Business managers currently spend 54% of an average work day on administration, according to an Accenture survey published in the Harvard Business Review. The research surveyed 1,770 managers from 14 countries and interviewed 37 executives in charge of digital transformation at their organisations. It found that after administrative chores, only 7% of time was left to develop people and engage with stakeholders, with 10% of time spent on strategy and innovation, and 30% on problem solving. If you ask me, this sounds like my dream role! Just take The Associated Press, for example, which expanded quarterly earnings by using AI to increase reporting from 300 stories to 4,400.

Consider that business managers currently spend 54% of an average work day on administrative chores such as scheduling, budgets and reports, according to an Accenture survey in the Harvard Business Review. They spend just 10% on strategic planning and even less, 7%, engaging one-on-one with their direct reports--two tasks that are key to managerial success. A growing number of AI applications, however, promise to drastically reduce business leaders' workloads by taking over many of those low-value and repetitive tasks. By 2021, this shift will generate an estimated $2.9 billion in business value and save 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity, according to Gartner. The upshot: Managers will have more time to perform more valuable work.