A Salesforce survey of 250 U.S. executives finds most AI use stays private, so teams repeat work and lose hours. Here is what it found and what to do.
Most AI use at work is still a one-person activity, and a new Salesforce survey says teams pay for it. Of 250 U.S. executives surveyed, 68% see useful AI results that never reach the rest of the team. Two in three say colleagues are solving the same problem without knowing it.
The cause is simple. Each person's AI chat is private. One executive described a prompt that could cut review time in half, but it stays in one person's workflow. An IT director said engineers wasted time asking AI to fix the same error because their separate chat histories kept them from sharing the answer.
Size makes it worse. Of enterprise executives, 73% report weekly stalls, compared with 37% at small and medium-sized businesses. More employees means more private chat histories and more places for work to go unseen.
Executives estimate the 3.6 hours a week is nearly 10% of every workweek. Over a 50-week year, that comes to about 181 hours, or roughly 22 business days per employee. These are executive estimates, not measured figures. Only 11% say their AI tools sit in one integrated system and cost no time.
Many companies have moved past testing. Some 49% are deploying AI agents, which are programs that complete tasks with some independence. But just 15% have embedded them across multiple systems so they work smoothly together.
Asked about an ideal setup, 72% chose AI that works across the team with shared context, so value builds on itself. Another 26% would have each person use AI alone. Rob Seaman, who leads Slack at Salesforce, said the solo era made people faster, while shared use makes a whole company smarter. Keep in mind that this comes from a company that sells workplace tools.
Small teams reported fewer stalls, but the same habits can start anywhere. Pick one shared spot where people post prompts that worked and answers worth keeping. Ask the team to check it before starting a new problem. It costs little and targets the repeat work the survey describes.
If your team uses AI, set up one shared place for good prompts and answers so people stop solving the same problem twice.
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