Every business is paying for conversations that go nowhere

This waste does not show up in a quarterly report. No one gets fired for it. And yet it compounds, month after month, in the background of every organisation that has more than a handful of people.

It is the cost of communication that does not communicate.

The average employee now uses between eight and twelve different tools to do their job. Slack for quick messages. Email for anything formal. Zoom for the conversation that could have been an email. Notion for the document nobody updates. Jira for the ticket that sits in a backlog for six weeks. Google Drive for the file that three people have saved three different versions of. Each tool made sense when someone bought it. Together they have created something nobody planned for: a fragmented, noisy, unnavigable record of how work almost happened.

Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2025 found that the average worker is interrupted two hundred and seventy-five times a day. Not by their work. By the systems meant to help them do it. Two hundred and seventy-five pings, notifications, threads, and requests landing in the peripheral vision of someone trying to think. The same research found that eighty percent of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy to do their job properly. Not because the work is too hard. Because the noise is too loud.

The financial cost is significant. IDC estimates that the average knowledge worker spends two and a half hours a day searching for information. Not creating it. Not using it. Searching for it. Across a nine-person team, that is one and a half full-time employees producing nothing but the attempt to find something that already exists somewhere in the organisation. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts the total annual cost of this disengagement and coordination failure at ten trillion dollars globally. A number so large it has lost its ability to shock people, which is perhaps the most telling indicator of how normalised the problem has become.

What makes this waste so persistent is that it is structural, not behavioural. You cannot fix it by asking people to write better emails or hold fewer meetings. The problem is that modern work was built tool by tool, conversation by conversation, over a decade of rapid software adoption, with no one responsible for the architecture of the whole. Every new tool solved a specific problem and created a new one: more context trapped in a different silo, more decisions buried in a thread no one will ever find again, more institutional knowledge accruing in the heads of the people who happened to be in the right meeting at the right time.

The result is an organisation that technically has all the information it needs to function well, and practically cannot access it. New hires spend weeks piecing together how things work from whoever will give them twenty minutes. Managers call status meetings because they cannot see what is actually happening without asking. Teams duplicate work because no one knew the other team had already started. Leaders make decisions on incomplete context because the context is three Slack threads, two email chains, and a Notion page that was last updated in February.

This is not a technology problem. Every major software vendor on the planet will sell you another tool to fix it. That is precisely the wrong answer. Adding a thirteenth tool to a twelve-tool problem does not reduce fragmentation. It adds one more place for context to go and die.

The businesses that will pull ahead in the next five years are not the ones that buy more software. They are the ones that find a way to make the knowledge they already have accessible to the people who need it, at the moment they need it, without anyone having to ask.

That is the problem worth solving. Everything else is noise.