By Alastair Goldfisher
Veteran journalist and creator of The Venture Lens newsletter and The Venture Variety Show podcast. Alastair covers the intersection of AI, startups, and storytelling with over 30 years of experience reporting on venture capital and emerging technologies.

The swivel chair may be the most overlooked expense in the enterprise, and AI agents are lining up to replace it.

The “Swivel Chair Problem” is what Ananth Manivannan, founder of Resolvd AI, calls the hidden bottleneck slowing down companies everywhere. It’s the person stuck bouncing back-and-forth between systems just to resolve a single operational request.

“We’ve thrown SaaS and RPA at this problem for years,” Manivannan told me in a recent interview. “But it’s still the human in the swivel chair holding everything together.”

He’s seen it firsthand. At companies like Capital One and PepsiCo, Manivannan said he watched as analysts received unstructured requests — such as a spreadsheet, a contract or an email — and then spent hours toggling between systems, reconciling context and manually updating records.

Here’s another example Manivannan discussed. Imagine an analyst at a hospital receives a blurry photo of a medical stent via email. The staffer needs to figure out the SKU, compare it against three different contracts, and then inputs it into the right system. It’s not a simple rule-based task. It’s more like a research project, Manivannan said.

This is what he calls the “Swivel Chair Problem.” Enterprises spend millions of dollars on software from Workday and Salesforce, but the connection between the systems is often a person in a swivel chair who bridges the gaps between systems by hand. AI agents replace that chair with a direct data pipeline.

And in healthcare, where labor shortages are a daily reality, that kind of automation isn’t just helpful. It’s necessary.

“Nurses should get to do what they do best, not be bogged down by administrative follow-through,” he said, adding that AI agents can offload tedious coordination tasks, giving humans back time and focus.

Manivannan said that Resolvd AI is designed to eliminate that kind of work. The shift from repetitive task to cognitive process isn’t just changing workflows. It’s changing how companies are built.

Resolvd’s platform’s agents:

🔶 Understand the intent behind unstructured inputs
🔶 Orchestrate and reconcile information across contracts, systems and teams
🔶 Execute updates directly in platforms like Workday, SAP, PeopleSoft and ServiceNow

If RPA automated tasks, Resolvd is trying to automate the glue, the cognitive coordination layer that connects tasks, systems and decisions.

It’s not about replacing analysts. “We want to elevate them,” Manivannan said. “Your best people shouldn’t be doing swivel-chair work. They should be orchestrating systems.”

Still, the speed of adoption raises familiar questions about de-skilling and the overreliance on agentic tech, especially when judgment-heavy tasks get shifted to AI systems.

Resolvd is currently working with healthcare and IT organizations to automate item master clean-up, contract reconciliation and other sticky processes that have resisted traditional automation. Manivannan considers these deployments a starting point, especially in sectors like healthcare that are dealing with labor shortages and where operational efficiency is a necessity.

The swivel chair isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a productivity sink, a hiring workaround, and increasingly, a target for AI deployment. As companies try to scale efficiently and deal with labor shortages, the swivel chair is becoming a symbol of what needs to change.

Q: What is the “Swivel Chair Problem”?
A: It’s a term used to describe the inefficient and error-prone process of manually re-entering data across disconnected systems. Employees are often forced to switch between tools—like CRM platforms, spreadsheets, and internal databases—copying and pasting the same information repeatedly. This wastes time and increases the risk of human error.

Q: How does Resolvd AI address this issue?
A: Rather than building a new app, Resolvd AI is developing an autonomous agent layer that works across existing systems. These AI agents operate in the background to handle repetitive tasks, eliminate data duplication, and automate routine workflows.

Q: Why is this important for businesses?
A: The swivel chair problem is a hidden cost in many organizations, especially in industries like finance and compliance. By solving it, Resolvd AI helps teams save time, reduce errors, and improve internal efficiency—without requiring companies to overhaul their tech stack.

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Editor’s Note: This article was written by Alastair Goldfisher and originally appeared in The Venture Lens. Republished here with permission.