New Research: Work Gets Trapped in Single-Player AI. Executives Are Ready for Multiplayer
Salesforce research finds 66% of executives report duplicated AI work and 22 business days lost annually due to siloed AI tools, prompting calls for shared multiplayer AI workflows.
A Salesforce survey of 250 U.S. executives reveals that 66% of respondents say employees unknowingly solve the same problems using AI, while 59% report work stalls because insights remain trapped in individual AI interfaces. The study highlights that only 15% of executives say their AI is integrated across multiple systems, forcing workers to toggle between tools and lose an average of 22 business days per year. The issue worsens with company size, with 73% of enterprise executives reporting weekly stalls compared to 37% at small and medium-sized businesses.
Executives describe how useful AI discoveries often stay private, such as a prompt that halves review time remaining unused by others, or engineers repeatedly fixing the same error due to isolated chat histories. Larger organizations face greater visibility gaps, as private AI interactions multiply with employee count, leading to redundant troubleshooting and lost productivity. Technical teams, in particular, report hours wasted debugging issues that could have been avoided with shared AI-generated code visibility.
The survey indicates most organizations have moved beyond AI experimentation but have not coordinated its deployment, resulting in fragmented workflows and significant time losses. When asked about ideal AI use, executives emphasize collaboration, with 72% favoring team-based AI that shares context across functions. A financial services director cited shared workspaces with collaborative AI as a way to eliminate redundant prompt engineering and speed up cross-functional projects.
Slack’s EVP and GM Rob Seaman argues that moving from single-player AI to multiplayer environments allows teams to build on shared context, capturing company-specific workflows and decisions. The findings are based on a double-blind Salesforce Pulse Survey of 250 U.S. executives conducted from September 14 to 22, 2026, with data annualized across 50 workweeks and rounded percentages.