Coordination tax
The cost of coordinating work between people: handoffs, status meetings and reconciling information. AI can cut much of it, but that moves the bottleneck to who may approve action.
Coordination tax is the time an organization spends moving information between people so that work can happen: handoffs, status updates, alignment meetings and reconciliation. Much of it is overhead that nobody chose.
AI systems can take over a large part of this coordination, from summarizing status to routing requests. The effect is real, but it does not remove the need for a decision. When coordination becomes cheap, the scarce resource is authority: who may approve the action once the information is ready. That is where the next bottleneck tends to appear. See authority latency and decision rights.
Related terms
Authority latency
The elapsed time between a workflow becoming ready for a consequential decision and an authorized person or system actually taking that decision or action.
Decision rights
Who may decide what, on which evidence, and who can stop or reverse it. Without explicit decision rights, faster AI output turns into a queue of approvals nobody owns.
Operating model
How an organization actually runs: its workflows, decisions, roles, governance and handoffs. AI creates value when it changes the operating model, not when it is bolted onto the old one.
Used in these essays
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Before calculating AI ROI, trace how an accepted output changes a real operating decision and creates captured value.
AI is removing the coordination tax. The next bottleneck is authority
As AI reduces the cost of moving work between teams and systems, many organizations will discover that the remaining delay is not coordination. It is permission to decide.
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The provocative part of OpenAI's Decisions API is not that AI can make choices. It is that a model score can quietly become an action — and an action can quietly become policy.