The Cost of Disconnected Work Report finds teams running three or more request platforms are far more likely to lose money to missing or delayed work

Zapier, the leading AI orchestration platform, today released its Cost of Disconnected Work Report, a survey of roughly 800 project managers and operations professionals about how internal requests move through their organizations. The survey revealed that 63% of ops professionals say their team has experienced delayed or lost revenue because of missing or delayed internal requests, and 30% report both.

The research points to a structural problem rather than a people problem. Most teams (54%) field requests across three or four channels, and 93% say those requests routinely arrive with missing information. The result is hours of triage before the actual work begins.

“Teams aren’t drowning because the work is harder. They’re drowning because the work shows up in five different inboxes with half the context missing,” said Emily Mabie, Senior AI Automation Engineer at Zapier. “You can’t hire your way out of that. You have to fix the intake layer so requests get organized, routed, and started without a person stitching the pieces together by hand.”

Key Findings

• Revenue loss is widespread. 63% of ops professionals say their team has had delayed or lost revenue because of missing or delayed internal requests. 30% report experiencing both.
• Fewer platforms, faster work. Teams using one or two request platforms are 81% more likely to process a request in under five minutes than teams using three or more. 49% of teams on one or two platforms say they’ve never lost revenue to missing or delayed requests, compared to 25% of teams on three or more.
• Triage eats the day. 42% of ops professionals spend 6 to 15 minutes organizing a single request when it comes in from multiple sources. Another 32% spend more than 15 minutes, just to figure out what the request is asking for.
• The mental load is bigger than the work. 36% say the mental fatigue of managing requests outweighs the effort of actually completing them. 44% consistently chase updates and approvals, and 41% are regularly interrupted by follow-ups and context-switching.
• Requests come in incomplete. 93% of ops professionals say they receive requests with missing information. The most common gap (48%) is a clear description of what’s actually being asked.

Why This Matters

Half of task-focused leaders (project managers, ops professionals, and small business owners) handle at least 26 internal requests, tickets, or tasks in an average workday. A quarter handle 51 or more. With that volume, every minute spent organizing instead of executing compounds. When something falls through, 46% of respondents say a coworker or manager has to step in, 31% see other requests get delayed, and 29% report burnout on the team.

“Most teams aren’t going to rip out all of their tools, and they shouldn’t,” said Mabie. “Email, Slack, ticketing, project management, they all have a job. The work is connecting them so a request can land in any one of them and still get triaged, assigned, and tracked the same way. That’s what shrinks the cleanup tax on the team and frees them up to do actual strategic work.”

Full survey results: https://zapier.com/blog/work-requests-report

Methodology

The survey was conducted by Centiment for Zapier. The survey was fielded between March 2, 2026, and March 7, 2026. The results are based on 801 completed surveys. To qualify, respondents were screened to be U.S. professionals who handle a moderate to high volume of tickets or other requests. This includes, but is not limited to, project managers, operations leaders, IT leaders, and SMB owners. Data is unweighted, and the margin of error is approximately ±3.5% for the overall sample with a 95% confidence level.

About Zapier

Zapier is an AI orchestration platform that connects 9,000+ apps to help companies automate workflows and improve productivity. Since 2012, millions of users have trusted Zapier to automate everything from lead routing and data synchronization to customer conversations, all without writing code. By turning complex integrations into simple, point-and-click workflows, Zapier empowers teams of all sizes to focus on strategic work. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations worldwide trust Zapier to streamline operations, reduce errors, and accelerate growth through intelligent automation.

Learn more at www.zapier.com.

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