Tech Disruptions Cost Companies Millions of Dollars in Lost Productivity Annually

Learn more about Ivanti

Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments, according to McKinsey. However, Ivanti's 2025 Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Report shows that just 21% of office workers say AI is significantly improving their productivity.

In the age of AI, digital friction threatens to undermine AI's potential, exacerbate tech problems and have a corrosive effect on employee productivity. Office workers already endure 3.6 tech interruptions and 2.7 security update disruptions per month. This equates to nearly $4 million in lost productivity annually for a company with 2,000 employees.

The number of workplace tools is exploding faster than employees can master them, yet nearly half of office workers say they're left to teach themselves how to use new technology — a source of frustration for employees and inefficiency for the business. For instance, among the 93% of companies that haven't banned AI use, only 40% have provided training, while another 24% plan to offer it soon.

"As organizations accelerate their AI investments, it's clear that realizing AI's promise requires a deeper understanding of the employee experience and impact on productivity. Tools that monitor and analyze how employees interact with technology in real time, like Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions, offer data-driven insights – revealing workflow bottlenecks and initiating self-healing actions," said Dennis Kozak, CEO of Ivanti. "By embracing DEX, organizations can take their AI initiatives further and truly empower their workforce, moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive improvement. DEX is more than a strategy for improving the employee experience; it's the engine that embeds AI into company culture, productivity and daily operations."

Additional key findings from the report include:

The newest office perk is employee technology autonomy

A new frontier in workplace benefits is emerging, giving employees greater autonomy over their technology. On average, office workers rate their workplace tools at just a "B-." Tellingly, 65% report that frustrations with these tools can negatively affect their mood and morale. Device choice is also a pressing concern; while 67% note that having a say in the devices they use is important, only 36% currently enjoy this freedom.

The help desk is evolving thanks to AI

AI is transforming help desks, moving them beyond the break-fix cycle that has defined IT support for decades. While most companies have automated basic IT operations such as security patch management (72%) and IT ticket routing (67%), significant opportunities remain. Nearly 40% still haven't automated password resets, missing an easy win that could eliminate countless routine support tickets.

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations must move beyond piecemeal DEX adoption and invest in strategies that deliver measurable improvements to both employee satisfaction and the bottom line.

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Tech Disruptions Cost Companies Millions of Dollars in Lost Productivity Annually

Learn more about Ivanti

Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments, according to McKinsey. However, Ivanti's 2025 Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Report shows that just 21% of office workers say AI is significantly improving their productivity.

In the age of AI, digital friction threatens to undermine AI's potential, exacerbate tech problems and have a corrosive effect on employee productivity. Office workers already endure 3.6 tech interruptions and 2.7 security update disruptions per month. This equates to nearly $4 million in lost productivity annually for a company with 2,000 employees.

The number of workplace tools is exploding faster than employees can master them, yet nearly half of office workers say they're left to teach themselves how to use new technology — a source of frustration for employees and inefficiency for the business. For instance, among the 93% of companies that haven't banned AI use, only 40% have provided training, while another 24% plan to offer it soon.

"As organizations accelerate their AI investments, it's clear that realizing AI's promise requires a deeper understanding of the employee experience and impact on productivity. Tools that monitor and analyze how employees interact with technology in real time, like Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions, offer data-driven insights – revealing workflow bottlenecks and initiating self-healing actions," said Dennis Kozak, CEO of Ivanti. "By embracing DEX, organizations can take their AI initiatives further and truly empower their workforce, moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive improvement. DEX is more than a strategy for improving the employee experience; it's the engine that embeds AI into company culture, productivity and daily operations."

Additional key findings from the report include:

The newest office perk is employee technology autonomy

A new frontier in workplace benefits is emerging, giving employees greater autonomy over their technology. On average, office workers rate their workplace tools at just a "B-." Tellingly, 65% report that frustrations with these tools can negatively affect their mood and morale. Device choice is also a pressing concern; while 67% note that having a say in the devices they use is important, only 36% currently enjoy this freedom.

The help desk is evolving thanks to AI

AI is transforming help desks, moving them beyond the break-fix cycle that has defined IT support for decades. While most companies have automated basic IT operations such as security patch management (72%) and IT ticket routing (67%), significant opportunities remain. Nearly 40% still haven't automated password resets, missing an easy win that could eliminate countless routine support tickets.

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations must move beyond piecemeal DEX adoption and invest in strategies that deliver measurable improvements to both employee satisfaction and the bottom line.

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

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Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...