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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
Everyone’s got a theory about the UK’s productivity crisis. Lazy workers. Weak managers. No ambition. Pick your villain. But we’ve been looking in the wrong direction. Just look at the numbers: from 2011 to 2019, the UK saw just 0.5% productivity growth per year. Across the pond, the figure was 0.8%. At first glance, you might think that gap seems small, but over time, it adds up.
So who gets the blame? Lazy workers? Ineffective managers? A lack of drive? The answer, usually, is all of the above. But we’ve been pointing fingers in the wrong direction. By 2019, the UK–US productivity gap reached 28%. Now, if we adjust for capital and skills, it drops to just 11%. In other words, around 60% of the difference can be chalked up to underinvestment in technology and operational infrastructure.
Many UK firms are still running service delivery on spreadsheets and manual work. In high-volume, client-centric environments, that doesn’t scale. For businesses, that means doing more with less. For the economy, it means sluggish growth and frozen wages.
If we’re serious about fixing productivity, we need to stop relying on outdated tools and start investing in the operational backbone that lets us compete on a global scale.
When I speak to B2B service leaders, the root problem almost always comes down to this: Broken operations. Everyone wants tighter and more productive teams, but day to day, they’re making calls without basic intel about what on earth is going on on the ground.
Who’s working on what? Where are resources stretched? Where are teams wasting effort? Most of the time, no one knows, because the information isn’t visible. It’s buried in various inboxes and scattered across spreadsheets and various communication platforms.
Then there’s the invisible work. Handoffs between different time zones, duplicated work, and delays that don’t show up on dashboards. When you can’t see what’s really going on, everyone is guessing, and productivity takes the hit. For all the talk about digital transformation, many service businesses are still operating like it’s the 90s. If you’re still relying on manual work to keep operations moving, you have to ask, Why?
Since GenAI went mainstream, it’s been pitched as the silver bullet for slow service delivery, rising costs, and stalled efficiency. Everyone was sold on the promise of a productivity renaissance, but the reality has fallen far short of expectations.
The results just aren’t there. MIT looked at more than 300 enterprise AI projects and discovered that 95% of companies are still waiting to see any return on their AI investments. Over $30 billion has been spent around the world, yet most companies have to show for, it is a handful of pilot projects gathering dust and RPA bots stuck in one corner of the business.
This isn’t a tech failure, it’s an operational failure. Even the shiniest new AI tool can’t work miracles if it’s dropped into a mess of manual processes, with no structure or usable data.
Yet automation still gets rolled out with no real grasp of the work. For example, does a task happen once or 100 times a month? Understanding this tells you whether it’s worth automating, but often no one has the answer. If your operations aren’t in order, AI won’t save you; it’ll just add another layer to the chaos.
If you want to see results from AI, get your processes in order first. McKinsey looked at 50 real AI builds and found the same thing: Success isn’t about the tech, it’s about the workflow. Get that right first, and AI actually works.
This is precisely why you need orchestration. It’s the air traffic control tower from which you can clearly see and direct all the moving parts, and for service delivery, there are many. The complexity is baked into operations, juggling time zone handoffs, compliance demands, and evolving client expectations. If you can’t see the work, or when it’s idle, you’re losing both productivity and revenue.
Most businesses map out their processes like this: Task A, then Task B, then Task C. What they miss is everything nuanced that’s in between. The email sitting in someone’s inbox for two days. The approval that never came. The work that got duplicated because two teams didn’t know the other was doing it. That’s where productivity dies
Process orchestration takes all the data that was scattered across various systems and spreadsheets and unifies it on one platform. Orchestration is the conductor, and your processes are the musicians. Without orchestration, you don’t have harmony; you just have a lot of noise.
Once orchestration is in place, everything changes. You’ll finally see where work is getting held up and where resources are being underused. This transparency gives you the power to fix what was invisible before, and that’s where the good stuff starts to happen.
From this point, you’ve got strong roots to start automating. Remember, AI does its best work on repeatable, high-volume tasks. One high-impact tool is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), which intelligently pulls data from forms, documents and contracts at speed and with minimal errors. Or, use email triage tools to route thousands of messages to the right place in seconds. These are just a couple of examples of how you can automate with impact.
Not all innovation has to be top-down. Don’t overlook the progress that can come from giving individuals the freedom to experiment with GenAI, especially in low-risk, high-reward areas like content creation or coding.
A common approach is to have one person in each department trial new AI tools and share their findings. This creates a safe, low-pressure space for testing what actually supports their day-to-day work.
If that sounds risky, remember how other new tech was treated in the past. My favourite example is the sat nav. In the early days, many drivers were unwilling to let go of their trusted A-Z maps. But if your cabbie did that today, you’d lose your patience. GenAI is the same. It can help you get to the end result faster and with less stress.
The complexity of B2B service delivery has gone through the roof. More tools, more teams, more regulation, and more data. But we still keep blaming people for our productivity problems, when the real issue is the way we’re working.
Orchestration has now become the minimum standard for running a professional service business at scale. The companies that come out ahead won’t be the ones chasing the latest tools, but the ones that are built on solid ground.
