Zombie Projects Are Draining Your Team. Here’s How AI Can Finally Kill Them

Employees know which projects are going nowhere, but anxiety and ambiguity stop them from saying so.

BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC

Business owners looking for additional ways to cut costs and boost staff productivity might want to look for the time, effort, and money killers haunting their workplaces. A good place to start is with what software company Atlassian calls “Zombie projects” that have long been going nowhere, yet continue stumbling onward because nobody summons the will or courage to point out they’re virtually dead.

A recent Atlassian survey of 8,000 global professionals revealed the scope of the Zombie problem. Almost 45 percent of those employees said they entered 2026 handling at least one business project described as one “they’re never going to find the time or the energy to see it through, but the boss still considers it ‘active.’” In 90 percent of those cases, the slow-moving or entirely bogged down assignments were generating considerable problems for staff dealing with them, and by complicating their other, more productive work tasks.

Why aren’t the employees or managers weighed down by those seemingly lifeless projects stepping up to declare them moribund, if not entirely defunct?

One big reason is they’re often based on problems a business has struggled to tackle over time, but which proved impossible to solve despite continued effort. As those fixes fail, workers often back off to regroup, pursue other tasks, then return to them later to find them still resistant to solutions.

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Other times, Zombie projects may start off as efforts to launch a new activity or idea that never quite gets off the ground. Despite repeated failures to get those aloft, workers—and sometimes even mid-level managers—wind up deciding to keep periodically tinkering with them, rather than telling bosses they appear hopeless.

There are also both personal and professional calculations creating that hesitation.

More than a third of survey respondents said they feared that pointing out a project was going nowhere risked making make them look like they were failing the team, or trying to ditch a difficult task. Another third of participants said lack of clear designation of which worker or manager had the authorization to pull the plug on a Zombie project caused them to remain mum.

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