04 November 2025

Season 7, Post 42: 39 minutes

That’s the amount of time saved every day by a typical user of AI at Heptagon Capital. Firmwide, that equates to around 5,700 hours of cumulative annual gains. This was a key finding from a recent ‘Copilot usage and impact’ questionnaire circulated around the firm. It makes a compelling case for the benefits of AI adoption.

Few topics generate as much debate as AI. Advocates assert that it could deliver $40tr in operational efficiencies globally. Sceptics contend that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver a return on their initial investment. To misquote Tolstoy*, all firms will inevitably adopt AI, but each firm’s experience of the technology will be uniquely different.

We sit firmly in the optimist’s camp. AI (like any other technology) should be seen as an enabler, a means to an end, or a mechanism for enhancing productivity. Results from our survey (conducted by Heptagon’s Chief Technology Officer, whom we featured in post #12) support this view. Over 75% of respondents now use Copilot routinely in their daily work. Almost half said they used it “constantly”, or multiple times a day.

People are using AI where they said they needed it most. Compare results from our previous survey of two years prior – where employees provided a ‘wish-list’ of what they would like the technology to do – to where it is being utilised now. Meeting preparation and recap, email drafting and summarisation, data analysis and reporting, and document creation were the top categories. Time saved on these tasks is now spent elsewhere, typically on “more interesting work.”

Your author naturally concurs. He is a daily user of Copilot for multiple purposes (including reviewing this piece for errors), and the benefits are tangible, even if anecdotal. At the same time, it is important to recognise that AI is not – and never will be – a panacea. Large language models can still hallucinate, so outputs should be checked for accuracy. Data must remain secure – the risk of cyber compromise still has to be top of mind. Ongoing training therefore remains important. We hope our next survey will show further progress across the board.

5 November 2025

*The opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reads “happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.

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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager

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