AI is accelerating individuals but fracturing the way teams work together
Globally, organisations have poured significant investment into artificial intelligence tools over the past two years. But a major new report from Atlassian reveals a confronting reality: AI is making individuals faster while quietly making teams more dysfunctional – and HR leaders are uniquely positioned to fix it.
The State of Teams 2026 report, released by Atlassian's Teamwork Lab and based on surveys of 12,035 knowledge workers and 172 Fortune 1,000 executives across the US, UK, Australia, India, Germany, and France, found that while 89% of executives say AI has increased the speed of work, only 6% can point to specific return on investment across their organisations. The gap between those two figures is what Atlassian calls the "fragmentation tax."
Alicia Lenart, vice president of HR at Atlassian, said the finding should sharpen the focus of every HR leader heading into the second half of 2026.
"AI has made us faster and it has made us more speedy, but it hasn't changed how we work together," Lenart told HRD. "And I think that's really interesting to HR folks because that's our job – to help people work better together. It's just that hidden cost that we're seeing."
The problem beneath the productivity numbers
The report estimates the fragmentation tax costs the Fortune 500 an estimated US$161 billion a year, driven by duplicative work, misaligned priorities, and coordination failures that erode productivity gains. Knowledge workers spend 80% of their time on collaborative tasks, yet just 24% of AI implementations are focused at the team level.
Most organisations are pointing AI at individual output – summarising notes, generating content, automating personal tasks – while the harder, more valuable work of redesigning how teams actually operate goes untouched.
Lenart said the pattern is entirely predictable. "A lot of people are using AI in their personal lives for personal productivity. That's the easiest place to point because you can kind of just buy the tools, do a little bit of upskilling and get people using them. But to actually rewire how work gets done and not just slap AI on top – that requires a lot of work, and people are shying away from that."
The report reinforces this, as 87% of knowledge workers say that with everyone in execution mode, there is no time left to coordinate. Meanwhile, 84% say they are operating with unclear or conflicting goals and priorities – a problem AI is compounding rather than solving.
HR's moment to lead AI transformation
For Lenart, the answer lies not in issuing AI mandates – a strategy she firmly rejects – but in building a culture of genuine adoption from the ground up.
"We don't believe in AI mandates, and you will never see an AI mandate from us," she said. "AI mandates drive fear, and then you also get compliance. People will click into the tool because they're worried. A better way to drive AI transformation and adoption is to get people excited and build that bottoms-up groundswell."
At Atlassian, that means running hackathons, building champion networks, and encouraging employees to use a "learning loop" framework – learn, play, then share – so that AI fluency becomes a shared, social practice rather than a top-down directive.
Employees who are getting the most from AI tend to block calendar time to experiment, pair up with colleagues for accountability, and openly share what is and is not working.
The report supports this approach: knowledge workers are 90% more likely to worry about lacking AI skills than about AI replacing their jobs, suggesting anxiety about capability – not job security – is the real adoption barrier HR should be addressing.
Why HR and technology must converge
Beyond culture, Lenart argues the structural model for AI transformation needs to change. Too many organisations are still running their technology investments through the CIO while people strategy sits separately – a split that prevents either side from delivering full value.
"If you continue to split tech and have the IT person driving it, and then you have the people thing on the side, you're never going to get the value together," she said. "The tech has gone really far, but the people bit hasn't."
Atlassian has itself created a chief people and AI enablement officer role, merging the two functions. Lenart noted that this convergence is one of the most important structural decisions organisations can make right now and it positions HR leaders to step into a broader strategic remit.
"CEOs and boards are looking around and saying, who's going to drive this AI transformation? There's tech and there's people, and the people thing is the more complex thing. So I think it's the moment for HR leaders to put their hand in the air."
According to the Atlassian report, organisations that implement all three of Atlassian's recommended AI coordination pillars – shared context, redesigned workflows, and a culture of experimentation – cut their fragmentation tax by nearly half and are 13 times more likely to say their teams feel increasingly connected. Despite this, just 14% of organisations currently meet that threshold.
The door for HR to lead is open. The question is whether leaders will walk through it.
