Why Workplace Friction Is A Real ROI Test For AI

Tal Dagan, CPO at Atera, an AI platform for IT management.

A kitchen can plate a beautiful dish in four minutes. If the order takes nine minutes to reach the line, that dish does not make the restaurant faster. ​

Enterprise AI has the same problem. McKinsey found that 80% of respondents say AI has improved their own productivity. Yet only 37% of organizations report any measurable impact on company-level earnings, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. ​

AI is making individuals faster. It’s not making organizations faster. I see this constantly in enterprise IT. A team deploys AI and then technicians resolve tickets faster. Then someone asks what changed at the business level, and nobody can produce an answer. There were gains, but they didn’t survive the trip from individual to organization. ​

Something is absorbing the value along the way. That something is friction: the stalled systems, broken handoffs and workarounds that sit between a person and the work they are trying to do. Most organizations aren’t measuring it, which means most organizations can’t see where their AI gains are going. ​​

The Friction Tax Nobody Budgeted For ​

Research recently commissioned, based on a survey of 1,000 full-time employees and 500 C-suite and senior enterprise leaders at large U.S. organizations, found that 88% of employees lose time every day to stalled systems. That looks like a password reset that blocks off an entire morning. Access to a system you needed yesterday, still pending after two requests. ​

There’s the work that never gets done—61% of employees say they have delayed or avoided a key work action because the process was too broken to bother with. ​

That avoidance is a cost nobody planned for. The friction tax compounds as a stalled system creates an interruption, the interruption creates a workaround and the workaround becomes the new way of working. Eventually, the original problem disappears from view. Nobody fixes it because nobody can see it anymore. ​