The Hidden Cost of Latency

Our CEO, Mimi Brooks, shared a strategic perspective last week on a challenge every enterprise faces but few name: organizational latency. In her latest article, inspired by Michael Carroll’s concept of The Latency Trap, Mimi explores how legacy systems and workflows—especially those rooted in traditional SaaS—contribute to the hidden friction that slows decisions, increases operational drag, and erodes human potential..

“SaaS didn’t fail. It succeeded perfectly at something we no longer need.” That provocative insight is the spark behind Mimi’s latest article, Latency as an Organizational Drag. It’s a call to rethink not just the tools we use but the very architecture of work—how decisions get made, and who (or what) makes them. As Agentic AI enables software to understand intent and orchestrate action, the nature of productivity is being redefined: faster, more fluid, and far more human.

If you’ve ever felt like your systems are slowing your people down, this article is a must read. Mimi unpacks the hidden tax latency imposes on teams and why eliminating it is about more than efficiency; It’s about unleashing potential. Whether you’re leading enterprise architecture, digital transformation, or building the future of work, this piece will challenge your thinking and expand your vision for what’s next.

Read the full article below!

Latency as an Organizational Drag

Latency isn’t just a tech issue. It’s the invisible tax on human potential inside our organizations.

John Doe, a middle manager at a Fortune 100 company, is late for work because his daughter’s school opening was delayed. On arrival at the office, he is told he needs to pull a report for the VP of Sales to be presented at a ten o’clock executive team meeting. He has just over an hour.

What follows is the all-too-familiar dance through enterprise friction: six levels of nested ERP menus, missing fields, re-exporting to CSV, cleansing in Excel, pivot tables, formatting PowerPoint charts—all before a final mad dash to assemble something “executive ready.”

This scenario has played out in organizations for decades. But it’s not just a workflow problem. It’s a latency problem—and latency, in this context, is organizational drag in disguise.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Latency

Latency is the time gap between intent and action. In human systems, that gap is widened by clunky interfaces, redundant steps, context switching, and brittle toolchains. It’s the delay that happens when systems require people to do what machines could—clicking, navigating, copying, reconciling—because the software doesn’t understand what the person is actually trying to do.

Today’s SaaS architectures, for all their promise of transformation, are still built to manage transactions, not intentions. They reflect a design philosophy optimized for auditability and control—not agility, autonomy, or adaptability.

Michael Carroll captures this beautifully in his recent writing: “SaaS didn’t fail. It succeeded perfectly at something we no longer need.”

These systems, he says, “treat every action as a transaction to be recorded, not a decision to be understood.”

From Transactions to Decisions

This is where Agentic AI enters—not just as a new tool, but as a paradigm shift.

Agentic systems aren’t just conversational. They perceive goals, plan steps, use tools, and act. They are designed around decisions, not just data or dashboards. That shift is radical: away from treating people as the glue between siloed systems toward a model where software itself reasons, learns, and executes.

The implications are profound:

• Decision latency drops by 10x up to 100x.

• Operational overhead is cut by 20–40%.¹

• And most critically, the mental load of navigating systems begins to disappear.

Instead of navigating menus, John Doe simply prompts an agent: “Show me last quarter’s qualified leads by region, matched to pipeline status and flagged anomalies.” The agent connects systems, runs logic, and presents a ready-made interactive dashboard and presentation—in seconds.

The Agentic Future of Work

We’ve been approaching this shift for decades, from Minsky’s “Society of Mind” and early expert systems, through supervised learning, and now to transformers and LLMs with tools and memory. But only recently have we crossed the threshold where software can intelligently orchestrate workflows on our behalf.

This is the end of latency as we know it.

We won’t eliminate UIs entirely—exploration, edge cases, and trust will still matter. But the center of gravity is shifting. Instead of humans navigating software, agents will increasingly navigate it for us.

As data, decision, and action converge into a single continuum, we’ll design systems that treat decisions—not transactions—as the atomic unit of work.

This isn’t just transformation. It’s a redesign of the digital workplace around how humans think, not how systems operate.

Deepen the Insight

To explore how reducing organizational latency becomes a strategic advantage in the era of agentic AI, read Winning in the Age of Intelligent Autonomy. This white paper is a deeper dive into how leading enterprises are redesigning for speed, adaptability, and autonomous decision-making at scale.

References

¹ Carroll, Michael. “The Latency Trap: SaaS’s Silent Sabotage,” LinkedIn, July 8, 2025.

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Logical Design Solutions is an organizational transformation strategy consultancy that helps global enterprises operationalize their digital transformation.

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