An agent that drafts support replies works. So does one that sorts invoices. And yet McKinsey's The State of AI 2026 reports that 89% of companies use AI in at least one function, while only 37% report a positive impact on gross profit, the same share as last year. Adoption went up. Profit stayed flat.
Automating single tasks delivers less than promised when the real work of your company lives between them, in the steps that cross departments.
Work crosses departments
Sales closes an order. Operations prepares it. Finance invoices it. Support handles the questions that arrive the next week. Every jump forces someone to translate information from one system into another, and every translation adds waiting time.
Jordan Tong and Kris Johnson Ferreira published an analysis of this in the September-October issue of Harvard Business Review: in many organizations the bottleneck sits in the handoffs and the decisions that cross units. They propose orchestrating that work across functions with agents that integrate each team's knowledge and automate where the machine has an edge, leaving people in the decisions that need judgment.
A concrete example. Your catalogue assistant handles 70% of the sales team's questions. Quotes still take three days, because four manual steps sit between the question and the signature: confirming stock with operations, checking payment terms with finance, getting approval from the account manager and logging the quote in the ERP. You automated the visible part and left the queue untouched. Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 found that 84% of organizations have not redesigned roles or workflows for AI. That number explains why the same tools perform differently in similar companies.
A handoff gets documented like a task
It needs five things written down before you touch a system:
- Inputs: which data enters the handoff and which application it comes from.
- Criteria: how you decide if a case moves forward or goes back.
- Exceptions: which cases don't fit and who resolves them.
- Owner: the person who answers when the process fails.
- Measure: how long a case takes from start to finish.
With that contract in place, the automation changes shape. The agent checks stock in the ERP, reads payment terms in the CRM, drafts the quote and pings the account manager in Slack. The person approves or corrects. You track the total time for the quote, which is what the customer sees.
Start with one handoff
Pick the handoff that hurts most and treat it as a small project:
- Measure today's waiting time: end-to-end duration, how many hands touch the case, how often it comes back.
- Write the handoff contract with the people who run it today.
- Connect the two or three systems involved. The other twelve can wait.
- Give the agent narrow permissions and human approval where the case requires it.
- Review the escalated cases for four weeks. The criteria missing from your document are there.
The second handoff usually costs less than the first, because the infrastructure is already in place.
At Luxion we help companies find that first handoff and build it on real data: we document the process with your team, ship the prototype and measure it before widening the scope.