April 02, 2026
AI Is Making Life Harder for CX Teams, Not Easier, Front Research Finds
Despite massive investments in AI tools, most B2B customer teams are, in fact, experiencing “burnout, time wasted, and new headaches.” That is the finding from a new report by customer operations platform, Front. According to 700 B2B customer service, operations, and account management leaders surveyed, CX teams are paying a heavy “coordination tax” to keep AI systems effectively stitched together. Research elsewhere shows this is not a unique issue to B2B customer teams.
The scale of the issue
Front found that the typical B2B company spends nearly three hours coordinating for every one hour resolving customer problems. Thirty-nine per cent spend more than three hours coordinating per hour of problem-solving, the largest cohort in the study, with only 31 percent falling below two hours.
Even companies running sophisticated omnichannel operations, which closed 73 percent of requests within an hour against 56 per cent for those on basic tools, the share of time actually spent solving problems remained flat at between 21 and 24 percent. As tool stacks grew, time spent jumping between systems climbed from 24 to 39 percent. A separate Dayforce report similarly found that 66 per cent of workers say adopting new tools reduces rather than improves efficiency.
AI is increasing the problem, not solving it
Ninety-three per cent of companies in the study use AI in customer operations but where a billing dispute, product issue or contract question must cross multiple teams, tickets can be created but crucial context gets lost in the process. Workers end up turning more to communication channels like email and Slack which can create a further disconnect between systems. Coincidentally, Salesforce has recently announced it is integrating Slackbot more closely with Agentforce to help solve this fragmentation between systems.
The report also uncovered that 71 percent encountered at least one significant AI problem in the past three months. For one in four, these occurred daily, most commonly through AI generating extra coordination work, losing context at handoffs, or misrouting requests.
Dan O’Connell, CEO of Front, is clear about the root cause: “Companies end up layering on more systems and more AI, while the real work of coordinating people, context, and decisions still happens manually. Teams are working around broken systems. AI won’t fix that. Until companies address the coordination gap, the problem won’t go away.”
The human cost
Of course, all of this means worse customer experiences as they inevitably end up having to act as the glue between departments and systems. The fallout extends even more severely across employee experiences. More than a third of companies were reported to have a top performer leave due to coordination burnout in the past year because the operational overhead became untenable. Among teams with the highest coordination ratios, 47 percent confirmed losing someone this way. For more balanced teams, the figure falls to one in four. When those people leave, companies often turn to AI to backfill the productivity hit, adding yet more fuel to the fire.
The picture beyond B2B
Front draws a distinction between B2B, where issues span multiple teams, and B2C, where requests tend to be simpler and single-channel. Evidence suggests, however, that internal coordination shapes the quality of external service delivery in both contexts. Research in the European Research on Management and Business Economics, for example, reaches the same conclusion: “Customer experience suffers when organisational silos create barriers to the flow of information and collaboration.”
The results are in
Front’s results speak for themselves. The most efficient companies are more than twice as likely to report zero operational issues in the past three months, and nearly half confirmed no burnout departures over the same period, compared with roughly a third across every other group. They are also half as likely to report that AI created additional coordination work, suggesting that when AI has access to full operational context, it reduces overhead rather than shifting it.
For most companies, the ‘coordination tax’ has never appeared on any dashboard and, until it does, faster ticketing and smarter automation may simply be adding a greater problem than it is solving.
