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?
We know that 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, with a whopping 33% rise in change in just the last year.
There are no signs of this slowing down, with 88% of the C-suite expecting further acceleration in 2025, with AI leading the charge. To stay ahead, organizations need to adopt emerging tooling and innovate progressively, fostering a culture where employees are encouraged to use AI solutions responsibly and creatively. However, this rapid adoption won’t be without its own set of challenges. Data privacy concerns, information security breaches, and potential biases in decision-making should all be approached with great thought and care. The real test for enterprises will be finding ways to harness AI’s vast potential without compromising on trust, security, and fairness. With the right approach, this balance is very achievable.
"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 showing it reaching $361bn by 2028. The sheer velocity of this growth underscores the rising priority for organizations to leverage data-driven, machine learning and insight-led decision-making. Grasping the opportunity of the new frontier in tech whilst taking a considered approach to its governance, is 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 to this seismic shift. 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, and without the proper governance this shadow IT could be keeping enterprise leaders up at night.
Extensive use of AI in the workplace breaks the barriers to innovation across teams, empowering workflows, improving time to value, and sharpening quality in many cases. Now that employees know the power that AI could unleash in their work lives, they’re likely to plug the gaps their leaders haven’t filled in their enterprise-governed tech stack – utilizing point solutions from a wealth of readily available providers. In order to regain control of tooling and reduce exposure of valuable enterprise data, leaders must act to integrate this technology into their own platforms and processes.
Unily’s AI journey began long ago by investigating the blockers faced by the largest organizations when connecting their employees, fostering better collaboration, and cultivating an informed culture. The dawn of AI promises to change the face of work for the better, sharpening time to value, and smoothening digital friction across the enterprise if it’s approached correctly.
Ungoverned, AI could spark an explosion of unverifiable content, unreliable experiences, and crucially, vast data exposure with far reaching implications for enterprise security and prosperity. That’s why Unily’s eyes have been wide open to the risks from the outset. It’s why we’ve shaped governed AI tooling to ensure safe, controlled, and secure use – rather than taking an overzealous leap into new technology without the safeguards to match its power.
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 capabilities and conversational interfaces make it immediately accessible to all employees – and while this sounds great on the face of it, early intervention on its safe use prove more difficult.
AI in the workplace is already making work easier, faster, and more efficient – making 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 inappropriate access levels.
Instead of leaving gaps for employees to plug themselves with ungoverned point solutions, enterprises should weave governed AI tooling across their tech stack and invest heavily in associated upskilling, cross-functional enablement, and change transformation. This is where governed AI plays the leading role.
With Governed AI, the utopia risk mitigated adoption and full realization of its boundless potential is possible. With a secure, controlled, and scalable approach, organizations can benefit from AI whilst minimizing the risks. An organization with a high degree of governed AI maturity is well-equipped with advanced AI tooling and a legion of skilled, knowledgable teams fully aligned with a coherent set of AI governance principles.
This organization may have integrated governance systems that touch all facets of its advanced AI tooling. It will be applying metrics that are comprehensively measured and constantly evolving to meet the needs of a modern workforce. This is an enterprise where both people and tools work in harmony to achieve great things.
Without governed AI policies in place, the technology will become part of the swelling shadow IT problem; ungovernable, untouched by controls or sanctions, and with the destructive power to leach your invaluable data.
We’ve seen the issue before. A lack of enterprise social networks led to the establishment of unsecure Facebook groups of employees, or WhatsApp group chats to plug the gap in comms tooling. Although this may have seemed innocent at the time, it set the scene for confidential data to run riot and IT departments had a challenging time trying to regain control over digital tooling.
Enterprises need to find ways to provide the capabilities that employees need and want, but wrap them in layers of security data protection as they do so. 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 digitally-dexterous employees in the workplace – and they want to take advantage of the latest tooling to elevate the work they do.
Governed AI is all about leveraging the opportunity that comes with this eagerness to adopt emerging tech and folding in controls around how it’s used, where the associated data sits, and how security principles hold it all together.
Governed AI is not just about controlling the safety of AI use within the organization. It’s also about 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; the quality of what you put in affects the quality of what you get out.
Your data strategy, content governance, and how you embed these practices across the organization is vital. Trust in AI and the quality of output 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. 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 a cross-functional AI ethics board, add a layer of governance around the use of this tooling, and allow multiple disciplines and departments to come together to answer these questions for the organization and feel they have a seat at the table.
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, make sharper pivots, 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. With these agents, we’ve moved past search linking you to a list of results within which you might find your answer – it explores all relevant sources and surfaces a precise answer for you based on what you’re actually asking for. AI also ensures that essential information is readily available within employees’ workflows, ever-present within the digital experience, 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, ensuring that our customers are able to accelerate organizational velocity without exposing themselves to data threats.
Unily is built on a highly sophisticated information architecture, which is essential for effective AI integration and governance. This foundation allows AI to optimize and personalize content with all the relevant safety guardrails in place. 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 for our customers unique requirements. 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.
Unily’s enterprise AI strategy brings sophisticated AI/ML (machine learning) solutions to our customers 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. With Unily acting as the experience layer, teams are enabled to adopt and leverage these advanced technologies and bring their own LLMs and Digital Assistants into the digital employee experience.
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 and ensuring we’re building solutions tailored specifically to our customer’s world – their needs and pain points.
"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 by leveraging AI. 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, and 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 using AI functionality. Everything from HR processes, expenses, finance, procurement, and teams working with large volumes of text or documentation are likely to see their workflows elevated by the cutting-edge technology.
"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 suite 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, bringing with them high expectations of the digital tooling, the risk of AI becoming shadow IT is increasing.
Companies need to embrace AI and the innovation it can cultivate—in any team. It’s time to adopt AI in the workplace alongside thoughtfully considered governance frameworks for its secure and controlled use.
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.
Speak to the team about how we can help bring smart, governed AI to your workplace.
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