Do More with the Same Team: The Challenge Businesses Need to Solve

For many businesses, the biggest barrier to growth is no longer a lack of opportunities. The markets are there, and so are the projects. The real challenge is often finding the capacity needed to support that growth.

Teams are already stretched. Customer expectations are increasing, timelines are getting shorter, and recruitment remains difficult across many industries. In this context, many organizations are facing a paradox: they have the potential to do more, but they don’t always have the resources to handle the additional workload.

During his presentation at Salon Connexion, Eric Murray pointed out that labour shortages remain one of the major challenges businesses face today. The question, then, is no longer simply how to hire more people. It’s also about determining how to make better use of the expertise already within the organization.

The Real Problem Isn’t Strategic Work

When we look at how teams spend their days, one thing quickly becomes clear: employees rarely spend all their time focused solely on their area of expertise.

A significant portion of their time goes toward administrative work, validations, follow-ups, searching for information, or coordinating between different systems. These tasks are necessary to keep operations running, but they don’t always make the best use of the skills of the people performing them.

Think of a sales representative who spends part of the day qualifying requests before even getting the chance to speak with a prospect. A finance team that has to manually validate information from several sources. Or an HR team answering the same administrative questions week after week.

The problem isn’t that these activities exist. It’s that they often take up valuable capacity that could be used elsewhere.

The Hidden Cost of Low-Value Tasks

On their own, a few minutes lost here and there may seem insignificant. But when these activities are added up across a team or an entire organization, their impact becomes much greater.

In his presentation, Eric Murray used the example of processing customer service emails. Reading the request, understanding the context, checking internal systems, retrieving the right information, and preparing a response may take only a few minutes per interaction. Repeated dozens or hundreds of times each week, however, the process quickly adds up to hours of work.

The same thing happens across many departments. Finance teams process invoices and perform validations. Sales teams qualify prospects and update records. Human resources teams answer recurring questions. Operations teams transfer, verify, and organize information.

None of these activities is a problem in itself. But as their volume increases, they gradually limit the organization’s ability to focus on higher-value work.

That’s also what makes these inefficiencies difficult to see. They don’t necessarily appear as one major problem. Instead, they accumulate a few minutes at a time until they represent a significant portion of the workload.

How Can Agentic AI Help Teams Do More with the Same Resources?

Traditionally, when a business reached its operational capacity, the solution was to hire.

Today, that approach isn’t always realistic—or even necessary.

Organizations now have new ways to absorb part of their operational workload without systematically increasing headcount. This is one of the reasons agentic AI is generating so much interest.

Unlike generative AI tools, which primarily respond when prompted, AI agents can be integrated directly into a process and take responsibility for certain steps: analyzing a request, retrieving information, applying rules, preparing a response, performing validations, or triggering an action in another system.

Let’s go back to the customer service example. An AI agent could analyze an incoming email, determine the nature of the request, retrieve relevant information from the company’s systems, validate certain details, and prepare a response. When the situation falls within established parameters, part of the process can be completed automatically. When a decision, exception, or human judgment is required, the case can be handed over to an employee with the relevant context already gathered.

At that point, it’s no longer simply about generating a response faster. Part of the process itself is being handled.

And when a process that takes a few minutes is repeated hundreds of times, the capacity gained can become significant.

The Real Question: Which Tasks Actually Require a Human?

This is probably one of the most useful questions an organization can ask when looking to increase its capacity.

Some tasks require judgment, experience, creativity, empathy, or a deep understanding of context. Others are primarily based on rules, validations, and the transfer of information.

It’s the latter that are worth examining more closely.

An HR manager who spends less time answering the same administrative requests can devote more energy to talent development and supporting managers. A sales team that automates certain validations can focus more on conversations and customer relationships. A finance team that reduces manual information processing can spend more time on analysis.

The goal, then, isn’t simply to automate more. It’s to determine where human involvement truly adds value and where technology can support the process.

That’s often where some of the most meaningful productivity gains can be found.

A Competitive Advantage That Goes Beyond Technology

The next few years probably won’t be defined by the organizations that simply adopted artificial intelligence. They’ll be defined by those that successfully integrate it into their operations and use it to increase their ability to execute.

In an environment where resources remain limited, doing more with the same team becomes an important competitive advantage.

This doesn’t necessarily mean asking employees to do more. Quite the opposite. The goal is to remove some of the work from their day-to-day responsibilities that can be simplified, automated, or handled differently.

The organizations that succeed will be those that know how to identify these activities, rethink their processes, and use technology where it can make a real difference.

How to Identify the Best Automation Opportunities

Most organizations already have several processes that could be optimized. But there’s no need to start with the most complex process or transform the entire business at once.

The best starting points are often much simpler.

A process may be worth examining when it occurs frequently, involves several people, requires information to be searched for or transferred between different systems, or when a large portion of the decisions involved are based on relatively predictable rules.

A few questions can already help uncover opportunities:

• Which tasks are repeated several times a day or week?
• Where do employees have to copy, search for, or validate information?
• Which activities increase quickly as business volume grows?
• Which processes regularly create delays or frustrations for teams?

A process analysis can then help determine which opportunities have real potential, which can be automated, and where agentic AI can provide additional value.

Before Hiring, Take a Look at Your Processes

Increasing an organization’s capacity no longer necessarily means increasing the number of people on the team.

Before adding another resource to absorb a growing workload, it’s worth asking whether all the work currently being done by the team really needs to continue being done the same way.

Some tasks will always need to remain in the hands of employees. Others can be simplified. Some can be automated. And others can now be partially handled by AI agents capable of interacting with the company’s systems and processes.

At Kezber, we help organizations identify these opportunities, assess their potential, and progressively implement solutions adapted to their business reality.

Wondering where your organization could gain capacity without adding to your team’s workload? Let’s take a closer look at your processes and the opportunities that may already be there.