Over the past two decades, enterprises have poured billions into automating business operations. Payroll runs itself. IT accounts are provisioned in seconds. Yet employees are still losing up to seven hours a week to tasks like chasing approvals, booking travel or filing expenses. That disconnect reveals a critical oversight; most digital transformation has automated around the employee, not for them.
This is the reality of shadow work - the everyday admin that quietly drains time, morale and momentum. It’s costing UK businesses £95 billion in lost productivity each year. And because it rarely shows up in dashboards or KPIs, it continues unchecked, even as businesses ramp up automation spending.
If the first wave of enterprise automation was about streamlining systems, the next must focus on orchestrating work - designing seamless, AI-driven experiences across the tasks that make up an employee’s day.
The automation gap is bigger than it looks
Businesses haven’t ignored automation; they’ve just deployed it in the wrong places. Core systems are optimised but the tasks that sit between them - managing expenses, coordinating travel, chasing invoices - remain stubbornly manual.
This misalignment has created a widening automation gap; a mismatch between where automation has been applied and where it would have the greatest impact on productivity and employee experience. While systems run efficiently in the background, employees juggle fragmented workflows. According to our research, they use four different tools on average to manage shadow work, yet just 7% say those tools are well integrated.
Because shadow work cuts across departments, it often escapes ownership. It’s too operational for IT, too invisible for HR, and too tactical for the C-suite. As a result, businesses invest heavily in automation while neglecting the points of greatest friction.
Why rationalising the stack is a leadership decision
The natural response to complexity has often been to add more tools. A new app for travel. A separate platform for expenses. Another layer for approvals. But more tools don’t always mean more productivity - they often introduce more logins, learning curves and policy confusion.
Instead of solving the problem, fragmented tech stacks shift the burden onto employees, who spend their time stitching systems together instead of doing the work they were hired for.
With 67% of global leaders already committed to investment in automation, it’s time to refocus. Leaders must stop layering tools and start embedding intelligence into the operational core, where workflows, policies and systems converge.
In fact, our report shows that the companies seeing the biggest gains from automation are those that apply it where the productivity drag is greatest - tasks employees say are frequent, frustrating and low-value. These are not abstract problems, they’re recurring bottlenecks that show up every week in expense reports, travel bookings and team coordination. They have a known cost and a measurable upside when removed.
Rationalising the stack is about focus rather than chasing the latest platform. The businesses that succeed will be the ones that prioritise
simplicity over scale, and employee experience over software sprawl.
Orchestration: Automation that works for people
Fixing the automation gap isn’t about adding more automation, it’s about aligning the tech and problem you want to solve. And this may not mean adding another system. It starts with looking at how work is really done, and how tasks move across finance, operations, HR and beyond.
Shadow work often exists in the grey areas between these functions, where no system is fully responsible. Orchestration bridges these gaps. Instead of forcing employees to jump between apps or chase information, AI-native orchestration coordinates tasks behind the scenes, enforcing policies and routing workflows automatically.
This allows employees to be quicker but also gives them more clarity. People stop losing time to distractions and start focusing on work that matters. We found that it takes 11 minutes to refocus after completing a shadow task. Multiply that across an organisation, and the case for orchestration becomes clear.
Shifting the focus
Most companies aren’t underpowered, but rather they’re misaligned. Automation has happened, but in ways that haven’t freed employees to do their best work.
To unlock real productivity, leaders must rethink how work is designed. That means simplifying systems, orchestrating experiences across departments and freeing people from the hidden admin that slows them down.
The tools are ready and the core problem is clear. What’s needed now is a shift in focus, from building smarter systems to creating smarter workflows that power real work.
