New survey of 1,300+ enterprise leaders finds executives and frontline managers see two different versions of AI in document workflows, with employees still losing up to half a working day a week to manual document tasks.
SAN FRANCISCO [July 7, 2026] - Nitro today released The State of AI in Document Workflows: Navigating the Gap Between AI Promises and Productivity, a survey of 239 C-suite executives and 1,100 managers and directors across Financial Services, Legal, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Real Estate in the US, UK, and Canada. The research set out to answer a simple question: when an organization says AI is part of its document workflows, do the people running those workflows agree? The data says no.
The split reveals itself immediately in how each group ranks AI as a priority: 84% of executives rate AI in document workflows a high or critical priority, compared with only 54% of managers and directors. The gap holds at the deployment level too: 85% of executives say AI has reached at least some part of their organization, while only 52% of managers say the same about their own department. When it comes to AI, executives describe an organization that has arrived. Managers describe one that has barely started.
That disconnect comes with a cost, as 62% of managers report that employees on their team spend six or more hours a week on manual document tasks such as editing, converting, merging, and redacting; 31% put that figure above 11 hours. And despite the AI investment, 96% of executives and 94% of managers say their organization still required employees to print, sign, scan, and email back a document in the past six months.
That reality is shaping how organizations are approaching their 2026 planning. Executives report near-universal movement on document tool consolidation, with 95% saying their organization is actively evaluating it or has placed it on this year's roadmap. When asked what would prompt them to switch vendors, 53% of executives named better AI and automation capabilities as the top factor, outpacing cost by more than two to one.
What the research surfaces is a market in transition, where the open question has moved from whether to invest in document AI to how to make sure that investment reaches the daily work of the people it was meant to serve.
The full report is available to download here.
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