What does AI in the workplace look like today? How do we ensure its use is properly governed within our organizations? Where are the opportunities? And what might the future of AI in the workplace look like?
Organizations are facing exponential rates of change. An Accenture report found that since 2019, the rate of change affecting businesses has risen by 183% in the last four years, and 33% in just the last year. 88% of the C suite expect this to speed up even further in 2025, with AI leading the charge.
To stay ahead, organizations need to adapt and innovate with it, fostering a culture where employees are encouraged to use these tools responsibly and creatively. However, this rapid adoption brings its own set of challenges: data privacy concerns, information security breaches, and potential biases in decision-making. The real test for organizations will be finding ways to harness AI’s vast potential without compromising on trust, security, and fairness.
"AI has brought a huge opportunity for organizations. According to Harvard Business Review, 40% of work activity can be augmented, automated or reinvented by GenAI. The organizations that adopt it in the right way, are the ones that will win the next decade."
In 2024 Statista valued the AI market at $184bn, with projections reaching $826.7bn by 2030. This growth underscores the rising priority for organizations to leverage data-driven, machine learning and insight-led decision-making, making it a central focus for the C-suite as they navigate new challenges and opportunities in an AI-enabled world.
"Something that previously would have been left to the domain of the CIO or digital teams is now a differentiator in your business strategy. It’s something that affects your employee and customer engagement."
It isn’t just the C-suite who are paying attention. The introduction of Open AI’s ChatGPT and other AI tools such as Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and more, means many employees are now comfortable using AI in their daily lives and expect to be able to bring it into their work. Whether sanctioned or not, 75% of knowledge workers are using AI at work today.
Mass use of AI brings opportunities to innovate across every team, enabling employees to engage in new ways and empowering innovation from almost any role in the organization. Many organizations now need to evaluate how best to integrate this technology into their own platforms and processes, considering how it can enhance collaboration, streamline workflows, and support employees in making impactful contributions.
Unily’s AI journey began by looking for the barriers faced by the largest organizations when connecting with their employees - challenges like seamless communication, workforce engagement, and secure information sharing. By harnessing the best in technology, Unily aims to help organizations overcome these obstacles and foster better collaboration.
To achieve this, Unily’s approach centers on implementing governed AI to ensure safe, controlled, and effective use, rather than jumping on the bandwagon and hastily adopting AI without safeguards.
Previous technological advancements, like enterprise software systems or cloud platforms, often had a steep learning curve. This gave organizations time to train employees in governance and processes before widespread use. In contrast, AI’s natural language interfaces make it immediately accessible to all employees.
This instant accessibility brings with it both opportunities and challenges for large organizations. AI in the workplace is already making work easier, faster, and more efficient. This makes it attractive in terms of large-scale adoption. But there are risks around data leaks, the wrong information being shared with the wrong tools, and access levels.
Organizations can’t stop employees from adopting AI, making it essential to find a way to enable risk-mitigated adoption. This is where Governed AI plays a chief role.
Governed AI involves deploying emerging artificial intelligence in a secure, controlled, and scalable way, enabling organizations to benefit from AI while minimizing potential risks. Without governed AI policies in place, the technology will become part of the shadow IT issue - tools which are found and used without IT teams being able to sanction and control them.
We’ve seen the issue before. A lack of enterprise social networks led to unsecure Facebook groups of employees. Before most companies had direct messaging, employees often used WhatsApp groups. Instead, organizations need to find ways to provide these capabilities, wrapped in layers of security data protection.
With Deloitte predicting the majority of the workforce will be made up of Millennial and Gen Z workers by 2025, we’re seeing a vast majority of tech-native employees in the workplace. These digital natives expect to be able to bring their technology with them into the workplace. AI is pushing the boundaries and it’s exciting. Governed AI means encouraging adoption while controlling how the tech is used, why it’s used, where the data sits, and how security principles are wrapped around all of this.
Governed AI is not just about controlling the safety of AI use within the organization. It’s also understanding that the quality of the data you put in directly affects the value and validity of the AI-generated insights and outcomes you receive. Your data strategy and how you curate good-quality data is vital. Your organizational truth and the governance around it are paramount.
Trust in AI affects employees at all levels. Deloitte found that 36% of C-suite executives worry about regulatory compliance, while 30% are concerned about the difficulty of managing risk. The study found that only 20% of AI projects that entered the Proof of Concept stage were implemented. The biggest reason given is a lack of trust in the decision-making process and its responses. Governed AI creates a level of trust in AI’s decision-making process and its outputs.
