Why we don’t need more tools, we need less friction

Have you noticed that the more tools we get to save time, the less time we seem to have?

I kept thinking about this after Retail Show Australia. Adam Posner commented about having ChatGPT open, Claude doing something else, and all these tools meant to make us more efficient… Yet somehow everything just feels busier.

I feel the same.

Before COVID, we had fewer tools, fewer notifications, fewer dashboards, fewer channels. And of course, fewer AI assistants. Now we have tools to manage the tools that are supposed to make work easier. Slack. Teams. Clickup. HubSpot. Salesforce. Power BI. ChatGPT. Claude. Copilot. Then an integration platform connecting them. Then a dashboard showing what they’re all doing. Then AI summarising the dashboard because nobody has time to read it. Something feels wrong!

Maybe productivity isn’t a technology problem

Every time a business has a problem, the instinct is often: What tool can solve this? Sometimes that’s exactly the right answer. But sometimes the question should be: Why does this process exist in the first place?

Why does this need three approvals? Why is someone copying data from one system into another? Why are customers being asked for information we already have? Why do four teams have four versions of the same data? Why are we generating a report nobody actually uses?

Adding technology on top of a broken process doesn’t necessarily make it better – sometimes you just get a faster broken process.

And it isn’t only technology adding complexity

The other conversation that stuck with me from the show was regulation. Martin Stirling from Master Grocers Australia talked about how many rules, policies, and compliance requirements businesses are constantly dealing with.

And I think there’s a bigger question in there. A lot of individual regulations make sense. Privacy matters. Cybersecurity matters. Accessibility matters. Consumer protection matters. Workplace protections matter. Environmental reporting matters. Industry standards matter. The issue is what happens when you keep adding one sensible requirement on top of another.

One form. One disclosure. One approval. One audit. One report. One compliance check. One more person who has to sign something off. Individually, each one might be reasonable. Collectively, you can end up with a business spending an enormous amount of time administering work instead of doing work. And then we ask why productivity isn’t improving.

Look at it from the customer side too

You can see the same thing happening in customer experiences. Take something relatively simple like choosing an energy provider, internet plan or insurance product. The business wants it to be easy. The customer definitely wants it to be easy. Then reality kicks in.

Privacy consent. Identity checks. Terms and conditions. Marketing preferences. Product disclosures. Security requirements. Accessibility. Payment verification. Industry-specific regulation. Potential hardship requirements. Data collection rules. Internal approvals. Each one exists for a reason. But who is looking at what the combined experience feels like for the customer?

We can sometimes create a situation where we are technically protecting the customer while giving them an experience they absolutely hate. That doesn’t mean removing the protection. It means we need to get much better at designing around it.

Regulated industries feel this more than most

We see this a lot working across utilities, health, local government, energy and other regulated industries. The business might want to make one simple improvement to a customer journey. But that improvement touches legal. Compliance. Security. Privacy. Technology. Marketing. Operations. Customer service. Suddenly something that sounds like a two-week change becomes a six-month project.

Sometimes that complexity is unavoidable. Sometimes it isn’t. And I don’t think businesses ask that second question enough. Which parts of this complexity are genuinely necessary? And which parts have simply accumulated over time?

We do the same thing internally

It’s not fair to blame regulation for everything either. Businesses create plenty of their own friction. A team buys one platform. Another team buys something else. Then someone discovers the two systems don’t talk. So we buy an integration. Then nobody trusts the data. So we create a spreadsheet. Then the spreadsheet becomes mission-critical. Then someone proposes replacing everything with a new platform. Sound familiar? This is why I think the next stage of digital transformation should be less obsessed with transformation and more obsessed with simplification.

Before adding another tool: Can we remove a step? Can two systems become one? Can this be automated? Can we stop collecting something? Can the customer do this themselves? Can we make the language simpler? Does this approval actually reduce risk? Does anyone use this report? Why are we still doing this at all?

Those questions aren’t as exciting as announcing a new AI platform. But they can have a much bigger impact.

AI could help. Or it could make the problem worse.

AI is obviously going to play a big role in improving productivity. But we should probably be careful. If we simply put AI on top of every existing process, every existing system and every existing layer of complexity, we may just make the whole mess move faster.

The opportunity is bigger than that. Use AI to remove work. Remove repetition. Remove unnecessary handovers. Make information easier to find. Help people make decisions faster. Make the customer experience simpler. That's different from buying another AI tool because everyone else has one.

Maybe the answer is less

At Mo Works, this is increasingly how we think about digital enablement. It isn’t automatically about replacing everything. Sometimes the biggest opportunity is connecting what already exists. Simplifying a workflow. Removing manual work. Fixing a broken customer journey. Integrating two systems. Or getting rid of something entirely. We’ve spent years assuming progress means adding more. More technology. More features. More processes. More data. More reporting. More controls.

Maybe the next productivity gain comes from doing the opposite. A process we remove. A tool we stop paying for. An approval we no longer need. A report nobody reads. A duplicate system. A pointless meeting. Or a regulation that achieves its purpose in a much simpler way.

We probably don’t need more tools. We need less friction.

That should be the goal of digital transformation in the first place.

About Mo Works

Mo Works is a full-service digital creative agency based in Melbourne, specialising in digital enablement, marketing, and branding. We deliver strategies for sustained growth with account-based marketing (ABM), AIO, SEO, ads, and social media. If you're looking for a Melbourne digital marketing agency to help with digital enablement, get in touch today.