There's a statistic that gets thrown around in enterprise AI conversations: employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day searching for information. McKinsey published a version of it. So did IDC. The number varies by study, but the direction is always the same.
Nearly a quarter of the working day, spent not doing the work — but looking for the information needed to do it.
Most leaders hear that number and think: "That seems high. Surely not here."
Then we ask them to watch their teams for a week. Watch the Slack messages that say "does anyone know where the latest version of X is?" Watch the emails forwarded three times before someone finds the right attachment. Watch the meetings scheduled just to share context that should have been findable.
It adds up fast.
The hidden costs
Lost time is the obvious one. But the real costs go deeper.
Decision delays
When people can't find the information they need, decisions slow down. Not dramatically — it's rarely a crisis. It's a day here, a day there. A meeting rescheduled because someone needs to "pull the numbers." A proposal delayed because the latest case study can't be found.
Individually, each delay is minor. Collectively, across an organisation of 200 or 2,000 people, the compounding effect on speed-to-market is significant.
Knowledge loss
When someone leaves your organisation, they take two things with them: their skills and their knowledge of where things are. The skills are hard to replace. The knowledge of how to navigate your information landscape — which SharePoint site has the current template, which Slack channel discussed that decision, who to ask about that process — is almost impossible to replace.
Every departure creates a knowledge gap that the remaining team has to fill through trial and error. Enterprise AI search doesn't prevent people from leaving, but it does make their knowledge findable for everyone who stays.
Duplicate work
If you can't find it, you rebuild it. We've seen teams create the same analysis, the same presentation framework, the same process document — multiple times, because no one knew the previous version existed.
It's not a laziness problem. It's an information architecture problem.
Why traditional search doesn't solve it
Most organisations already have search. SharePoint has search. Google Workspace has search. Confluence has search. The problem is that each one only searches within its own walls.
When an employee needs to find "the proposal we sent to that mining company last quarter," they don't know whether it's in SharePoint, Google Drive, Salesforce, or someone's email. So they search in one system. Then another. Then they ask someone on Slack.
This is the problem enterprise AI search solves. Not by replacing your existing systems, but by sitting across all of them and providing one place to search everything.
What enterprise AI search actually delivers
When we implement Glean for clients, the results follow a consistent pattern:
- Search time drops dramatically. Instead of checking three or four systems, people search once and find what they need.
- Onboarding accelerates. New team members can find answers without knowing who to ask or where to look.
- Knowledge surfaces naturally. The AI understands context — it knows what's relevant to your role, your team, your current projects.
- Institutional knowledge persists. When someone leaves, their documents, decisions, and contributions remain discoverable.
The ROI conversation
We get asked about ROI regularly. Here's how we think about it:
Take the average fully-loaded cost of an employee in your organisation. Multiply by the number of employees. Now give each of them back even 30 minutes a day — not the full 1.8 hours, just 30 minutes.
For a 500-person organisation at an average cost of $120,000 per employee, that's roughly $15 million in recovered productive time per year.
The cost of implementing Glean is a fraction of that. The implementation timeline is typically 4 weeks. The value starts showing up in the first month.
Starting the conversation
If your teams are spending more time searching than doing, enterprise AI search isn't a nice-to-have. It's an operational necessity.
JOURN3Y implements Glean across Australia and New Zealand. We handle the technical setup, the integrations, the change management, and the ongoing optimisation.
Want to understand what enterprise AI search could save your organisation? Talk to the JOURN3Y team.