The Freshworks Global Cost of Complexity Report, drawn from 12,021 IT decision-makers across six markets, puts British organisations near the top of the global complexity table. Eighty-eight percent of UK respondents say managing AI has increased team workloads — second only to the US — while 87% report that between 10% and 39% of their AI-related time is absorbed by complexity rather than strategic delivery.
The bill is measurable. Organisations estimate that 24% of AI budgets disappear into what Freshworks calls the 'complexity tax': integration challenges, data preparation, governance overhead, rework, and ongoing support costs that were not in the original business case. A third of UK IT leaders — 33% — describe the situation as 'a very significant issue' today.
The numbers land at an awkward moment. UK government policy has repeatedly pointed to AI adoption as a route to higher productivity. The Freshworks data suggests many businesses are building a new administrative layer at exactly the same time: IT teams spending a quarter of their AI-related hours on troubleshooting and integration rather than on the projects those investments were meant to enable.
Freshworks positions its own IT service management platform as a consolidation play — reducing the number of tools IT teams must stitch together — though the report does not benchmark specific vendors against the problem it describes.
The full Cost of Complexity Report is available at freshworks.com.
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