Lack of AI training leads to fragmentation tax: Atlassian

For its latest report, The State of Teams 2026, Atlassian explored the impacts that a lack of return on investment from AI use has on organisations.

“The most successful teams cut the fragmentation tax nearly in half by equipping AI with full context, designing clear workflows for people and agents, and creating cultures that celebrate human-AI collaboration,” the report found.

The $161 billion in fragmentation tax Fortune 500 companies faced in 2018 was due to eroding productivity gains.

“Duplicative work, misaligned priorities, and coordination chaos are eroding AI productivity gains within the enterprise,” it said.

Further, 6 per cent of respondents confidently pointed to specific ROI across their organisations, despite 89 per cent of executives noting increased efficiency due to AI.

The report noted that, despite respondents saying that 80 per cent of time was spent on collaborative tasks, only 24 per cent of AI implementation targeted team use.

Fifty-five per cent reported that AI adoption widened performance and opportunity gaps across teams, and only 29 per cent of workers embedded AI in their daily workflows.

The report found that executives were more likely to invest in new tools rather than upskill their workforce. Although 31 per cent of knowledge workers report extensive AI learning opportunities, 69 per cent indicated that their data and knowledge foundations were not optimised for AI, and only 22 per cent trusted AI's accuracy.

“Leaders feel this drag as a persistent tax on their AI wins. They’ve invested heavily in tools, but have largely overlooked the shared context, workflows, and culture that would let their teams actually harness those tools as a team,” the report said.

“Across the organization, the pattern repeats. Cross-functional teams spin up overnight and dissolve just as quickly, because there’s no shared roadmap for how human teammates and agents are meant to work together,” it concluded.