Microsoft: Employees are interrupted every 2 minutes – how can AI help us re-focus on the work that matters?

Workers across the world are grappling with the “seemingly infinite workday”.

That’s the top line finding of Microsoft’s new research.

Analyzing thousands of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, the tech giant found that the workday is not just getting longer – one in three are actively diving into their inboxes after 10pm – but work is also more chaotic.

Workers received, on average, 117 emails a day, and 153 Team messages. Messages are up 6% globally year-on-year, rising to 15% in the UK and 20% in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“Each email or message notification may seem small, but together they can set a frenetic tempo for the day ahead,” stated the Microsoft report.

Individuals are also grappling with huge call volumes, with 57% of meetings being ad-hoc, rather than pre-scheduled. 50% of these meetings are between 9-11am and 1-3pm, which research shows is when “many people have a natural productivity spike in their day, due to their circadian rhythms”.

The report stated: “We fill this time with meetings, leaving little room for deep focus.

This means “the most valuable hours of the workday are often ruled by someone else’s agenda”.

Microsoft’s data further found that, shockingly, workers only have two minutes of uninterrupted time between meetings, emails or messages in core working hours. That’s 275 interruptions every single working day.

“Many workers feel harried and are operating with a last-minute mindset,” Alexia Cambon, Microsoft Senior Research Director, Copilot & Future of Work, exclusively tells UNLEASH.

Cambon comments: “It’s not just that the work never ends—it’s that work is increasingly disruptive, leaving little time for moments of mental rest or focus.”

Clearly, organizations need to step up and take action. As employers and employees embrace AI, they need to avoiding see AI as a silver bullet, and actually think about how AI truly rethink how we work.

“Otherwise, we risk using AI to accelerate a broken system,” said the report.

What’s the path forward for companies, and specifically HR leaders?

It’s time to embrace the ‘frontier firm’ mindset, finds Microsoft

Amid this chaos of work, the solution, according to Microsoft, is to embrace a ‘Frontier Firm’ mindset.

What does this mean? Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report concluded that 2025 will be the year of the ‘Frontier Firm’.

Put simply, these are organizations that question “how time is spent, how work gets done, and what truly drives impact”, and truly leverage AI agents as digital colleagues.

Microsoft’s report recommends that employers move away from seeing activity as the same as progress – just because people are replying quickly on email or Teams, doesn’t mean they are working on the projects that matter.

Instead, there’s a need to focus on the 20% of work that delivers 80% of the outcomes – AI agents make this possible and scalable by taking away the low value work so that individuals can reclaim time for business critical, deep work.

Essentially, it’s time to work smarter (not harder), and truly embrace human-agent teams that built to adapt and scale.

In conclusion, Cambon tells UNLEASH in this AI reality of work, “now is the perfect opportunity to ask ourselves how we can fundamentally reshape the workday to create more space for the work that matters most and the patterns that support workers best”.