Carrot, Not Stick: Inside Omnisend's Bet That Paying People to Use AI Beats Threatening Them With Job Cuts
“Omnisend is giving employees a 2–4% raise for measurable AI impact instead of mandating adoption or cutting jobs. What the experiment reveals — and what it means for MEA employers running the same playbook under tighter budgets.”
Most companies talking about AI adoption right now are talking about it through the lens of headcount — who's replaceable, which layer goes first, how many roles a given tool can absorb. Omnisend, a Lithuania-based marketing automation platform with around 250 employees, decided to run the experiment from the other direction. Starting in April, the company began offering employees a 2% to 4% raise, on top of its normal quarterly review cycle, tied specifically to demonstrated AI impact. More than half of its staff qualified in the first quarter alone.
The Evaluation Mechanics
The mechanics are worth understanding, because they're the part other employers can actually copy. To earn the raise, an employee has to show measurable value in at least one of three categories: efficiency, meaning a real, quantifiable time or cost saving; impact, meaning a workflow that visibly moved a business metric or improved quality; or scalable adoption, meaning a workflow the employee built that other people or teams picked up and started using themselves. The finance team qualified by lifting invoice-automation coverage from 36% to 85%. The legal team qualified through AI-assisted vendor assessment and legal-intelligence workflows that cut manual review time. Several engineers earned the raise not for personal productivity gains but for building AI workflows that spread across other teams — the adoption criterion doing exactly what it was designed to do. Managers, not a central committee, decide whether the bar has been cleared.
Culture and Play Before Pay
Omnisend didn't start with the money. Before tying pay to AI use, the company built familiarity first — internal games and videos to get people comfortable with the tools, and monthly "AI days" where staff cleared their calendars specifically to experiment, no output expectation attached. Only once that foundation existed did leadership move to the incentive structure. CEO Rytis Lauris has been candid that the program cuts both ways: it's explicitly designed to reward what he calls "highly effective people," and he's said plainly that salaries across the company are already starting to diverge based on who leans into the tools and who doesn't. Bernard Meyer, Omnisend's head of AI operations, is equally candid about the hard part — measuring AI's actual business impact is, in his words, honestly difficult, and unevenly so depending on the job function.
Solving the "What's In It For Me?" Dilemma
What makes this worth studying rather than just admiring is the problem it's actually solving. Wharton's own research on AI incentives has pointed out that most employees are still asking a basic question — what's in it for me — and that without a real answer, workers who do find genuine AI-driven time savings often quietly avoid reporting them, worried they'll simply be asked to do more with the same headcount, or worse, that the savings will be used to justify cutting their role entirely. That's the stick version of AI adoption, and it's the default most organizations are running whether they mean to or not. Omnisend's bet is that naming a carrot explicitly, and pricing it, gets you further.
Pragmatic Blueprint for MEA Workforces
This case lands directly on top of the other two workforce stories in today's package. Gulf and African employers are simultaneously flattening management layers, per Korn Ferry's data, and racing to stand up the AI infrastructure covered in today's feature — which means the adoption question isn't theoretical here, it's active and urgent. Omnisend is also a useful comparison precisely because it isn't a hyperscaler with unlimited budget; at 250 people and real financial constraints, it more closely resembles the mid-sized employer that dominates much of the region's private sector than it resembles Amazon or Google. Whether a 2–4% raise moves behavior the same way against Gulf or African wage structures as it did against a Baltic tech-company salary base is a genuinely open question — and one regional people teams are better positioned to test directly than to assume an answer to.