Salesforce Research: Siloed AI Costs Teams 22 Workdays a Year

AI at work has a sharing problem. According to a new Salesforce survey of 250 U.S. executives, 68% say AI insights go unshared every week, 66% see colleagues unknowingly solve the same problem twice using AI, and 59% report that work stalls because it is trapped in one person's AI tool.

The research puts a number on the friction: employees lose an average of 3.6 hours per week switching between AI tools and other systems. Over a 50-week year, that adds up to about 22 lost business days per employee.

The isolation problem compounds with company size. Enterprise executives report weekly work stalls at nearly twice the rate of small-business leaders, 73% versus 37%. Most organizations remain in an early deployment stage: only 15% say AI is embedded seamlessly across multiple systems and interfaces.

Despite this, the appetite for connected AI is clear. Given a clean slate, 72% of executives say they would design AI to work across the team with shared context so that value builds over time.

"The single-player era of AI made people faster," said Rob Seaman, EVP and GM of Slack. "The multiplayer era is what makes a whole company smarter, together."

Key Takeaways

• Siloed AI is costing businesses 22 days per employee per year in time lost to duplicated work and tool-switching.
• The stall problem grows with scale -- 73% of enterprise leaders report weekly work stalls tied to isolated AI use.
• Most executives want connected AI -- 72% would build shared-context AI from the ground up if they could start over.

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