The friction tax: What hidden IT dysfunction really costs a business

Most IT dysfunction is unreported by employees through the ticketing system. Unless the issue stops them in their tracks, employees often just adapt, waiting out a sluggish VPN, restarting a crashing app, powering through slow IT performance, or reaching for a personal device when the corporate one fails them. But this kind of IT irritation isn’t just a minor annoyance. According to research from TeamViewer, digital friction is quietly eroding enterprise performance from the inside out. TeamViewer’s survey of 4,200 managers and employees found that 42% of organizations are losing revenue directly due to digital friction and 80% are losing productive work time every month.

But the financial cost is only part of the story. Productivity erodes every time employees work around a broken tool or hope IT will fix an annoyance that doesn’t quite merit submitting a ticket or, worse, that they don’t trust IT to fix. Those losses compound across thousands of devices and multiple locations. Slow applications, unreliable endpoints, and poor connectivity frustrate users and introduce measurable drag on productivity.

What’s more, when employees can’t get the tools they need through official channels, they find their own solutions by turning to personal devices, consumer apps, and unsanctioned AI tools and cloud services. This is shadow IT, and each workaround creates a new gap in visibility, a new vector for data loss, and new risks for regulatory exposure. Also, because security teams can’t protect what they can’t see, the proliferation of unmanaged endpoints means that audit trails grow thinner. For example, employees who can’t access the approved corporate AI due to a slow VPN may simply access a freely available large language model (LLM) via cellular on their mobile device, potentially exposing sensitive information or obtaining incorrect results. This increasing risk becomes embedded in daily operations.

There’s a cultural cost, too. When employees repeatedly encounter broken workflows and sluggish tools, they eventually stop expecting IT to help, because they assume that the problem is known and accepted or that raising it will generate more trouble than it resolves. Meanwhile, IT teams interpret the low quantity of tickets as stability. This growing distance between employees and the people responsible for their digital environment means that problems fester, trust in IT erodes, and meaningful improvement becomes harder to achieve.

“The organizations that are winning on digital experience have stopped waiting for employees to tell them something is wrong,” says Sebastian Schrötel, senior vice president product management at TeamViewer. “They’ve built the infrastructure to identify issues before users do, by detecting anomalies, predicting failure, and resolving issues automatically well before anyone notices a problem exists.”

That shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive prevention is where AI-driven automation changes the equation. Modern endpoint management platforms can continuously monitor device health, application performance, and network behavior across the entire device estate. When telemetry signals a problem in the making, automation can intervene before the user even notices, by pushing a patch, restarting a service, or routing around a network bottleneck. Resolutions that once took hours now occur in seconds, and many issues are addressed before they generate a single help desk call.

To close the gap between IT performance and employee experience, CIOs should first establish continuous visibility across all managed devices and the IT infrastructure around them. IT can’t act on what it can’t see. Next, IT leaders should shift the metric from ticket volume to proactive issue resolution. The goal is to fix problems before they become tickets. Third, they should treat shadow IT not as a policy failure but as a signal. When employees resort to workarounds, that’s evidence of unmet need, and eliminating that need is more effective than enforcing restrictions. Finally, monitoring, AI-powered automation, and remote support should be unified in a single platform so IT teams can move from insight to action without switching tools or losing context.

TeamViewer’s platform, TeamViewer ONE, provides an example of the kind of AI-powered solution that enables organizations to effectively and proactively address digital friction. Using AI, TeamViewer not only spots issues before anyone files a ticket but also enables IT to resolve those issues in a fraction of the time it would ordinarily take. Its unified approach to endpoint management and digital experience gives IT leaders the visibility and automation they need in order to improve the digital employee experience, reduce IT costs, strengthen security, rebuild employee trust in their tools, and free up IT capacity for the strategic work that moves the business forward.

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