The most important innovation question is often not, “What can we add?” It is: “What can we make disappear?” Every business is surrounded by friction. A customer must fill out another form. An employee must search three systems for an answer. A salesperson manually prepares for a meeting. A physician spends time entering information that could have been captured automatically. A manager waits days for an analysis that should take minutes.

Most organizations learn to live with these obstacles. Great innovators become obsessed with them. They understand something deceptively powerful: every point of unnecessary friction is an invitation to create value.

And increasingly, artificial intelligence is making it possible to remove friction that once appeared unavoidable. More tools are being developed than ever before. An April 2026 estimate determined that there are over 47,400 publicly listed AI tools spanning 5,000 job categories and over 11,000 tasks.

Add that to the large number of SaaS tools already on the market before the AI boom, and there is a lot of innovation and building going on in this space. More importantly, those tools need to remove actual friction from their users’ day-to-day routines.

The Dangers Of Unresolved Friction

Finding friction takes things a bit farther than identifying an audience’s pain points. It digs deeper to find the tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive or difficult. We see this a lot with many current AI tools, which place a heavy emphasis on automating repetitive tasks or helping work get done faster .

There is a good reason for this. Friction can come in a variety of forms, but it ultimately falls into a single overarching category. Basically, anything that makes work harder or take longer than it should is a form of friction.

Friction that makes it harder for team members to get their job done can add up much faster than we realize. According to Gartner , “Employees who must work around friction spend an average of 1.9 additional hours per day on routine tasks. For a 10,000-person company, these workarounds translate into 3.1 million wasted hours a year.”

Blue-collar trades know this problem well. Peak Performance 2026 , an annual roofing industry benchmark report, found that 80% of high-revenue roofing companies run a CRM while only 29% use project management tools, so the front of the job is organized and the rest of it depends on someone remembering to make a call. That gap does not show up on a P&L, but it costs real money.

Of course, lost productivity is not the only reason why tools that remove friction are so needed. Too much friction at work can hurt the overall experience of individual employees, causing them to feel more stressed or less motivated. They may become less productive or leave for another job.

Making Friction Removal The Top Priority

The potential negative consequences of unresolved friction are why friction removal has become the top priority for many tool developers. Often, this requires a multi-layered approach. There is the initial type of friction that the tool is trying to solve. But there are also potential frictions associated with the tool itself. Innovative developers are aware of this and are constantly looking for ways to make using their own software as easy as possible.

One example of this comes from JobNimbus, an AI-enabled CRM for roofing contractors, which recently unveiled native integration with Angi. As the company’s release explains , “The integration automatically surfaces new Angi leads inside JobNimbus the moment a homeowner submits a request. This allows contractors to move from inquiry to estimate to scheduled job without switching platforms or duplicating data entry, helping save valuable time and reduce manual administrative work.”

In this specific use case, removing manual steps like re-entering a lead’s contact information manually can help reduce the time it takes for a contractor to reach out to a lead, while also reducing the risk of manual data entry errors. Considering that 78% of customers will buy from the first contractor to respond to their quote request, removing this type of friction can have a surprisingly big impact on the bottom line for home service businesses.

Similar innovation processes are required for any tool, no matter what its use or intended audience. Developers must first identify the friction or pain point, the part of a job or task that could be streamlined with the right software. They then dig into the problem to identify practical ways that a tool could cut unnecessary steps or speed up processes.

One element that is essential in building tools that remove friction is making sure the tools themselves do not introduce new friction. A 2025 report found that enterprises used an average of 625 applications, but that underutilized technology resulted in average losses of $104 million.

As tech spending continues to grow, it is important for innovative developers to consider whether they are fully considering the needs and skill level of the intended user. Not all people have the same technology skills. Creating a tool that is unnecessarily complex or intimidating could scare away potential users before they even give it a try. And in an enterprise business setting, a bloated tech stack with poor integration could cause otherwise helpful tools to get buried.

Adding another tool to a fragmented stack often creates as much friction as it removes, and that holds double for AI. Because of this, developers need to do more than find an innovative solution to solve a problem with their tech tools. They also need to consider what the experience would be like for the average user, one who is not approaching the tool with developer-level knowledge.

Every tool will naturally have a learning curve for new users. But that learning curve should be short and streamlined, just like how the tool itself is trying to make other tasks easier to handle. Making a tool as simple and accessible as possible is a requirement to keep a tool from creating unnecessary friction.

What Leaders Should Do Now

The path forward can be surprisingly practical.

1. Create a friction inventory. Ask employees and customers:

  • What takes too long?
  • What requires unnecessary repetition?
  • Where do people wait?
  • Where do employees copy and paste information?
  • Where do decisions get stuck?
  • Where do customers abandon the process?

Rather than beginning with an AI strategy, begin with a list of frustrations.

2. Quantify the friction. Estimate hours, costs, delays, errors, lost customers and missed opportunities. A problem becomes much easier to prioritize when friction has a price tag.

3. Pick one high-volume, low-risk workflow. Do not begin by attempting to transform the entire enterprise. Choose something repetitive, measurable and relatively contained. Automate it. Measure it. Learn. Then expand.

4. Keep humans where judgment matters. Use AI for information gathering, synthesis, routing, drafting and pattern recognition. Keep humans accountable for consequential decisions until the technology and controls justify greater autonomy.

5. Redesign the process, not merely the task. If AI eliminates three steps, do not preserve the old workflow around them. Remove the steps. The point of innovation is not to make the old process faster. It is to create a better process.

Building Tools For A Frictionless Future

Practically every job and task has some level of friction that keeps things from being as smooth and streamlined as we might want. The best innovators are leveraging AI to remove that friction, creating win-wins for themselves and their users. As we continue to remove friction from work, even more innovations will become possible.