On a regular working day, professionals often find themselves sifting through dozens of e-mails, a good number with attachments, looking for relevant information and data when they have a deadline to meet. Add to that a couple of PowerPoint slides and presentations and half a dozen important phone calls and you have a heady cocktail guaranteed to give you stress or a migraine if not both.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the “biggest challenge to moving fast is the difficulty to find the right information,” say employees. ‘The State of Teams 2025’ report by Atlassian reveals that even when professionals manage to come across relevant data or information, there is no way they can be certain whether it is the latest data or whether it is high-priority. The likelihood of responding or reacting to random or obsolete information is quite high.
What is the solution?
Teams require a system that can transform information into action—impactful action. But the problem is that the information within teams is more often than not scattered. It is not available in one place. It exists all over in the form of printouts, slides, attachments or even scribbled notes. Sometimes relevant documents or files may be stored in wrong folders causing valuable information or inputs to be lost. Much of the information often fails to travel from people’s minds to paper or a computer.
The problem is not a dearth of information but a deluge of it. If only it was available in one place or in an accessible and organised manner. A Marie Kondo well versed with tidying data could be of help here, right?
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. A whopping 98 per cent of executives—out of the 200 Fortune 1000 executives and 12,000 knowledge workers surveyed—are concerned their teams aren’t making use of AI to do away with silos. They wish for their teams to create a process or system wherein they work with AI to fetch the right data or information required for a project to progress.
To really understand the situation, a majority of the knowledge workers say they must know the right person and find the time to chat with them live. A good 56 per cent of the workers often find that the only way to obtain the required information is to ask someone or call a meeting. About 25 per cent of the executives as well as teams spend or rather waste a quarter of the workweek just searching for the right information. That is valuable time and energy lost.
About 74 per cent of executives admit that the lack of communication is responsible for the slow pace of work and its quality.
Is there a possibility of overlap of work with so much of scattered information? Sure there is. One in two knowledge workers say that they know of teams within their organisation that often end up working on the same things unknowingly!
Very few (20 per cent) of the knowledge workers feel confident that their team has an effective system in place for quickly informing other teams of the decisions that may impact their work
Only seven per cent of executives admit to being aware of exactly how each team member is contributing to the organisational goals. This is a very poor number but not shocking because teams today are overwhelmed and disoriented. What with the pressure of staying ahead and on top things at all times. They are so busy tackling this pressure that they fail to see how their contribution fits into the bigger scheme of things. Most of the time, they do not have the relevant information. If they do, they may not know what to do with it or how to benefit from it. Employees and the teams they are part of are all working in silos when they should actually be collaborating to achieve a common goal.
An alarming 71 per cent of teams know they are not maximising the use of AI to help them manage and discover information. What is worse is that 96 per cent of executives are not even sure how to get their teams to use AI more effectively.
There should be a centralised platform where it is possible to track what each team is up to and why. Teams themselves should share whatever they have learned with everyone else via videos that are automatically transcripted for the benefit of the others. It becomes possible for AI to report what is actually happening when all the information is connected and organised. Then AI can offer teams with valuable insights that they may not even have thought of before. This leads to innovative ideas and better decision-making at the organisational level. A connected knowledge base holds the key to AI translating information into powerful insights that lead to more impactful and meaningful work. Of course, the end result is an engaged workforce that works fast, achieves its goals and believes in the value they are adding to the organisation.