enables progress rather than smothering it; guardrails that allow speed without introducing unacceptable risk or runaway cost, and ultimately eliminating shadow AI use.

No more over-running transformation programmes that don’t deliver

This is where the model changes and the Valliance approach bucks the bloated consulting models of the past where the focus was (in reality, if not in the rhetoric) on value for the consultant, not the client.

At Valliance, we don’t bill for consultancy hours, workshops, or time spent. The value we take is tied directly to the value we help you generate. You realise gains from month one, and we only take our share once that value is captured. If the productivity improvements don’t materialise, we don’t profit.

The risk sits entirely with us. This isn’t consulting theatre. It’s a partnership aligned to outcomes, not activity.

Getting started without the risk

The organisations that will dominate their sectors won’t be the ones with the most advanced AI tools, they’ll be the ones that solved the human challenge; by thinking people-first, and building AI-native cultures where confidence grows, capability compounds, innovation scales naturally, and cost stays under control.

Your most difficult investment decision has already been made; the tools are deployed. The only remaining question is whether you now commit to unlocking their true potential, or allow that investment to continue delivering quietly disappointing returns and steadily rising usage costs.

The difference between 7% and 30% productivity improvement isn’t technical, it’s people-first, it’s systematic, it’s human, it’s entirely achievable, and with Valliance, it comes with zero risk to you.

Talk to us about what a people-first partnership with Valliance might look like for you.