Nicosia, Cyprus. AI is becoming one of the most important sources of operating leverage for companies that know how to use it, according to Yiannis Stavrianos, Senior Manager, Advisory Services at PwC Cyprus. He said some organisations have already moved beyond experiments and demos and are using AI to reshape their cost base, growth model and decision-making processes.
Shift beyond productivity tools
Stavrianos said every CEO has seen AI demonstrations, including tools that summarise documents, draft emails and answer customer questions. However, he said many companies have spent the past two years treating such tools as useful additions to the technology stack, somewhere between a better search engine and a more capable assistant.
He said that view is becoming increasingly difficult to defend, as companies begin to use AI in ways that affect broader business operations.
PwC study findings
According to Stavrianos, a turning point came in April 2026, when PwC published the results of its global AI Performance Study, based on a survey of 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors. He said the study found that nearly three-quarters of AI’s economic value is already being captured by 20 per cent of companies.
He said this shows that AI value is now measurable, while also indicating that the benefits are not being distributed evenly across the market.
Impact on unit economics
Stavrianos said many companies have made the mistake of viewing AI through the narrow lens of productivity. He said that framing suggests only a limited increase in output per worker and has cost organisations time and money because they placed AI on top of unchanged workflows and then saw limited financial impact.
He said AI, when deployed effectively, acts as a lever on unit economics. According to Stavrianos, AI changes the financial structure of a business in three main ways: it compresses the cost of high-volume customer-facing operations, lowers the marginal cost of growth in knowledge-intensive functions, and improves the economics of decision-heavy functions after losses are taken into account.
Changes to operating models
Stavrianos said the leading companies are not using fundamentally different models, but are rebuilding their operating models around them.
He pointed to Klarna as an example, saying the company’s OpenAI-powered customer service agent demonstrated how AI can alter the cost of customer operations. He said that within months of launching the agent in early 2024, Klarna was handling two-thirds of all customer service chats with AI, a volume the company described as equal to the workload of around 700 full-time agents.