Digital Trends Spotlight: Key Insights on Workforce Productivity Tools

In the fast-paced world of evolving technology and consumer expectations, leaders must constantly adapt, pivot and innovate to stay ahead. While our annual Digital Workspace Priorities report offers strategic, high-level guidance for setting your overarching employee experience (EX) vision and roadmap, our quarterly Trends Spotlight is your go-to resource for key updates and details of what's happening in the industry. Keeping a pulse on these trends will help you continuously shape and refine your organization's priorities. 

This quarter, we highlight what's new in AI-powered tools, assistants and agents for employee productivity. This directly relates to Priority #2 in our full priorities report: scaling AI to empower all employees. The report advises leaders to think of AI as an employee with specific job descriptions, tasks and responsibilities. The trends discussed in this Research Note will help you define the roles of your AI-powered workforce productivity tools and maximize adoption. 

Trend 1: Rapid advancement of AI assistant capabilities

The workforce productivity landscape is expanding fast, as organizations seek to leverage the power of AI-driven tools to enhance employee efficiency and collaboration. From Google Gemini to Microsoft 365 Copilot, AI assistant capabilities are advancing rapidly.

Recently, Microsoft showcased a significant expansion of Copilot's features and functionality at Microsoft Ignite, underscoring the growing sophistication of AI-powered productivity solutions. These capabilities included deeper integrations across Microsoft products, enhanced natural language processing and new tools designed to streamline workflows. Microsoft also introduced Copilot Pages for seamless content creation, Copilot Actions for task automation and Copilot Agents for custom AI-driven assistants. These advancements demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to making Copilot an integrated, end-to-end productivity solution.

Outside of Microsoft, vendors across the industry, like Glean, are continuing to innovate to meet the evolving needs of organizations and their employees. Given that 75 percent of employees are using AI and 78 percent of them are bringing their own AI to work (BYOAI), it's important that organizations stay informed of the latest AI assistant releases and feature. This allows them to empower their employees with their desired functionalities and minimize shadow AI. 

Key takeaway

Keep a pulse on the latest developments in the AI assistant landscape (following our Workforce AI page is a great start!) and continuously evaluate and optimize your workforce productivity tool ecosystem to maximize its impact. Our team at WWT can help you navigate this fast-changing landscape by drawing on our deep expertise, experience and partnerships with leading workforce productivity vendors.

Trend 2: Leveraging AI-powered enterprise search 

While off-the-shelf AI assistants can help employees complete routine tasks faster, many organizations continue to face challenges in facilitating employee access to data and insights across various systems and knowledge bases. This critical gap has led to a growing trend toward the deployment of AI-powered enterprise search solutions, like Glean, to transform workforce productivity.

Unlike AI assistants tied to a specific ecosystem or suite of tools, Glean integrates with a wide range of tools and data sources across an organization, making it a valuable complement to broader workforce AI initiatives. Glean's AI-powered knowledge graph creates a uniquely tailored experience for each user, prioritizing and surfacing the most relevant information based on their context, role and interactions. This personalized approach is particularly beneficial in scenarios where employees need to quickly find what they're looking for — whether it's a contact center agent searching for the latest customer information, an internal support team member looking for up-to-date product documentation or a financial analyst summarizing key insights from various reports. Glean's enterprise-grade search capabilities can make all the difference in these situations.

Key takeaway 

To capitalize on this trend, we recommend that you evaluate Glean and other enterprise search solutions as a strategic complement to your broader workforce AI initiatives. By viewing enterprise search as a foundational element of your digital workspace strategy, you can unlock new levels of productivity and set the stage for more widespread, effective adoption of your other AI investments.

Trend 3: Inconsistent workforce AI adoption 

As organizations race to implement the latest AI-powered productivity tools, a concerning trend is emerging — inconsistent adoption and utilization among their employees. Many of our clients have invested in workforce AI solutions only to find that the anticipated benefits are not being realized. 

The root of the problem typically lies in failing to approach AI tool deployment with the same rigor and strategic planning as other major technology initiatives. Instead of a thoughtful, organization-wide rollout, these tools are often "checked off the list" without proper training, governance and change management. As a result, a small subset of "power users" may be leveraging the full capabilities of the tools, while most employees revert to their old habits and workflows. This inconsistent adoption undermines the productivity gains leaders are seeking and leads to frustration, inefficiency and a lack of return on your AI investment. 

Key takeaways

To maximize workforce AI investments, organizations must take a more proactive, holistic approach to driving workforce AI adoption. 

• Develop comprehensive training programs to educate all employees on the features and use cases of the tools.
• Establish clear governance policies around data privacy, security and appropriate usage.
• Implement feedback loops and usage monitoring to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Empower "champion" users to evangelize the tools and share best practices with their peers.

Trend 4: AI as the new pair programmer 

Software developers represent a crucial subset of the workforce that stands to benefit significantly from advances in AI. Research shows that 81 percent of developers are already using AI-powered coding assistants to learn new skills, generate boilerplate code, check for errors and more. We anticipate this trend continuing.

As Jeetu Patel, Cisco's EVP and Chief Product Officer, highlighted in a recent fireside chat with WWT's Co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, "There's this concept in development called paired programming … when you sit with someone and program together. It's expensive right now, right? Because it takes two humans to do one piece of code. Well, now everyone can have a paired programmer because AI is your paired programmer." 

Coding assistants, like Codeium Windsurf and Github Copilot, can take the lead in generating code, while developers focus on providing strategic direction and refining the output. This shift not only reduces costs but also enhances productivity, allowing developers to tackle more complex challenges and innovate faster. 

Key takeaway

AI coding assistants present manageable risks and offer a high ROI, making them an excellent entry point for integrating generative AI into your business. We recommend deploying a coding assistant at an individual or team level initially, particularly for ongoing projects such as legacy code modernization efforts. This allows you to more effectively compare the assistant's impact on productivity and quality while mitigating risk.

Our outlook and predictions

As we look to the future of workforce productivity tools and the digital employee experience, it is crucial for leaders to monitor these key trends. The advancement of AI assistant capabilities and the implementation of enterprise search solutions will continue to reshape employees' interactions with these transformative tools. However, the full potential and ROI of these tools will only be realized through an effective adoption and governance strategy that includes comprehensive training, clear usage policies and "champion" users who can drive adoption across the workforce.

Organizations that take a strategic, user-centric approach to evaluating, implementing and optimizing their workforce productivity solutions will be best positioned to drive meaningful gains in employee efficiency, collaboration and satisfaction. WWT's deep expertise in this dynamic landscape can serve as a valuable resource as you navigate these trends and scale workforce AI across your organization.