Last week, our team published a case study on an ecommerce migration project and why the real value wasn’t simply moving to a new platform. It was removing the operational friction that had quietly accumulated over years. As I produced the Deep Dive podcast based on that case study, Chip and Nova got me thinking less about ecommerce and more about something much bigger.
It struck me that operational friction isn’t just an ecommerce problem at all. It’s a business problem. Marketing teams deal with it every day, but so do sales, customer service, finance, HR, and just about every other department. We simply call it different things depending on where it shows up.
As marketers, we’ve become remarkably good at adapting to inefficient processes. We build workarounds. We create spreadsheets. We copy and paste data between systems. We develop checklists. We accept delays. Eventually, those workarounds stop feeling like temporary fixes and simply become “the way we do things.”
The scary part is that once you’ve lived with operational friction long enough, you stop seeing it. It becomes normal. New employees inherit the process without questioning it, experienced employees build shortcuts around it, and eventually nobody remembers why the process evolved that way in the first place.
That realization stuck with me throughout the week, especially as several members of our team came to me looking for help getting better results from AI. Their questions were all slightly different, but they usually boiled down to the same frustration. “AI isn’t giving me what I want.”
Interestingly, my response was rarely about prompting. Instead, I’d ask them to walk me through exactly how they were accomplishing the task today. Almost every time, AI wasn’t revealing a prompt problem. It was revealing a process problem.
AI Is Teaching Me to Ask Better Questions
One instruction has quietly become part of almost every Webster AI Agent and Claude Project I create:
Don’t just create this project the way I’ve described it. First scrutinize this process. identify operational friction, and recommend a better way to accomplish the same outcome.
That simple approach has changed the way I think about operational efficiency. Instead of asking how AI can help us do something faster, I’m increasingly asking whether we should still be doing it that way at all.
The Friction You’ve Stopped Seeing
Operational friction rarely arrives all at once. It builds gradually over months or years. A software upgrade changes one step in the process. Someone creates a spreadsheet to compensate. Another system gets added. A manual approval becomes necessary. Before long, the workaround has become the workflow, and nobody remembers there was ever another way.
Nobody intentionally creates inefficient processes. Organizations simply adapt to them. Eventually everyone assumes that’s just how the work gets done.
I call this acceptable waste. Not because it’s actually acceptable, but because we’ve gradually learned to accept it.
The most expensive inefficiencies usually aren’t the ones you complain about. They’re the ones you’ve stopped noticing.
It Shows Up Everywhere
As I’ve been looking for operational friction, I’m realizing it ‘s not been confined to one department or one technology. It was hiding almost everywhere. While every organization is different, I’ve found that most of it falls into three categories.
1. Work Friction
Website content migration has been a chronic pain point in our industry for decades. No matter how well we planned, migrating hundreds or thousands of pages from an existing website into a new platform has almost always required more time and effort then we’ve planned or budgeted. Frankly, we’d become so accustomed to that pain that we treated it as an unavoidable part of building websites and more often than not just absorbed the extra cost ourselves
Recently, instead of asking AI how to migrate content faster, we asked it to help us rethink the entire process. The result wasn’t a slightly better workflow. It was an entirely different approach that allowed us to migrate an entire website’s content into a development environment in roughly the amount of time we had originally estimated.
We didn’t just automate the work. We eliminated years of operational friction.
The same thinking is influencing the way we create proposals, strategic recommendations, audits, and other client deliverables. AI isn’t replacing the expertise behind those documents. It’s helping us eliminate repetitive effort so our team spends more time thinking strategically and less time rebuilding the same content over and over again.
2. Administrative Friction
Every agency has administrative work that simply comes with the job. Hours need to be entered. Tasks need to be marked complete. Documentation has to explain what was done and why. Project records need to stay synchronized across multiple systems. None of that work is billable, and none of it directly creates value for our clients, yet it consumes hours every week across the organization.
Instead of accepting that as the cost of doing business, we’ve begun working with Webster and Claude to define AI-assisted workflows and connectors that can update project status, document completed work, synchronize systems, and prepare much of the administrative record automatically. In many cases, those workflows are proving to be just as…and sometimes even more….accurate, than relying on people to remember every manual step.
The objective isn’t to replace talented people. It’s to replace administrative overhead so talented people can spend more of their day doing the work clients actually hire us to do.
3. Decision Friction
Decision friction is different. The work may already be complete, but progress stalls because people are waiting for approvals, waiting for reports, waiting for someone who knows where the latest information lives, or waiting because nobody completely trusts the dashboard they’re looking at.
Marketing leaders shouldn’t have to wait days for someone to manually stitch together website analytics, CRM data, advertising performance, and sales information just to answer a simple question. Likewise, teams shouldn’t lose momentum because one person becomes the bottleneck for information everyone else needs.
Those delays rarely make headlines inside an organization, but they quietly reduce agility, frustrate employees, delay good decisions, and chip away at ROI far more than most organizations realize.
This Is Where Discovery Makes the Difference
As AI kept exposing these patterns in our own business, it reminded me of something we’ve been doing for clients for decades. Every Trivera engagement begins with Discovery.
While clients often come to us asking for a new website, marketing automation, better SEO, or now AI solutions, we know those are only part of the equation. Before we recommend any technology or tactics, we want to understand what’s getting in the way of your marketing success.
Our Discovery process is designed to uncover the operational friction that quietly reduces your marketing ROI by asking questions like:
- Where are your marketing efforts slowing down?
- Which processes create unnecessary work or delays?
- Where are your team members spending time on low-value tasks?
- Which systems, handoffs, or reporting processes are creating bottlenecks?
- What operational improvements would allow your team to spend more time marketing and less time managing the work of marketing?
Those answers shape everything that follows. Sometimes the solution is a new website. Sometimes it’s automation, AI, better reporting, or a redesigned workflow. More often than not, it’s a combination of improvements that removes friction, frees your team to focus on higher-value work, and allows every marketing dollar to work harder.
That’s why AI hasn’t replaced Discovery. It’s made Discovery even more valuable.
What This Means for You
Over the next week, don’t look for AI opportunities. Instead, become a student of your own organization. Pay attention to the workarounds your team has stopped questioning. Notice the manual steps everyone assumes are unavoidable. Watch where talented employees spend time managing process instead of creating value.
Listen for the phrases, “That’s just how we’ve always done it,” or “It only takes a few extra minutes.”
Those are often clues that operational friction has quietly become part of your culture.
Then ask a different question.
If we were designing this process from scratch today, would we still do it this way?
The organizations gaining the greatest advantage from AI won’t necessarily have the best prompts or the latest tools. They’ll be the ones willing to question the processes everyone else has stopped seeing.
If this article has you mentally making a list of workarounds, bottlenecks, manual tasks, and “that’s just the way we do it” moments inside your own organization, that’s a good sign. You’re beginning to see the operational friction that’s been there all along.
A Trivera Discovery, the first phase of our Evolve Process, is designed to uncover those hidden friction points across your marketing operation and, quite often, throughout the rest of your business as well.
Sometimes the answer is AI. Sometimes it’s a better process. Sometimes it’s new technology. More often than not, it’s a thoughtful combination of all three.
The goal isn’t simply to help you work faster. It’s to eliminate the work that never should have existed in the first place.
