Cutting the ‘coordination tax’: How agentic AI can reshape workflows
Discover how AI can reduce the coordination tax by redesigning workflow interfaces, accelerating processes, and unlocking greater value from AI investments.
Ai’s Next Frontier: Coordination
Companies have largely deployed artificial intelligence to speed up single tasks within a process, but the real upside lies in the hand‑offs that link those tasks together. The most valuable gains appear when organizations rethink entire end‑to‑end workflows to exploit what AI can now handle at the points where work moves between teams, systems or functions.
The Hidden Cost of Hand‑offs
Executives are being urged to look beyond the internal mechanics of each step and focus on the “coordination interface tax” – the expense incurred when humans mediate transfers between stages. Past automation waves improved the speed of isolated actions but fell short on the judgment and verification required at these junctions. That gap has left a sizable, often invisible, cost burden on enterprises.
Agentic AI Bridges the Gap
The emergence of agentic AI marks the first generation of tools capable of automating much of the verification, reconciliation and routing that previously demanded human oversight. By taking over these coordination duties, the technology promises not only incremental efficiency gains but also the chance to redesign processes so that the hidden coordination costs shrink dramatically. Industry experience suggests that these costs represent the largest unaddressed expense in many large‑scale operations.
Workflow Examples and Time Impact
Typical enterprise workflows—such as order‑to‑cash, procure‑to‑pay and demand‑to‑production—are often mapped out on whiteboards after years of incremental improvement. While each individual step may be finely tuned, the transition points still consume a substantial share of effort. Across knowledge‑intensive firms, the activities of aligning, verifying, reconciling, waiting and passing work from one stage to the next account for roughly 35 % to 60 % of total work time. That range underscores the magnitude of the coordination tax that agentic AI aims to reduce.
Rethinking Redesign Priorities
Leaders seeking to capture these benefits should begin by cataloguing the interfaces where work changes hands. Identifying the most time‑intensive or error‑prone hand‑offs allows them to prioritize where agentic AI can be deployed for maximum impact. Rather than tweaking the internal logic of each step, the focus shifts to automating the judgment calls that have traditionally required human involvement.
Strategic Implications for Enterprises
Adopting agentic AI at coordination points can free up skilled staff to concentrate on higher‑value activities such as strategic analysis, innovation and customer engagement. The resulting workflow redesign not only trims the hidden tax but also creates a more agile operation capable of responding faster to market changes. Companies that successfully integrate this technology into their hand‑off processes stand to achieve performance improvements that go well beyond the modest gains of earlier automation efforts.
Source: mckinsey.com · 2026-09-18