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Karen Joy Bakud
financial editor
In Parallel published research showing that administrators who use artificial intelligence daily spend more time on coordination tasks than those who don’t. The survey surveyed 247 managers from five countries.
The Helsinki-based software company found that managers lose an average of 16.5 hours per week to debriefing meetings, job restatements, and searching for information. This is estimated to cost approximately US$64,600 per manager per year.
The findings suggest a gap between the widespread adoption of AI and the day-to-day demands of executives. Research shows that while 86% of managers use AI, the heaviest coordination load for daily users is 20.3 hours per week, compared to 9.1 hours for managers who don’t use AI.
At In Parallel, we refer to this lost time as the “coordination tax,” or the effort required to keep people, decisions, and work aligned before core tasks begin. Beyond reducing the overhead of managing teams and information across an organization, AI claims to have improved individual productivity.
The study also found that managers underestimated the scale of the problem. Respondents believed that adjustments accounted for approximately 21% of their week, but itemized responses suggested the actual number was 41%.
Almost half of that time was spent in status meetings. The rest was divided between repeating context and finding information across documents, chat tools, emails, and meeting notes.
AI and context
In Parallel said the results do not suggest that AI itself will create more jobs. Rather, current systems often lack access to the organizational context needed to understand previous decisions, discussions, and commitments.
This view reflects a broader debate in business software about whether stronger AI results depend more on the quality and availability of in-house data than on the underlying model. For managers, this often manifests itself in everyday tasks like tracking decisions across teams, clarifying task ownership, and finding reliable information.
Marku Markälainen, CEO and co-founder of In Parallel, said customers expect AI to not just help employees complete tasks faster, but also reduce the time they spend making administrative adjustments.
“We all expected AI to eliminate busywork. Instead, we’re seeing organizations invest in increasingly sophisticated AI while managers continue to spend vast amounts of time simply keeping work in line,” Makelainen said.
“Our customers tell us they didn’t invest in AI just to make their work faster. They invested in the expectation that they would spend less time tracking information, reconstructing context, and coordinating work. That’s what managers really want, and AI becomes much more valuable when it understands what the organization already knows.”
product focus
In Parallel said it has built what it calls an AI context layer that links meeting decisions, project history, organizational knowledge and ownership information. The goal is to make existing information easier to use for both employees and AI systems.
Founded in 2023, In Parallel is headquartered in Helsinki and has operations in Munich. We develop software designed to organize a company’s internal knowledge and decision trajectory using AI tools.
This research suggests that managers see value in that approach. Respondents said that AI assistants with access to shared organizational context could save them an average of 4.4 hours per week, which is 27% of the coordination time identified in the survey.
Christian Luoma, co-founder of In Parallel, said the next stage of AI in business will depend on whether systems can work with what companies already know.
“The next generation of enterprise AI is not just defined by better models,” Luoma said.
“It depends on how well AI understands the organizations it works within. Businesses already have the knowledge they need to make better decisions. The challenge is to make that knowledge available to everyone and to all AI systems the moment they need it,” he said.
The managers surveyed were based in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany.
