Is collaboration chaos derailing your workday? Maybe it's time for new tools

Imagine you’re a project manager at an investment firm, a fashion company, or even a Formula 1 racing team. Your boss hands you a new assignment and puts you in charge of assembling a team of people to get things done. You’re ready to jump right into the work, until you realize there are all these tasks you have to knock out before the fun stuff can even begin: finding out people’s schedules, coordinating meeting times, keeping track of notes and objectives. 

Not only that, but all of the other project managers are trying to do the same thing for their own assignments, too. And worse still, the tools and systems that exist to help support all this teamwork seem to take just as much time and attention to manage as the work itself. The result is a sort of collaborative chaos, as multiple groups of workers try to figure out how to manage schedules, organize information, assign tasks, and more at the same time.

“Humans have not fundamentally changed,” says Pranav Gupta, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—but the tools and processes we use at work have, “which means there’s a lot of overload on people to figure out who to collaborate with and how to collaborate.”

It’s a little ironic, then, that the answer to all of our woes could actually be more tools. Over the last few years, knowledge workers have increasingly turned to AI-powered tools for help finding, organizing, and sharing information—common sources of collaborative friction. A recent EY survey found that workplace use of generative AI alone increased from 22% in 2023 to 75% in 2024, with more than 50% of employees saying it had a positive impact on productivity and their ability to focus on high value work.

By flipping the script on the most tedious collaboration bottlenecks—scheduling meetings, tracking project progress, highlighting notes, recalling past information, even translating messages between languages—employers and employees alike believe that AI could be the thing that frees up teams to spend more of their valuable time on creative thinking.

“So much of the work that we do is mundane,” says Kate Vitasek, Distinguished Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute. “AI is a wonderful replacer of that mundane work.”

Using AI to collaborate more efficiently

Collaboration is practically a requirement of many modern jobs, from building apps and analyzing data to fulfilling customer orders and more. But research published by the Harvard Business Review in 2016 based on data collected over the prior two decades found that “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”—and not always to the benefit of the critical work that needs to be done. Research the authors conducted at more than 300 organizations found that 80% of an employee’s time is spent in meetings or answering requests from colleagues.

All of that time adds up. In a Dropbox-sponsored study from 2023, Economist Impact found unproductive meetings, chat messages, and emails cost the knowledge workers surveyed an average of 309 hours a year—or nearly six hours a week.

“If you just need a quick answer to something, Slack [...] is fantastic,” says Vitasek. But if you’re always messaging your colleagues to find the answers you need, she says, it might be time to rethink how your teams work together.

No wonder, then, that things like meetings and communication are areas where some of the most promising AI solutions are aimed. For example, Reclaim is using AI to help people optimize their schedules by automatically managing their calendars. Zoom now generates AI-powered transcriptions and summaries, right within a meeting, making it easier for everyone to stay on the same page. Or there’s Dropbox Dash, an AI-powered universal search tool which helps knowledge workers find, organize, and more easily collaborate on their content in the cloud.

For knowledge workers, sharing some of these manual tasks with AI has the potential to be a game changer for collaborative work, especially as knowledge workers find themselves working with more and more teams both inside their organization and beyond. For instance, data from the last year shows that people who integrate AI tools into their work gain 105 minutes back per day—time they can re-invest into more creative projects or work. And in another survey of Canadians by KPMG, 52% of respondents said generative AI saved them anywhere from one to five hours per week.

“It’s like what a calculator does for my ability to run multiplications,” says Gupta. Sure, you could crunch the same numbers yourself by hand. But with a calculator—or, say, the latest AI-powered collaborative tool—”I can do more of it more efficiently.”

Creating more space for human ingenuity

In 1989, the late Austrian-American management consultant Peter F. Drucker wrote an article titled “Sell the Mailroom.” In short, it was an argument in favor of “unbundling" organizations in service of focusing on the work they do best.

Think of it this way: It would be incredibly inefficient if, every time you needed a shirt dry-cleaned, you set up the equipment to do so at your own house. Companies realized this too. Why would a fashion label, for example, try to develop a new shopping app when it could hire a third-party team of software developers? Instead, unbundling lets both teams of people focus on what they enjoy most: designing new clothes and programming intuitive, easy-to-use tech.

This has been a boon for modern businesses—but also introduced challenges of its own. How much time do teams actually spend working on the creative stuff when hours of a day have to be allocated to setting up meetings, taking notes, passing along emails, and myriad other small chores? These are the sorts of administrative tasks that can easily become jobs unto themselves.

Even the bureaucratic U.S. government recognizes there’s a problem to be solved here. “The most profound AI impacts will inevitably be—whether professionals from all walks of business learn it sooner or later—in the back-office functions, at least in the short term,” said Michael Kanaan, an author of AI-related policies and guidelines for the Department of Defense, in a meeting this past July.

The trick, as ever, will be in figuring out how to wield these AI tools best. The next step for AI in the workplace is what Gupta calls collective intelligence. Right now, people are primarily using AI for things like processing and organizing information. But soon, Gupta believes our AI tools will act more like digital coaches, facilitating collaboration by breaking down projects and assigning tasks based on people’s interests and abilities. Some business leaders are already anticipating things will move in this direction. In a Korn Ferry survey of 200 executives, one-third said they expected their teams to foster better collaboration in the very near future with AI’s help.

“True collaboration is when we become more efficient and reduce work—but we’ve [also] made people better because of it,” Vitasek says. In other words, it’s not just about the time you save, but how you use it—ideally, for working smarter, not harder. “It’s an optimization exercise, not a task-elimination exercise.”