Companies are buying AI tools. That doesn't mean they know what to do with them.

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Companies have spent the past two years racing to deploy chatbots, coding assistants, and AI agents to their workers. Two new reports, however, suggest that deploying AI tools is the easy part.The hard part is using them well.Ramp, a financial technology company, and Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence platform, studied company behavior across nearly 22,000 US firms. They found that companies making sustained, high-intensity AI investments saw greater workforce gains than firms using AI more lightly.The report defined "high-intensity adopters" as those who spent an average of about $34 a month on AI, compared to those who spent an average of less than $3.High-intensity adopters grew faster. They saw their head count grow more than 10% over the first 24 months after adopting AI. Entry-level head count rose 12%.The high-intensity adopters have some advantages. "They are larger, more technical, and faster growing before adoption," the authors wrote.The key to their success, however, is not just adopting AI but knowing how to leverage it effectively. The authors wrote that the benefits of AI adoption require "complementary investments, organizational change, and learning inside the firm." In other words, a few enterprise chatbot subscriptions may not be enough to move the needle.