Is Outdated Workplace Technology Quietly Costing Your Business?

Businesses are under pressure to do more with less.

Costs have increased, customers expect faster responses and employees expect technology at work to be as intuitive as the technology they use everywhere else.

Yet there’s an uncomfortable question many organisations aren’t asking:

Is Your Workplace Technology Actually Helping Your People Become More Productive – Or is it Quietly Slowing Them Down?

Adrian Hancock, Founder and Chairman of Clear Technology Group, recently explored why B2B technology companies are struggling in 2026 in an article for Entrepreneur UK.

One of his observations was particularly relevant to the workplace: difficult economic conditions don’t necessarily create inefficiency – they expose it.

For years, businesses could tolerate outdated systems, duplicated processes and technology that wasn’t quite working as well as it should.

Today, there’s far less room for that friction.

Technology Friction Rarely Looks Dramatic

The problem with inefficient workplace technology is that the cost often isn’t obvious.

It’s the employee who spends ten minutes trying to start a meeting.

The meeting room that’s avoided because everybody knows the camera doesn’t work properly.

The support team waiting for someone to report a fault before they know there’s a problem.

The employee walking around the office looking for an available desk.

The engineer manually copying hundreds of serial numbers and MAC addresses into a spreadsheet.

Individually, these can look insignificant.

Multiply them across hundreds of employees, dozens of rooms and an entire year and they become a very different commercial conversation.

The question businesses should therefore be asking isn’t simply:

“Does our technology work?”

It’s:

“Is our technology helping our people work better?”

AI should make good people more valuable

One of the themes Adrian explores in his Entrepreneur article is AI.

The businesses gaining an advantage aren’t necessarily using AI to replace entire teams. They’re using it to process information, automate administration and enable their existing people to work more effectively.

That’s a philosophy we strongly believe in at ClearVC.

We’ve started applying it within our own operation.

When equipment arrives for a large AV project, serial numbers and MAC addresses need to be captured accurately against the customer and ultimately recorded within the asset register.

Traditionally, that could mean a member of our team spending hours manually reading labels, capturing images and entering information.

So we’ve developed an AI-assisted stock-booking application.

Our team can photograph the equipment labels and AI extracts and structures the relevant information automatically.

On one recent workload, a process representing approximately four hours of manual processing was reduced to around two.

But the two hours aren’t really the interesting part.

It’s what our employee can now do with them.

Instead of employing a technically capable person to manually transcribe serial numbers, we’re giving them more time to test equipment, configure devices and prepare customer systems properly.

That’s where we believe AI becomes genuinely useful.

Your Meeting Rooms Are Part of the Productivity Conversation

The same principle applies to workplace technology.

A meeting room shouldn’t require an employee to understand how the technology behind it works.

They should walk in, start the meeting and concentrate on the people they’re there to speak to.

Intelligent cameras can automatically frame participants. Modern audio technology can make conversations clearer. Workplace management platforms can help employees find and reserve the right space before they arrive. Remote monitoring can give support teams greater visibility of technology health.

None of those technologies replaces the employee.

They remove friction around them.

Our work at Autotrader’s Manchester headquarters is a good example.

ClearVC delivered technology across 86 AV-enabled spaces supporting a workplace designed for more than 1,000 employees, including collaboration environments, meeting spaces and a multi-purpose auditorium.

The objective wasn’t simply to install more technology.

It was to create environments that supported how people actually wanted to work.

That project has since been shortlisted for Corporate Project of the Year at the AV Awards 2026, while ClearVC has also been shortlisted for Integrator of the Year.

For us, it’s evidence of an important shift: workplace technology is no longer simply an IT or AV conversation.

It’s an employee productivity conversation.

Standardisation Matters Too

Technology doesn’t need to be cutting-edge to be effective.

In fact, continually adding new technology without considering the wider environment can make the problem worse.

If every meeting room operates differently, employees have to relearn the experience every time they change location.

If every office uses different platforms and manufacturers, support becomes more complicated.

And if nobody has visibility of the complete technology estate, organisations can end up replacing equipment unnecessarily while simultaneously running business-critical systems beyond their sensible lifecycle.

The answer isn’t automatically more technology.

It’s better technology strategy.

That means understanding what you already have, standardising where appropriate, integrating systems properly and creating a clear lifecycle and support strategy.

Move from Reactive to Proactive

There’s another legacy behaviour businesses should challenge: waiting for technology to fail.

Traditionally, workplace support has often started when somebody raises a ticket saying:

“The meeting room isn’t working.”

Modern device-management and monitoring platforms increasingly allow support teams to see the health of workplace technology remotely.

That changes the conversation from simply reacting to faults towards identifying and diagnosing issues earlier.

Again, technology isn’t removing the engineer.

It’s giving the engineer better information.

A skilled person with the right data and tools can be significantly more effective than a skilled person working blind.

Is Your Workplace Ready for 2026?

Adrian’s argument is that difficult conditions are widening the gap between businesses prepared to adapt and those continuing to operate as they always have.

We believe the same is happening inside the workplace.

So there are some simple questions every organisation should be asking: