Here are 5 ASX Stocks Making Productivity Gains Thanks to AI and Seeing Pay Offs!

With productivity the buzzword right now, ASX Stocks Making Productivity Gains are highly sought after. Just about all companies are talking about it, but not many are able to boast about a specific impact AI has had on productivity. This article outlines a few that can.

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5 ASX Stocks Making Productivity Gains Thanks to AI and Seeing Pay Offs!

1. NIB (ASX:NIB)

With health insurers getting permitted to inflict the biggest premium hike in nearly a decade and NIB (an insurer covering nearly 2 million Australians) going above and beyond, investors think it is a good time to be invested in it. NIB’s 1H26 results saw 8% revenue growth and 22% profit growth.

The business boasted that it is extracting meaningful productivity gains, purporting that 94% of claims are being processed within 24 hours and 86% are processed unassisted using automation, while cumulative productivity savings since FY24 total $39m and have pushed the group operating expense ratio down 100 basis points

2. CBA (ASX:CBA)

CBA is arguably the most advanced AI-deploying institution on the ASX, having ranked in the top five banks globally for AI maturity on the Evident AI Index. The productivity story is now directly tied to bottom-line numbers rather than being buried in strategy documents. In its 1H FY26 results, CBA for the first time linked AI explicitly to a specific bottom-line saving: its AI-driven scam and fraud detection systems, which scan over 20 million payments daily, were identified as a primary driver of a 20% reduction in customer fraud losses compared to the prior corresponding period.

There are other tools where it boasted of benefits. For instance CBA’s GenAI-powered messaging service handles over 50,000 customer inquiries daily, contributing to a 40% reduction in call centre wait times, while AI is being applied to business loan processing to reduce the annual credit review process from approximately 14 hours to two hours. The Compass AI tool for business bankers has handled over 500,000 queries, allowing frontline staff to answer complex customer questions roughly three times faster than traditional methods.

While CBA has not quantified an impact, its fellow Big 4 Bank NAB booked $420m from productivity benefits in FY25, so we think it’d be fair to assume it is in the hundreds of millions too.

3. Telstra (ASX:TLS)

Telstra’s productivity story is structural in nature rather than quarterly in cadence, built around the multi-year T25 transformation program that concluded in FY25. Telstra’s T25 strategy originally targeted $500m in fixed cost reductions by FY25, later revised to $350m, with cumulative savings of $122m achieved in FY24 and an additional $228m targeted in FY25.

The forward ambition is significantly larger: Telstra’s $700 million joint venture with Accenture is targeting automation of customer service, billing, and network management tasks, with the goal of saving over $3 billion annually by 2030. That 2030 figure is aspirational, but the underlying logic is sound for a telco of Telstra’s scale — automating billing, provisioning and fault resolution across a network serving millions of customers creates compounding savings that are genuinely structural.

The near-term challenge is that transformation costs have historically obscured underlying operating leverage, and investors are now in a period of watching whether the efficiency gains delivered through T25 are durable or whether they were partly one-off. For FY26, management has guided to EBITDAaL of $8.15–8.45bn, a mid-single-digit uplift, signalling confidence in continued earnings growth despite persistent cost inflation and regulatory pressure. In our view, investors should treat the $3 billion 2030 savings target as directional rather than bankable.

4. Woolworths (ASX:WOW)

We would like to disclose that this is a complicated picture because it is based around rearranging its logistics hubs to be AI-automated. This will deliver benefits in the long-term but cost a lot in the near-term. But investors are arguably the most bullish they’ve been on the Fresh Food People since early 2024.

On the technology front, Woolworths has upgraded its Olive digital shopping assistant using Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, and AI is being applied across store governance, promotional planning, and supply chain optimisation. The honest investor assessment is that Woolworths is in the middle of the most capital-intensive phase of its logistics transformation — capital expenditure has been running at around $2.5bn a year; and the efficiency dividend from Moorebank automation has not yet arrived in visible margin improvement. Automation ramp-ups are famously allergic to perfection, and Woolworths is a live example. The long-term structural argument is compelling: lower logistics cost per unit, better availability, stronger eCommerce throughput. True, but patient capital is required.

5. TechnologyOne (ASX:TNE)

TechnologyOne is a slightly different kind of productivity story — and the more interesting for it. Where NIB’s gains are internal (faster claims processing, lower expense ratios), TechnologyOne’s productivity advantage runs in two directions simultaneously: the company extracts efficiency from its own operations through the SaaS model, while simultaneously delivering measurable productivity gains to its customers. That dual dynamic is what makes it genuinely comparable to NIB as an investment thesis.

The headline numbers are striking. TechnologyOne has just delivered its sixteenth consecutive year of record profit and revenues, with profit before tax up 19% to $181.5 million and annual recurring revenue rising 18% to $554.6 million — both surpassing previous guidance. That consistency of execution across sixteen years is itself a productivity statement: the business compounds reliably because the SaaS model structurally improves unit economics every year as the customer base grows on a largely fixed cost base but also spending more.

The forward momentum has just accelerated. TechnologyOne has lifted its FY26 profit before tax growth guidance to 18–20%, up from 13–17%, attributing the upgrade directly to AI product momentum and its SaaS+ model, framing AI as a commercial enabler rather than a structural threat. The company is currently spending $8–9 million on AI Showcase product launch events across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, which is intentionally front-loading cost into the first half to generate second-half conversion. That is disciplined investment sequencing rather than undisciplined spending.

The UK expansion is the most underappreciated productivity lever. UK ARR surged 49% in FY25, and the market is structurally three times larger than Australia. Winning local government and higher education contracts in the UK with essentially the same product built for Australian conditions is high-margin growth — the R&D is already sunk, the incremental cost of serving additional jurisdictions is low, and the recurring nature of ERP contracts means churn is minimal once a customer has migrated their financial and HR systems.

TechnologyOne hit its $500 million ARR milestone 18 months early and has now set a new target of $1 billion ARR by FY30. Now, its valuation is not cheap — the stock trades at a forward P/E of roughly 41x — but that is below the broader software and IT peer group at around 64x, which means TNE is actually in a more reasonable zone than its quality profile might suggest.

For investors looking for an ASX software stock where productivity gains are structural, recurring, and mathematically embedded in the business model rather than aspirational, TechnologyOne is the clearest example on the exchange.