The $1.2 Trillion Mistake Most Businesses Don't See

When I first started my business, back during the pandemic in 2021, I got curious.

I wanted to know how much money companies lost, per year, due to poor communication and presentation skills. So I had my husband help me build a simple calculator that lived on my website where you could enter how many employees you had on your team, the number of presentations each one roughly made per year, and the average salary of each person. They would also share how many presentations throughout the year they felt went poorly, meaning they lost business or the communication wasn't very clear, which caused more meetings and, ultimately, more time spent.

To me, she was a calculating beauty, and the funny numbers I plugged in were astonishing.

I am not sure how many people actually used this thing, because this was something I was unable to track, and the calculator wasn't connected to anything, because the idea of having a lead magnet was not in my lexicon of entrepreneurial jargon yet.

So flash forward to today.

I got curious again. Except this time, I wanted to know if AI was impacting this number.

And the answer was, YES!

Back when I built that calculator, I was guessing. Educated guessing, but guessing.

Today, I was excited to find there was actual research to support my curiosity, and the real number is bigger than anything I ever typed in.

Here is what I found and I will site my sources at the end:

$1.2 trillion. That is what U.S. businesses lose every year to poor communication. Not market crashes. Not supply chains. The internal stuff. Unclear emails, meetings that end without a decision, and presentations that don't move anyone to take action.

For a 100-person company, that comes out to about $500,000 a year. For a large enterprise, $62.4 million. Organizations are so good at tracking marketing spend and headcount down to the decimal. But this is the invisible number, nobody looks at.

I also found in my research that 75% of leaders say they burn too much time cleaning up miscommunication. One in five executives has lost business over it. Not because the idea was bad, but because it didn't land.

My hunch was that AI would bring this number down because it can write the emails, summarizes the meetings, draft your deck, etc.

Nope. It's actually making the gap wider.

AI can produce words, but it cannot produce trust. It cannot fake the conviction of a leader who actually owns and believes what they're saying.

When you stand in front of a board or a client, you are not handing over information. You are making a case. You are reading the room and hopefully connecting with them. You are putting your name on the line and no tool can do that for you.

And the numbers back this up. 88% of organizations now use AI somewhere in the business. Only 7% have managed to scale it across the whole company. The tools are everywhere, but the pay-off isn't quite there yet.

So a split is happening.

The leaders who use AI to sharpen their own thinking are getting better and the ones who hand their thinking over to it are getting worse. Same idea, same strategy, and it lands for one and dies for the other, because only one of them believed in it enough to sell it.

For a few years, I white-labeled an AI speech coaching tool and built it right into my programs. Almost everyone came in excited to use it. Then almost everyone quit.

It was a great tool, but it wasn't enough to hold their interest. It could tell them they said "um" fourteen times. It could offer generic advice about the power of three and if their argument wasn't landing, but it sounded the same every single session and became predictable in its response.

The people who got better fastest were not the ones who found a sexier tool. They were the ones who got an honest read from a human who could see what they couldn't, and then went and did the work. They did the work. Did I say, they did the work? They did the work.

So here are the four questions I like to ask the leaders I get to work with:

• When did you last get real, specific feedback on how you present? Not on what you said, but on whether it landed. (As a leader, you have to ask. Your team won't give you feedback unless you tell them you want it and they feel comfortable enough to give it.)

• How much revenue can you trace to communication wins or losses in the last twelve months? (The last company training I did, they discovered they had lost $110 million in business due to pitches that lacked emotional connect and empathy).

• Do your senior people know how to build an argument, or do they read the data out loud and hope their audience connected to something?

• Are your presentations built around what your audience needs to decide, or around what you want to say?

If those questions made you a little uncomfortable because you're not sure or you never thought about it, there's your gap. And somewhere, that gap is costing you opportunities you never knew you lost.

The number was real when I built a wonky little calculator in my spare time in 2021. And today, it's only gotten bigger. Your ideas deserve to land.

Sources: Grammarly / Harris Poll (2024), Axios HQ Research, McKinsey "Superagency in the Workplace" (2025).