New Data from Riverside Shows Multi-Tool Workflows Slow Webinar Production, Inflate costs, and Limit ROI

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Mar 30, 2026, 09:00 ET

New data from Riverside, an AI-powered platform that enables recording, editing, repurposing, and distributing studio-quality content, shows fragmented webinar workflows slow down growth, while consolidation drives speed, efficiency, and ROI.

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The traditional webinar tech stack has become a roadblock to efficiency. New data from Riverside shows that fragmented workflows built on multiple tools are slowing marketing teams, increasing costs, and limiting return on investment. As pressure grows to produce more content with fewer resources, companies are shifting toward consolidated platforms able to streamline the entire webinar lifecycle.

“This is an infrastructure shift. The future of marketing is not about adding more tools. It is about simplifying the workflow. Consolidation is how modern teams scale.” — Abel Grünfeld, Vice President of Marketing at Riverside

Riverside analyzed 424 webinar-related customer touchpoints and found that companies use an average of 3 to 4 tools to execute a single webinar workflow, with some using as many as 7 to 11. These numbers reflect a broader industry trend, with many organizations now managing between 12 to 20 marketing tools on average, often with overlapping functionality, while using less than half of what they pay for, according to recent industry reports.

"Marketing teams don't need operational bottlenecks that pull time away from the strategic and creative parts of their job," said Riverside's Vice President, Marketing, Abel Grünfeld. "Right now, marketing teams have less time to spend on strategy because they are struggling with execution speedbumps from tech stacks."

Tool Sprawl Drives Cost and Inefficiency
Modern webinar workflows rely on separate platforms for hosting, streaming, recording, editing, clipping, and distribution. This multi-tool approach can exceed $200 per user per month, compared to less than $100 for a consolidated solution.

Riverside sees the greater impact, however, on time and productivity. According to their research, producing a single webinar using fragmented tools typically requires 8 to 20 hours of editing and post-production, with additional tasks such as clipping, captioning, and transcription piling on even more time.

A key driver of this inefficiency is constant context switching between tools. A 2022 Harvard Business Review study found that workers toggled roughly 1,200 times per day between apps and websites, and Microsoft summarized the finding as amounting to just under four hours per week spent reorienting after those switches.

In webinar production workflows that rely on multiple platforms, this repeated switching compounds delays at every stage of the process. At scale, these impacts add up quickly. Teams running recurring webinar programs can lose hundreds or even thousands of hours each year to manual, fragmented workflows, slowing output and limiting growth.

By contrast, integrated, AI-powered workflows, such as Riverside's, can reduce total production time to 3 to 6 hours per webinar, saving teams up to 14 hours per project, with even greater efficiencies when accounting for downstream tasks.

Consolidation Is a Growth Lever
Reports by NPI Financial and BetterCloud show how consolidated workflows align with broader enterprise patterns. In NPI's 2025 study of IT sourcing leaders at organizations with $5B+ in revenue, 82% reported actively pursuing supplier reduction. BetterCloud's 2025 survey of approximately 600 IT professionals found that 70% prefer a unified platform for SaaS management. Meanwhile, Zylo reports that 51% to 53% of SaaS licenses go unused in a typical month or 30-day period, contributing to wasted budget.

For growth marketers and revenue operations teams, efficiency is now directly tied to performance outcomes, including speed to market and campaign impact. "Speed is now a defining advantage in marketing," Grünfeld said. "The teams that execute faster will outperform those that cannot."

From Webinars to Content Engines
Riverside consolidates recording, live streaming, editing, transcription, clipping, and distributing webinars into a single workflow. Instead of one-and-done events, webinars become repeatable content engines that generate ongoing value.

Companies using AI-powered repurposing tools produce an average of 11.6 content assets per webinar and achieve higher ROI, according to recent reporting. However, most webinar content goes to waste. Automateed reports that 60% of marketers do not repurpose webinar content because they don't have the time. By removing workflow friction, teams can transform a single webinar into multiple content formats, including short-form video, social clips, and on-demand assets, without additional tools.

The result shifts how marketing teams operate. Smaller teams can scale output without increasing headcount. Larger organizations can move faster while reducing reliance on external vendors, which means the production refocuses from how many tools teams use to how efficiently they operate. Riverside reflects this transition by positioning webinars as part of a broader content creation and distribution system rather than a standalone function.

"This is an infrastructure shift. The future of marketing is not about adding more tools," Grünfeld added. "It is about simplifying the workflow. Consolidation is how modern teams scale."

About Riverside
Riverside is a browser-based content creation platform that enables creators, businesses, and media organizations to produce studio-quality audio and video content remotely. The platform combines high-quality local recording, AI-powered transcription and editing, live streaming, and webinar capabilities into a single integrated workflow.

Originally built to solve the challenge of low-quality recordings (for example, due to unreliable internet connections), Riverside now enables creators, marketers, educators, and media organizations to turn conversations into scalable content, from podcasts and webinars to social clips and thought leadership media. The platform is trusted by leading creators and global brands including NPR, Marvel, and The New York Times. Learn more about Riverside.com's webinar software here.

References

BetterCloud. (2025). 2025 State of SaaS: Trends and insights.
Brinck, K., Iqbal, S. T., Czerwinski, M., & Mark, G. (2022, August 18). How much time and energy do we waste toggling between applications? Harvard Business Review.
CMSWire. (2025, June 17). Beyond the mirage: A data-driven blueprint to tame martech complexity.
Gartner. (2023, August 23). Gartner survey finds 63% of marketing leaders plan to invest in generative AI in the next 24 months.
Microsoft. (2022, September 20). Microsoft Viva Connections and daily briefing email enhancements to unify the employee experience. Microsoft Tech Community.
NPI Financial. (2025). The state of enterprise IT sourcing in 2025.
Socialnomics. (2025, June 21). How to maximize the impact of your webinar by repurposing its content online.
Zylo. (2025). SaaS management index.