What 26 minutes a day actually looks like
A 20,000 person government trial measured the time returned by AI tools. The number is modest, repeatable, and far more useful than the claims being made in sales decks.
The Government Digital Service ran one of the largest controlled trials of generative AI tools in UK working life: roughly 20,000 civil servants, over three months. The headline finding was an average of 26 minutes a day returned per person.
Why a modest number is the credible one
Twenty six minutes will not impress anybody selling you a platform. That is exactly why it is worth paying attention to. It was measured rather than claimed, across a large and varied workforce, doing ordinary administrative work.
HMRC published a separate evaluation of the same class of tools and reported a more conservative figure again, around an hour a week self reported. Both sit in the same territory: real, repeatable, unspectacular.
Doing the arithmetic on your own team
Twenty six minutes a day, across a team of twelve, is roughly five hours a day returned to the organisation. Whether that is worth anything depends entirely on what happens to those hours. If they disappear into the day, the project shows no return. If they are pointed at work that was being deferred, it shows up in output.
The practical lesson
- Measure the process before you change it, or you will never prove anything
- Expect minutes per person per day, not transformation
- Decide in advance what the returned time will be spent on
- Treat the first project as a measurement exercise as much as a technology one
Sources: Government Digital Service, Microsoft 365 Copilot experiment findings report, 2025. HMRC, Evaluating the impact of Microsoft Copilot in HMRC, 2026.