Governed AI can mitigate these risks by addressing issues of fairness and bias. For example, organizations need to ensure AI systems are not making biased decisions and that data input is fair and equitable. Maintaining this fairness requires ongoing monitoring and a robust decision-making framework.
Security is another critical consideration: What is the risk of the model being hacked? How secure is the data? Are confidential details being safeguarded appropriately?
When it comes to AI in the workplace, we also need to think about employee data. What data do employees share with the organization? Does the organization monitor employees’ interactions with the tools?
Now is the time to create an AI ethics board, add a layer of governance around AI, and allow multiple disciplines and departments to come together to answer these questions for the organization.
According to a McKinsey survey, 65% of organizations are regularly using generative AI. That’s almost double the number who were doing the same 10 months ago. AI is creating growth and change at dizzying speeds, and organizations need to keep up.
"Organizational Velocity means to move at speed and in a set direction. You can spend a lot of energy innovating, but if you don't align that innovation to an organizational strategy where you're going to make a difference, then it can be wasted effort."
In the workplace, AI has become a powerful tool for accelerating decision-making, driving innovation, and providing speedy access to information. By breaking down silos and reducing digital friction, AI helps employees navigate the complexities of today’s technology landscape and manage the digital noise that often hinders productivity.
For instance, digital assistants provide personalized experiences and deliver contextual information precisely when employees need it, so they can make fast decisions. AI also ensures that essential information is readily available within employees’ workflows, allowing them to access it where it matters most and in the right format.
"It’s nothing new. AI has simply sped up our ability to bring answers to employee questions and provide assistance in the moment that it matters."
AI is seamlessly integrated into the Unily platform to address our customers’ biggest challenges. Our platform holds the highest information security accreditation, ensuring robust protection across all features. We’ve also put a comprehensive governance framework in place to manage and oversee every AI capability and feature across the platform.
Unily is built on a differentiated structured information architecture, which is essential for effective AI integration. This foundation allows AI to optimize and personalize content. Estée Lauder uses native Unily AI to adapt content for its global workforce across multiple brands. They use Unily’s AI to publish around 300 articles a month to hyper-granular target audiences.
Unily ensures ethical deployment and precise control, allowing every AI feature to be enabled or disabled as needed. An example of this is our native AI-driven translation services, which allow content to be translated across 41 languages, with configurable rules and preserved terms, minimizing risks. Kernzer uses our AI to support creating content across 135 nationalities.
Unily’s enterprise AI strategy brings sophisticated AI/ML (machine learning) solutions alongside an open architecture for integrating best-of-breed AI tools. Many of our enterprise customers, such as EY and EON, are training their own language models and agents. Unily acts as the experience layer, enabling teams to adopt and leverage these advanced technologies and bring their own LLMs and Digital Assistants.
Our Customer Advisory Board comprises executives from large global organizations such as American Express, Estée Lauder, and Johnson & Johnson. The board plays a crucial role in shaping our AI roadmap.
"The average person will benefit from an increase of 50 IQ points by leveraging AI-powered tools in their day-to-day working life."
Both knowledge workers and frontline workers are increasingly able to reduce some of the more mundane and repetitive tasks. This means they can focus on high-value, strategic work, which is expected to be a key area of future opportunity.
In the workplace, access to knowledge is likely to become deeper, quicker, and more relevant. Intelligent notifications will prevent the rise of digital noise which currently reduces productivity and efficiency. Personalized access is also likely to be a big feature of workplace AI.
Back-office tasks within the business are likely to be fully optimized. Everything from HR processes, expenses, finance, contractuals, and anywhere teams are working with large volumes of text or documentation is likely to be reinvented and disrupted.
"We don’t pretend to know the future of AI in the workplace, but we see LLMs becoming a commodity. The focus will be in the orchestration. You'll choose the right model for the right application, the right cost basis to deploy it. The real value will be in which apps it connects to, what data is used, and what your governance and security layers look like. What's the human interface?"
Those who use and create technology will need new skills too.
"The skills of the future are likely to be structuring arguments, making a very verbose statement of intent. New interfaces are going to be much more verbose."
With rapid growth and change across every industry set to continue, now is the time to embrace the tool that can create velocity in your organization - AI in the workplace. Frontline and knowledge workers alike are adopting this new technology, and as more tech natives enter the workforce, and employees use AI increasingly in their home lives, the risk of AI becoming shadow IT is increasing.
Companies need to embrace AI and the innovation it can create - in any team. It’s time to adopt AI in the workplace and put governance in place for secure and controlled AI initiatives.
Unily is the ONLY triple leader across the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, Forrester Wave™, and IDC MarketScape. We solve difficult challenges like organizational AI. Speak to the team about how we can help bring smart, governed AI to your workplace.
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