Atlassian: AI could help workers stop wasting 2.4 billion hours searching for information every year

Workers have more information than ever, but they’ve never been less informed.

That’s the conclusion of software giant Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report.

Atlassian’s survey of 200 Fortune 1,000 executives and 12,000 knowledge workers found that difficulty finding information was the number one barrier to moving fast, and 25% of executives and teams alike spend a quarter of the workweek searching for information.

Atlassian estimates that a whopping 2.4 billion hours are being wasted searching for information each year within the Fortune 500.

This information sprawl means important updates are lost, but also that work is duplicated – half of workers told Atlassian that teams has unknowingly worked on the same things.

Plus, just 7% of executives know exactly how the work that their teams are doing actually support big company goals.

Ultimately, “we are drowning in information”, “yet, people just do not feel like they have the useful context that they need to do their jobs in the best way”, Molly Sands, Head of the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian, tells UNLEASH in an exclusive interview at Qualtrics X4.

For Sands, the powerful message of the report is that “people have really reached that breaking point” around information overload and playing digital hide and seek.

Companies are concerned: “Every time that I talk with any executive leader, they are really focused on – how do I connect people across my company?”

The question is how do they overcome this information crisis? AI has a crucial role to play, currently 71% of teams amid they aren’t maximizing the use of AI to help them manage and discover information.

AI can help us to ‘become more curious again’

This information challenge is something “that I’m excited about AI helping us solve”, shares Sands.

With this information overload, humans don’t have the time to sort through all of it, but with AI, “it’s a really exciting moment where people can start to become more curious again”.

“The barriers to navigating all that information that’s available in a company are really coming down” – this frees us employees to ask the important questions, such as “how would our sales team think about that? What are we hearing from our customers?”.

In fact, people can even start to ask those questions of AI agents, and use them to dig into to data and turn it into insight.

By leveraging AI, Sands argues, HR teams can really continue the “evolution of knowledge” within their organization.

This is where AI is embedded into teams, meaning “we are working in this human-AI collaboration model where AI is making all of us better, faster, and is really elevating the quality of the work”, continues Sands.

However, AI isn’t the only piece of the puzzle – Atlassian’s report explores what else high-performing teams are doing to solve the right problems in the right way.

First of all, they set clear goals and align work to those goals, then they plan and track work together (in a centralized place) – this creates the foundation for AI to then do its job to unleash collective knowledge.

Credit: Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report.

Talking directly to HR leaders, Sands comments that when it comes to goals, it is not about setting them and then forgetting them.

“Too many times people [say] these are our goals for the year.”

Instead, companies need to get “really strong at continuously evolving their goals and reflecting on how they’re making progress against them”.

When they do this, “you see that really starts to create a much more collaborative environment across the organization”.

Ultimately, “I want executive leaders and teams leaders to really be thinking about how they can build stronger cultures of how things get done”, concludes Sands.

That’s how you move the needle and ensure your people are not drowning in information, but leveraging the expertise in your organization to drive business results.

Want to hear more from Atlassian on HR topics? You’re in luck! Atlassian’s Chief People Officer Avani Prabhakar is speaking at UNLEASH America 2025, 6 to 8 May.

It’s not too late to grab a pass.