The Hidden Cost of AI Tool Sprawl in Enterprise Organizations

Knowledge workers spend an average of 2.5 hours per day managing email alone. Add calendar coordination, meeting preparation, task tracking, and phone management, and operational overhead can consume 60% or more of a productive workday. Across a 1,000-person organization, that represents thousands of hours of lost capacity every week. The average enterprise now deploys 9.4 separate AI point-solutions across departments — each with its own login, billing, data silo, and security posture. The visible cost is licensing: $1,650 per user per year on average across fragmented tools. But the hidden costs are larger. Integration overhead consumes IT resources. Security review multiplies with each new vendor. Context switching between disconnected tools costs an estimated 23 minutes of recovery time per switch. And the biggest cost of all: none of these tools share memory. Your email AI doesn't know what happened in your meeting. Your calendar AI doesn't know about the task that's due Friday. Every tool starts from scratch, every time.