The Power of Productivity

Two sales teams walk into the same market with identical products, budgets, and territory. After 6 months, one team has closed 66% more deals with 20% fewer people. The other is still manually updating spreadsheets while their competitors have automated lead scoring, hyper-personalised their outreach, running predictive analytics 24/7.

This performance today is not science fiction.

In 2025, the companies building better products and winning more business are not only working harder, they are working exponentially smarter. Organisations leveraging smart workers combined with powerful AI & automation tools are fundamentally outperforming their peers and the results are staggering.

Outlined in Jakob Nielsen’s PhD paper on Employee Productivity, AI-proficient teams are not only delivering 1.7x more output but are doing so with 20% lower headcount. More importantly, Gallup’s study on over 180,000 businesses showed these teams are generating 23% more in profit.

We have entered a new realm of company-building.

This is the power of productivity today.

Yet productivity hasn't always meant the same thing; technology has evolved and fundamentally changed our understanding of what's possible. Its historical trajectory reveals why productivity today, now powered by AI and automation, is the ultimate business catalyst.

1900s – The Industrial Age: Henry Ford revolutionised industry through assembly-line innovations, while Nikola Tesla's alternating current powered entire cities and factories. Productivity was synonymous with mechanisation, standardisation, and electricity transforming human capability.
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1990s – The Internet Revolution: Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web created "a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information." By the 2000s, email, enterprise software, and instant communication enabled global collaboration and digital efficiency.
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2025 – The AI and Automation Era: Today, we're witnessing the next Tesla-level transformation. AI represents the biggest leap in human productivity since electricity itself. But 7 out of 10 HR professionals are suffering with a shortage in talent that can utilise these tools beyond a basic standard.

Now, power officially belongs to professionals that are able to blend their human creativity with artificial intelligence: people who can effectively combine advanced AI and automation skills with strategic insight, emotional intelligence, and collaborative leadership.

This change has created a seismic shift in traditional hiring hierarchies. From startups to enterprise and tech giants, hiring is being completely rewritten. “X years of experience” is no longer the primary differentiator but productivity has become the new premium qualifier, where people skilled in AI & automation tools are becoming a company’s most valuable asset.

In fact, Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index found 66% of business leaders now would not consider candidates who lack AI skills, with a striking 71% hiring less experienced people with AI expertise over more experienced people without it.

Just imagine what an individual with both experience and AI proficiency could achieve.

What we understand is that the most valuable professionals of tomorrow possess three key traits: curiosity, learning agility, and intelligence. Fundamental characteristics that separate good employees from transformational ones in this new era.

Curiosity drives people to explore new ways of working, thinking, and problem-solving. Harvard Business School research shows that cultivating curiosity leads to higher-performing, more-adaptable firms because "when our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more-creative solutions."

A study by the Bipartisan Policy found that employees with higher levels of curiosity are more likely to be engaged and find meaning in their work, with 92% viewing curiosity as "a catalyst for job satisfaction, motivation, innovation, and high performance."

Learning agility is the speed at which someone picks up new skills and transitions between tasks seamlessly. According to the Korn Ferry Institute, learning agility is "the single best predictor of an executive leader's success," ranking it above intelligence and education. Companies with highly agile executives have 25% higher profit margins than their peers and are 5x more likely to be highly engaged. Research shows that people with high learning agility are promoted twice as fast as individuals with low learning agility.

Intelligence enables professionals to make sound decisions, articulate thoughts clearly, and solve complex problems better than their peers. It's the more obvious but vital cognitive function that allows workers to synthesize information, think strategically and navigate ambiguity with confidence.

         Today’s most powerful tools are now accessible to everyone. In fact, 75% of professionals are now using AI at work - so the challenge isn’t access. The challenge is the growing gap between basic users of AI and those who’ve mastered it.

Most people today are "novices" or "explorers" rather than "power users”. The faster the industry continues to move, the bigger the void becomes as new tools, models and capabilities begin to emerge on a near daily basis.
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Therefore, today’s most productive workers are not simply “AI users”. They are AI users that can apply curiosity, learning agility and intelligence. It is these workers that are keeping pace with the world’s most cutting-edge tools - mastering ways to drive productivity, output, and ultimately profitability ahead of your competition.

That is why mastery is not merely a trait but a signal.

The problem we have today is that traditional hiring practices are fundamentally broken and have not evolved with this new world. When it comes to identifying tomorrow's most productive workers, we are offered a false choice between equally flawed approaches.

Eighty-five years of research now prove that resumes are entirely ineffective at predicting job performance, while 85 percent of applicants fabricate their credentials and skillsets. Meanwhile, comprehensive studies by Schmidt & Hunter show that traditional interviews have remarkably low predictive validity, accounting for only 10 percent of the variation in job performance.

On the other hand, we have abstract psychometric tests and personality assessments that have remained unchanged for decades, and while cognitive ability scores correlate with initial job performance, they account for only 20% of the variance in long-term career success.

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Theoretical aptitude does not guarantee practical capability.

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The current "best practice" is the Situational Judgment Test (SJT) or Work Sample, which simulates real-life job scenarios. These tests outperform traditional psychometric assessments, with SJTs demonstrating a predictive validity coefficient of 0.34, compared to just 0.24 for cognitive ability.

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But even these have fatal flaws. SJTs are static multiple-choice questions that can be easily gamed with AI assistance, while Work Samples require virtual or in-office supervision - making them prohibitively time-consuming for employers recruiting at scale.

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We're left choosing between scalable-but-gameable or accurate-but-impractical.

Tomorrow's most productive teams cannot be built on guesswork, fabricated resumes and abstract tests. Companies deserve certainty with upfront proof of a candidate’s productivity, tool proficiency, and real-world impact. A simple way to source this new wave of talent that embodies curiosity, learning agility & hybrid intelligence.

So what if there was an alternative option? A solution that could deliver the accuracy of real-world assessments with the scalability that companies demand, all at the same time. Without the fatal flaws of traditional methods that skip productivity and AI fluency altogether.

A solution that will bridge the gap.