Nobody Is Building the Fixes
By David
McKinsey’s November 2025 report put the technical automation potential of US work at 57 percent. AI agents alone could already handle 44 percent of total work hours.
The technology exists. The gap is not capability.
The gap is in execution. Identifying where margin is leaking is one job. Building the fix that plugs it is another. Most businesses do the first and never get to the second.
Where the Money Stops
Cost-cutting projects all start the same way. A finance lead pulls a list of subscriptions. A consultant interviews department heads. A slide deck gets presented to the board. Nothing changes after that.
The reason is mechanical. Identifying a duplicate vendor is a research task. Renegotiating the contract, retiring the licence, migrating users to the surviving system, and verifying the saving on the P&L is an engineering task. Most teams that can do the first cannot do the second.
Gartner’s 2025 figures show the scale. 25 percent of provisioned SaaS licences sit unused. 30 percent of SaaS spend is wasted on tools nobody runs. The average company maintains 4.5 systems with overlapping functionality and 7.6 duplicate subscriptions. Every one of these is a known problem in a spreadsheet somewhere. None of them are being built out of the business.
What the Build Gap Actually Costs
The bigger number is not the savings. It is the multiple.
A business running at 8 percent EBITDA that recovers 10 percent of its cost base does not move its margin by 10 percent. It can double it. At a 6x multiple, typical for a mid-market services business, every £1M of recovered margin produces £6M of enterprise value.
That gap shows up at the next valuation, the next refinancing, the next conversation with a buyer. The cost of leaving the work undone is not just the saving foregone. It is the multiple foregone.
How the Best Businesses Are Closing It
They do not separate identification from execution. The same team that maps the cost leak is the team that designs the fix and ships it. A finding without a build attached to it is not progress, and they do not pretend otherwise.
They automate the work that should have been automated years ago. Manual approvals, repeat data entry, vendor reconciliation, expense categorisation. The Smartsheet 2024 survey found that 60 percent of workers could save six or more hours a week if those tasks were removed. They build the workflow that nobody else has.
They measure the saving on the P&L before they call it a win. Numbers get baselined, signed off by finance, and tracked in production for a quarter before anyone declares the project finished. If the saving does not survive contact with the books, the build was not real.
If You Have 50 or More Employees
If you can name three places your costs are leaking but cannot point to anyone who is actively building the fix, the gap is the problem, not the leak. Lightbloom works with businesses to find the leaks and engineer the fixes in the same engagement. Book a free consultation and we will assess the fit of working together.
References: 1. McKinsey Global Institute, “Agents, Robots, and Us: Skill Partnerships in the Age of AI,” November 2025. 2. Gartner, SaaS spend management research, 2025. 3. Smartsheet, “Automation in the Workplace” survey, 2024.