In brief
- McKinsey estimates employees lose 1.5 hours per day searching for information
- For a team of 10, that is between £50,000 and £80,000 per year in unproductive time
- Semantic search reduces each search to a matter of seconds
Picture your best account manager on a Monday morning. Before her first call, she needs the latest contract with a client. She opens Drive, browses three folders, finds five files with similar names, opens the wrong one, searches again. Five minutes later, she sends a message to a colleague: “do you have the Dupont contract?”
That colleague stops what they are doing. Searches. Replies.
Ten minutes to find one document. Two people interrupted. Multiply that by however many times it happens in your organisation each day.
1.5 hours a day: the figure McKinsey put on it
This is not a rough estimate. The McKinsey Global Institute study is clear: knowledge workers spend an average of 1.5 hours per day searching for and consolidating information. That is nearly 20% of a working day.
This time never appears in any performance report. Nobody “bills” for these searches. They slip between tasks, invisible, yet entirely real.
For a team of 10, the picture becomes striking:
10 employees × 1.5h × 220 working days = 3,300 hours lost per year. The equivalent of 1.7 full-time positions whose entire job is finding files.
Calculate it for your own team
Enter your numbers — the result updates in real time.
Before accounting for errors caused by using the wrong version of a document, delays, or accumulated frustration.
”We just need to be more organised”
That is the first reaction from many managers. And it is partially right.
Good naming conventions, well-structured folders, collective discipline: these all help. At first. Then the team grows, projects accumulate, one person creates a subfolder “their way”, then another does, habits drift, and you are back where you started.
The truth is, folder-based and filename-based searching does not match how people think. When you search for a document, you think about its content, its context, its author — not the folder tree it was placed in three months ago.
What semantic search changes
With Archesia, you ask your question in writing or out loud, exactly as you would ask a colleague. “The latest quotes for Dupont”, “the final version of the March audit report”, “the service agreement with the Martin agency”: Archesia searches the actual content of your documents and returns the right file in seconds.
The difference from a classic search? It does not look for a keyword in a filename. It understands the intent. Searching “pollution” also surfaces documents on carbon emissions, environmental compliance, and CSR reporting. Searching “termination” finds the end-of-contract clauses even if the exact word does not appear.
In practice: a search that took 10 minutes drops to 10 seconds. Across a full day, that is 1 hour 20 minutes recovered per person.
For a detailed look at the technical difference between the two approaches, our article on semantic search vs keywords covers it thoroughly.
The return on investment is fast
For a team of 8 at an average fully loaded salary of €45,000, one hour saved per day represents around €68,500 per year. That is a return on investment few tools can match with such predictability.
The return on investment is felt from the very first searches: the time saved is immediate and visible. It accelerates further when combined with Archesia’s document automation features. Everything can be configured directly from Archesia, in writing or out loud, with no coding required. We can even take care of it for you.
Frequently asked questions
Is this simply an organisational problem?
Partly. But better organisation rarely solves the problem durably, especially as teams grow. The real solution is a tool that knows how to make itself forgotten. Teams drop their files in without worrying about naming conventions or folder structures, and Archesia takes care of the rest.
Do we need to transfer all our existing files to Archesia?
Yes, and we handle it together during installation. After that, transfers can be automated: your teams can keep using their existing cloud services and come to Archesia only to find documents, or switch entirely to Archesia if they prefer.
How long before you see a return on investment?
The return on investment is felt from the very first searches. It accelerates further when combined with Archesia's document automation features. Everything can be configured directly from Archesia in plain language, with no coding required. And if you would rather not deal with it yourself, our team handles it after an audit of your needs.