Study finds companies lose 26% of time to wasted effort

Ace Workflow has released research finding that companies lose 26% of working time to wasted effort. The study examined 680 processes across 128 companies in 10 sector groups.

The findings point to inefficiencies in the work between tasks rather than within individual software tools. The biggest leaks appeared in reporting, onboarding, invoicing and billing, approvals, and customer relationship management cleanup.

At six companies, the group timed every step of 187 processes covering 2,546 hours of weekly work, based on accounts from the employees doing those jobs. It found that an average of 424 hours of work a week generated 110 recoverable hours.

Using a 46-week year and an hourly cost of USD $100, Ace Workflow calculated that this equated to USD $510,000 in annual losses for the average business in that sample. The study also found that two-thirds of recoverable time sat within the top 10% of projects, while nearly half came from the top 5%.

Tool overload

A central finding was that the spread of workplace software has created new manual burdens. Among the timed companies, the median number of tools in use was 52, while the average process touched 2.9 tools.

Nearly half of all handoffs, or 48.9%, involved a person moving work from one tool to another. The report argued that the problem was not the software itself but the gaps between platforms, where staff had to switch applications, copy information, and track down updates.

That pattern also shaped how workers described the problem. Staff were 4.5 times more likely to complain about a lack of visibility than about speed.

Employees often struggled to see where work was sitting, where updates were being logged, and where the latest version of important documents could be found. The report also noted that 13.4% of processes took less than an hour a week, making them less likely to be automated and more likely to remain manual.

AI question

The research argues that artificial intelligence has, in some cases, added to this complexity because businesses are introducing more tools without changing how work moves through the organisation. That leaves workers managing transitions between systems rather than removing repetitive effort altogether.

Tim Rodgers, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ace Workflow, said the findings showed that many businesses were still failing to address the points where work changes hands.

"The waste hides in handoffs, switching between apps as people who are drowning in tools struggle to do more with less," Rodgers said.

He said companies should focus less on speeding up individual tasks and more on reducing the friction around them.

"AI's biggest payoff isn't performing tasks faster; it's eliminating the waste that eats at corporate productivity and ultimately profit," Rodgers said.

Company model

Ace Workflow describes itself as an operational intelligence business that identifies manual work inside client organisations and rebuilds those processes within their existing software. Its latest platform, Ace Work, uses AI agents to interview employees continuously, producing a picture of how work is done and where the pressure points sit.

The system compares that information with Ace Workflow's database of 128 companies, then creates diagnostics and automations inside a client's current toolset. The company positions that approach as a way to avoid adding more standalone platforms to already crowded software stacks.

Ace Workflow has a team of more than 50 people across New York, Los Angeles, London, and Lisbon. It says it has completed 311 projects for more than 100 companies.

Its client list includes Paramount and Airbnb, according to the company. Ace Workflow also said it had increased applications for Tishman Speyer by 300% and saved 15 days a week of staff time for Hollywood agency Maximum Effort.

Rodgers founded the company after running Rehab, an agency focused on emerging technologies for advertisers including Google and Nike. He said the shift came after the team began building no-code workflows that could condense work previously handled by engineering teams over three months into one week with a single operator.

The report's results suggest that businesses looking to cut wasted effort may not need to tackle every workflow at once. With most recoverable time concentrated in a small share of projects, the data indicates that a targeted approach could yield the biggest returns, even as a long tail of short, manual processes remains harder to address.

Among the six closely studied companies, the average process involved multiple tools and repeated handoffs between people and systems, underlining the report's core claim that the main source of wasted effort lies not inside tasks themselves but in the work required to connect them.