What’s holding back your AI potential? Complexity.
A new webinar from Freshworks and Constellation Research highlights four steps to removing complexity and increasing AI adoption
The age of agentic AI is here. So why are so many organizations still stuck in the age of manual work?
In a recent Freshworks webinar, “The real cost of complexity—and how businesses can find relief,” Constellation Research's Liz Miller argued that complexity is what stands between most companies and the AI-fueled efficiency gains we’ve all been promised. The problem runs deeper than most leaders realize, and addressing it requires equal parts honest diagnosis and deliberate action.
The numbers on unsuccessful AI pilots and inefficient software spending are stark. A Freshworks survey of nearly 700 C-suite executives found that one in five dollars spent on software is wasted on duplicate or poorly implemented solutions. Complexity erodes 7% of annual revenue—equal, not coincidentally, to the average enterprise R&D budget, meaning the innovation pipeline is being quietly drained. And employees lose nearly seven hours a week just navigating fragmented systems—the equivalent of 88 full-time employees' worth of productivity in a mid-size organization.
"It's a compounding debt," Miller says. And most organizations are still paying interest.
AI raises the stakes considerably. Constellation Research found that 60% of executives want AI to free up time, and 40% want it to deliver exponential growth. But when asked what's standing in the way, executives pointed to the same culprits: fragmented data, legacy infrastructure, and the absence of a clear AI strategy. Complexity isn't a side issue in the AI conversation: It is the AI conversation.
4 steps to managing enterprise complexity
The good news: Complexity is manageable—with the right approach. Miller outlined four actions organizations can take right now to start clearing the path to a successful AI transformation:
Audit your systems—honestly. Run it as a cross-functional teardown, not an IT exercise, says Miller. Bring your CMO, your CX leaders, your finance team, and map every redundancy, overlap, and silo. "You can't know what you don't know," Miller says, "but once you recognize the problem, you can actually start to solve it."
Consolidate with intent. Miller suggests that companies should think about paring back, methodically, toward a single coherent system of record. The goal isn't fewer tools for the sake of having fewer, she says; it's to unify data so the right information gets to the right person at the right moment.
Implement AI strategically. Don't bolt AI onto broken infrastructure, Miller warns, embed it at the workflow level, where it can actually surface the right information at the right time. She pushes organizations to hold vendors to a high bar and ask them to clearly explain how their solutions reduce complexity rather than add to it.
Embrace an uncomplicated culture. Reducing complexity isn't a one-time project, Miller argues, it has to become an organizational value. That means celebrating consolidation, simplifying process design, and staying vigilant.
"When I address the totality of the complexity tax," Miller says, "that's when I get velocity — intentional and durable motions that say, I want to grow, and I'm going to grow in that direction."
Watch the full webinar, "The Real Cost of Complexity."
