Headlines Hype Disruption, Companies Face Friction
Around 6 years ago, I built my first marketing automation solution. The following year, after Covid halted operations, my team had to maintain the same output with fewer resources during a hiring freeze, turning that skillset from a bonus into a must-have. Around that time, I started reading industry reports on digital transformation. I recall an interview where a CIO noted how his subscriptions and feeds were flooded with complex machine learning hype, yet most of his company’s productivity gaps could be closed with simple automations that did not even require predictive analytics.
Do you think anything has really changed in 2025? While many C-level executives rush to position themselves as AI thought leaders on public forums, the reality is that their organizations are probably far behind the curve when it comes to integrating automation. They may publicly champion the latest shiny object to boost their company’s brand perception, yet some of their teams have still not fully adopted technology that was already available 15 years ago.
It’s not just a 1 or a 0. In most cases, automation is present in companies, but it’s not uniformly absorbed. Some departments have integrated it more deeply than others; even within the same department, certain processes are more officially automated than others; also, some employees take the initiative to automate workflows, while others do not. Unless we’re talking about small, agile startups, tech absorption and productivity gains in larger companies are usually slow, complex, and often painful. This happens even in mid-sized companies, not just huge legacy enterprises.
New tech availability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it to be adopted. Legacy tools, half-adopted platforms, data silos, and processes that depend on a handful of people manually holding it all together all create friction to adoption. And even once you get past that and you establish or build an automated process, you still have to get employees to adopt it instead of going the old route, and this doesn’t happen unless everyone (from the leaders who decide to buy or implement the tech to the teams who use it) sees its value!
The headlines might keep talking about disruption, but most of what’s happening inside companies is friction. SaaS needs to account for this.
