Paysend restricts AI tool access as UK companies widen workplace rollouts

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Paysend restricts AI tool access

Highlights

Paysend restricts AI tool access to top-performing employees, boosting engineering output by 25% without increasing team size, according to CEO Ben Chisell.
Lloyds Banking Group rolled out 40,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses with 97% employee adoption, and Sage reports AI coding tools saving hundreds of thousands of work hours.
UK government research finds three-quarters of AI-adopting businesses report better productivity, but 77% see no revenue change, raising questions about broad AI rollouts.

Paysend ties AI access to employee performance

As reported by CNBC, Paysend CEO Ben Chisell says the company limits access to artificial intelligence tools to its highest-performing employees, reflecting his view that the technology can raise output but also amplify weak judgment and poor working habits if used carelessly.

Chisell, who previously worked at Amazon, eBay and Starling Bank, says Paysend can now deliver about 25% more engineering work with the same-sized team. He argues, however, that stronger results do not come simply from giving every employee the latest tools, and says management should stay focused on solving customer problems rather than reacting to industry hype.

At Paysend, new hires get a month to test AI tools and explain what they have achieved with them. Chisell says that process is designed to measure practical value rather than assume every general-purpose tool is worth keeping.

He cites a recent case involving a new search engine optimization lead who requested access to Claude. After a month, the employee said the tool was mainly useful for producing briefs more quickly and instead proposed building a dedicated content-brief agent, a project now under way.

Broader AI rollout brings mixed business returns

The wider UK market is moving in a different direction, with major employers pushing AI tools across large parts of their workforces. Lloyds Banking Group says it has rolled out 40,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, with 97% of licensed employees actively using the tool, while Sage says its AI coding tools have saved hundreds of thousands of work hours.

Grant Thornton UK has also encouraged all of its staff to use Anthropic's Claude as part of a 500 million pound investment in AI. But broader adoption has not always translated into stronger financial outcomes, with UK government research published in January finding that three-quarters of businesses using AI report better workforce productivity, while 77% say revenue has not changed.

Other technology executives are also questioning whether universal rollout is the best model. Unily CEO Lokdeep Singh says AI is a "superpower" better suited to high-performing employees and warns against treating the technology mainly as a cost-cutting tool, even as companies face pressure from the wider macroeconomic environment.

CoreView has taken a more expansive approach. CEO Simon Azzopardi says the software company initially rolled out AI broadly to engineers for tasks such as correlating logs and data, producing technical documentation and speeding up onboarding, and now sees developers coordinating teams of AI agents across coding, quality assurance and documentation, reducing some work from weeks to days.

Our earlier article on a KPMG U.S. CEO survey found that AI agents are already producing measurable efficiency and growth gains, but only a small minority of leaders view them as truly transformational so far. It also noted that many companies expect AI to increase hiring and retraining needs and to keep investment in AI infrastructure elevated, highlighting that real impact depends on process redesign and strong human judgment rather than “plug-and-play” adoption.

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