Paysend restricts AI tools to top performers, CEO says

Paysend CEO Ben Chisell is restricting artificial intelligence tools to the payments company's top performers, a decision that cuts against the prevailing direction of workplace AI adoption in the United Kingdom.

The approach sets Paysend apart from other U.K. companies, which are pushing broader rollouts that put AI tools in the hands of every employee regardless of role or performance record.

Chisell's position is simple: AI access at Paysend is not universal. It is earned.

What does the decision change?

Most large employers deploying workplace AI treat access as a default. The dominant model distributes AI assistants, coding copilots and drafting tools across entire workforces, on the theory that broad availability spreads productivity gains evenly and builds familiarity with the technology.

Paysend reverses that logic. By limiting the tools to top performers, Chisell concentrates the company's AI investment where he judges the return to be highest.

The CEO's stance carries a second implication. Employees who do not meet the performance threshold face a workplace where their peers have AI assistance and they do not. That gap in tooling could widen existing performance differences rather than narrow them — a risk that broad-rollout strategies explicitly try to avoid.

It also creates an incentive structure. If AI access functions as a perk or reward, performance management at Paysend becomes tied directly to access to the company's most productive software.

Why does the split matter?

The disagreement over distribution is not a minor operational choice. It goes to the core question every employer now faces: who should get AI first, and on what basis.

Broad rollouts rest on an assumption of equal benefit. Restricting access rests on the opposite assumption — that the gains from AI compound in the hands of people already performing at the highest level. Neither assumption has been settled by evidence, and companies are choosing sides in real time.

Chisell's choice is the more unusual one. Reports on U.K. workplace adoption describe companies pushing AI tools out to everyone, treating universal access as the safer and simpler default. Against that backdrop, Paysend becomes a test case for the selective approach.

The stakes extend beyond one payments firm. If selective distribution works — if concentrated access produces better outcomes than broad access — other executives will copy it. If it fails, Paysend will have spent its AI investment reinforcing a hierarchy of tooling that its competitors abandoned.

What does it signal about AI in the workplace?

The decision illustrates that AI deployment has moved past the question of whether companies will adopt the technology. The live questions now concern allocation: who gets which tools, under what conditions, and to what end.

Chisell's framing treats AI capability as a scarce managerial resource to be directed, not as office infrastructure to be switched on for all. That view conflicts with how most U.K. companies currently behave, according to reports on their rollouts.

For employees, the difference is concrete. Under a broad rollout, a junior analyst and a senior manager receive the same AI tooling. Under the Paysend model, tooling depends on measured performance, and the company's best performers gain an advantage their colleagues are denied.

Whether that advantage motivates or alienates the rest of the workforce is the question other CEOs watching this experiment will want answered.

The U.K. market will supply the comparison. With most companies giving AI to everyone and Paysend giving it to a select group, the divergent outcomes will show which distribution strategy the next wave of adopters follows.