AI was supposed to make customer experience faster, easier, and more efficient. But for many B2B teams, it’s doing the exact opposite.

That’s according to a study of 700 B2B customer service, operations, and account management leaders conducted by Front, a customer operations platform built for B2B complexity, for its new report, The Coordination Tax: The Invisible Line Item in B2B Customer Operations. The findings point to a largely ignored failure in modern customer support: the systems companies rely on weren’t built for how B2B work actually gets done. Layering AI on top has done little to solve the problem.

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The report finds the real challenge in B2B customer experience isn’t answering questions, like it often is in B2C, where requests are simple and come from a single channel. It’s in coordinating the people, systems, and context required to actually resolve them. In B2B, issues can originate anywhere and span multiple teams, leaving teams chasing information, switching tools, and aligning across the business just to move work forward.

“For years, companies have been sold the idea that faster responses and more automation would fix customer support,” said Dan O’Connell, CEO of Front. “But in B2B, customer issues don’t live in one inbox or one team. They cut across the entire business. Most support tools ignore that reality. So companies end up layering on more systems and more AI, while the real work of coordinating people, context, and decisions still happens manually. Teams are working around broken systems. AI won’t fix that. Until companies address the coordination gap, the problem won’t go away.”

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New data from the report shows just how widespread this breakdown has become.

Customer Teams are Experiencing Burnout, Time Wasted, and New Headaches

• When AI breaks, coordination is usually the culprit. 24% said AI created more coordination work, 22% reported lost context during handoffs, and 20% saw requests routed incorrectly.
• AI is everywhere and it’s creating new headaches. 93% of companies use AI in customer operations, yet 71% reported significant issues in just the past three months.
• Teams spend nearly 3x as long coordinating work than solving customer issues. B2B organizations report spending three hours coordinating work for every hour spent resolving customer problems, a dynamic that has quietly become the norm.
• Top performers are burning out. More than one-third of teams lost a high performer to “coordination burnout” last year.
• Most companies aren’t even measuring the problem. 42% don’t track coordination at all, leaving the biggest source of inefficiency completely invisible.

Even as companies upgraded their tools and layered in AI, the research found the core work didn’t get easier. Resolution times improved on paper, but the effort required to solve complex issues stayed the same or increased. As systems multiplied, so did the need to jump between them, pushing more work into side channels like email, Slack, and meetings where critical context gets fragmented and lost.

While many organizations continue to struggle with coordination overhead, the report finds that one in seven organizations has flipped the equation—spending more time solving customer issues than coordinating them. These organizations are taking a different approach: building coordination into their systems, rather than layering on task automation.

“In B2B, customer issues bounce between support, operations, finance, and account managers before anyone can fully resolve them,” said Jakari Robinson at Flex-Tec. “Before Front, keeping track of that context meant digging through inboxes and Slack threads. Now we handle more than 700 customer emails a day with shared visibility across teams, so everyone sees the same conversation and we can resolve issues faster without things falling through the cracks.”