Managers’ busywork increases with AI use

A recent report by In Parallel reveals that managers are experiencing significant friction when coordinating tasks across their teams, even when utilizing artificial intelligence assistants. Instead of streamlining workflows, the integration of AI has been met with less-than-stellar results, leaving managers with a substantial amount of administrative busywork.

The Breakdown of the Coordination Tax

According to the In Parallel report, managers spend approximately 16.5 hours per week coordinating what is described as the "work of work" across their respective teams. This administrative burden, referred to as the "coordination tax," consumes a massive portion of the work week through various repetitive communication tasks.

The report details exactly how this weekly meeting and coordination time is spent:

Status Meetings and Lost Time

Out of the total coordination time, managers spend eight hours in status meetings. Additionally, nearly five hours are dedicated to re-explaining context to team members, and nearly four hours are spent searching for data that already exists within the organization. Rather than reducing these redundancies, the use of AI assistants has not yet resolved these core coordination challenges for most managers.

What This Means for AV Integrators

For AV integrators, this report suggests that simply deploying AI-assisted collaboration tools and smart meeting systems may not automatically reduce administrative overhead for clients. Integrators should be cautious when positioning AI features as immediate time-savers, and instead focus on designing unified communication environments that specifically target search friction and context-sharing challenges to help minimize this coordination tax.