The task got cheaper. Who gets the hour? (Tim Harford)

A copilot that saves your team ten hours a week proves the task got cheaper. It does not prove the week got shorter, and it says nothing yet about where the freed capacity goes.

Tim Harford's latest essay runs the history. In one Connecticut shirt factory in 1860, 400 people with sewing machines produced as many shirts as 2,000 hand stitchers, and pay rose from $3 to $4 a week. A working paper he cites finds the freed time did different work for different women: working-class women used the machine to earn independently and delay marriage, while wealthier women put the hours into charities and community life. The same invention produced different lives, because where the saving went depended on who held it.

The mechanism behind that has a name: elasticity of demand. The washing machine cut the time per load so much that households simply washed far more clothes, and the saving was spent. The dishwasher saved time too, but nobody felt the need to wash dishes more often, so the saving stayed saved. When a task gets cheaper, what happens next depends on demand and on who chooses.

That is the question AI tools now put to leadership teams. A drafting assistant genuinely saves time at the task, but the saving arrives without instructions. It can become more output, higher quality, lower cost, or hours returned to people. If nobody is asked to choose, one plausible outcome is expansion: more documents, more threads, more review cycles. The risk is not exactly waste; the machinists were better paid, and the extra shirts were real. The risk is quieter, an allocation made by default rather than by decision.

When the next tool hands your team an hour, who is allowed to say where it goes?

Source: Tim Harford, "Liberated by technology (again)" (29 Oct 2026, first published in the FT 30 Sep 2026) https://lnkd.in/geUCFKag

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