How Workplaces — and the Technology That Supports Them — Have Evolved

Workplaces have undergone rapid evolution in recent years, for varied and complex reasons. During the pandemic, most organizations pivoted out of necessity, and some of those changes were made in haste.

While the need to modernize the workplace may be old news to many, it’s still having an impact on organizations’ tech strategies. The lingering effects of those changes continue to manifest in many ways. When COVID-19 arrived, organizations had to make overnight decisions about how they were going to provide access to their coworkers in order to get work done. They had to make these decisions at speed, and they had to make them perhaps less intentionally than they ordinarily would have.

The findings of a recent CDW survey indicate that, while hybrid work is here to stay, infrastructure hasn’t fully caught up with the demands of hybrid environments. Although 59% of respondents are back in the office today, long-term preferences are split nearly 50/50 between a full return to the office and hybrid flexibility, signaling continued investment in hybrid infrastructure. Yet, challenges such as communication gaps across locations (cited by 60% of respondents), meeting inequities (52%) and difficulty accessing shared resources (52%) highlight a mismatch between intent and execution.

Today, as technology and workplaces evolve, a lot of organizations are looking for platforms that can serve their needs. They’re also looking to consolidate tools. So, instead of having 10 applications that do similar functions, they have just one that could be a meeting platform.

And it’s not just about software. Looking at hardware, organizations are seeking a solution set that exists at home as well as in the office, particularly as they make strategic decisions about the space they own or lease and how they want to utilize that space. 

Organizations really need to think about the level of productivity they can achieve by deploying hardware and software tools that are easy to use in the office, and the intelligent way in which they can design those solutions for their coworkers so that ease of use and business continuity persist in ways that help individuals get their jobs done.

When considering meeting platforms and how they've improved over the past several years, the first thing that comes to mind is AI. 

Among the CDW survey respondents, 80% expressed excitement about AI-enhanced collaboration, and over two-thirds want it to boost productivity and security, making AI a core modernization pillar. However, responses also revealed deep concerns about workflow automation, personalization and data integration, pinpointing where expectations aren’t yet matched by execution.

The most successful platforms provide the ability to have a conversation with an individual or multiple participants, both in and out of the office. With AI enhancements, collaboration platforms are becoming better at transcribing meetings. Elevated audio quality allow speakers to hear better, and differentiates the words being spoken so transcripts are more accurate. And now, AI tools can send each participant the action items that are specific to them. All of these things have made an enormous impact on how people get work done.

One of the areas in which AI is having a massive impact is in the customer experience space. When I think about an organization that has a lot of conversation with their customer base, maybe there's opportunity to do proactive outreach. Maybe there's opportunity to have reactive outreach for the customer back to the organization. That overall experience is enhanced greatly with the advent of AI. 

The other area where AI is supervaluable is the agent assist space. When an agent is taking a call or responding to a chatbot or an email from a customer, being able to find answers immediately rather than having to search for them is a real benefit. And agent assist capabilities really allow me to have that when I think about sentiment.

In the contact center experience, the platform can detect, in real time, the sentiment of both the agent and the customer simply by performing tone-of-voice sentiment analysis. And then, it can help to serve up ways to improve that sentiment if it's negative, or maintain it if it's positive. AI can help provide answers to customer questions, and it can even help with tone of voice through real-time coaching capabilities. 

All of those things provide multiple improvements in the contact center space. They allow the agent to have easier access to the tools they need, enabling them to create a level of comfort, loyalty and responsiveness while actually reducing the amount of fatigue and negativity that sometimes is being pushed onto them from the customer. And then, they are able to be a more proactive and positive individual in solving that problem.

The other area where AI is making for happier and more productive contact center employees is through the use of generative AI. With the advent of Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT and other generative AI offerings, the ability to work done by utilizing AI in that capacity is amazing. 

However, generative AI won’t work well for any organization without proper adoption, and you can't get to proper adoption without proper training. According to the CDW survey, only 44% of respondents say they have offered employee AI upskilling or training, and only 18% have conducted internal workshops or awareness sessions.

Being very intentional, knowing as an organization that you’re going to invest in AI for your productivity, for your employees, for your business overall means that you need to take the time to map out what you want it to do for you. What are your intentions? What are the business outcomes you're trying to achieve? 

Once you’ve answered those questions, you can implement what you’ve learned, then train employees to drive your objectives and measure adoption against those benchmarks. When you do all of those things with intelligence and intention, you’ll create a tremendous experience for your employees. You’ll be driving an unbelievable amount of productivity and creating an experience that most people strive for in both their personal and their business life.