As the workplace landscape evolves, organizations that invest in a connected, AI-powered, and outcome-driven EXP will be best positioned to adapt and thrive. Here are three critical insights from the event that highlight why prioritizing an EXP in 2025 is essential for long-term success.
Takeaway 1: Enterprises are seeing a strategic shift to measuring value through customer outcomes
A key theme at the Gartner summit was the move towards customer outcome-focused technology. Organizations are no longer simply adopting tools based on their features but are instead prioritizing solutions that demonstrate measurable value. Tori Paulman, Gartner’s Lead Analyst for digital workplace strategy, emphasized that enterprises must be able to quantify the impact of their digital workplace investments in terms of productivity, engagement, and efficiency.
This shift is driven by growing scrutiny from leadership teams demanding clear ROI metrics rather than anecdotal success stories. Businesses that cannot correlate their digital workplace investments with tangible outcomes will struggle to justify further spending in an era of heightened fiscal responsibility.
Unily’s opportunity lies in helping organizations track and report on their digital workplace success. Through advanced engagement analytics, AI-powered content effectiveness tracking, and intranet adoption benchmarking, Unily can provide the quantifiable insights that decision-makers need to justify investment. This is particularly compelling when positioning against other ‘mega-vendors’, which often lack the depth of analytics necessary to showcase real business impact.
Takeaway 2: Intelligent workplaces
The summit reinforced that AI is not just a passing trend but a fundamental component of the future digital workplace. Despite this, many businesses are at different stages of AI maturity. Some are in the early phases of adoption, facing challenges related to governance, data quality, and integration. Others have embraced AI extensively, only to find themselves struggling with tool fragmentation and a lack of cohesive strategy.
This growing complexity has led to concerns about the risk of AI sprawl, where enterprises deploy multiple disconnected AI tools, creating inefficiencies and governance challenges. The industry response is a push toward centralized AI governance, ensuring that AI adoption is structured, secure, and integrated into broader digital workplace strategies. Google’s announcement of its upcoming agent studio API, which allows external AI assistants to integrate into a unified platform, exemplifies this shift toward consolidation and controlled AI management.
For those looking to simplify the experience for their employees and drive adoption, it is essential to understand whether an EXP locks them into a single AI agent system or empowers users with innovation. Unily’s Insight Center allows businesses to integrate multiple best-in-class AI agents or orchestration tools into a single, unified experience within the intranet.
Unily offers a governed AI-powered experience, ensuring enterprises can deploy AI-driven search, content automation, and enterprise-wide intelligence without the risks associated with AI fragmentation. The upcoming Unily and Microsoft CoPilot Connector further cements our EXP offering as a future-proof centralized AI hub that prevents sprawl and ensures secure, efficient AI adoption.
The AI reality check
Takeaway 3: Employee communication is failing but can EXPs provide the fix?
A session led by Appspace revealed critical data on the state of employee communication: over 80% of employees value consistent communication, yet nearly 69% report inconsistent messaging across different channels. This disconnect is one of the key drivers behind shadow IT adoption, where employees turn to unauthorized tools to access reliable information.
Inconsistent communication not only impacts engagement but also increases operational risks, from compliance failures to misinformation spreading unchecked. Cisco’s approach to internal communications, summarized as "Do the words and the music align?", highlights the need for a cohesive content strategy that resonates with employees across different platforms.
Unily’s Employee Experience Platform is designed to solve this challenge by providing:
- A single source of truth for company communications, ensuring messaging is aligned and consistent
- AI-powered insights to optimize communication strategies and boost employee engagement
- Omnichannel reach, enabling messages to be delivered across mobile, desktop, and digital signage platforms
With mandatory content distribution and automated governance mechanisms, Unily also helps enterprises combat misinformation risks, reinforcing its role as a trusted communication hub in the age of AI-driven disinformation.
Unily ranks first in all Use Cases in the 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions.
Final thoughts: The future of work needs an EXP strategy
The Gartner Digital Workplace Summit 2025 made one thing clear: organizations that invest in structured, AI-powered employee experience platforms will gain a competitive advantage in productivity, engagement, and governance.
For enterprises evaluating their 2025 digital workplace strategy, Unily stands out as a platform that:
- Delivers measurable business outcomes, ensuring ROI can be quantified and justified
- Provides a governed AI-powered experience, centralizing AI adoption to reduce fragmentation and inefficiencies.
- Fixes broken employee communication, creating a consistent, effective content strategy that employees trust.
One final takeaway (if we may!) is that now is the time for enterprises to take control of their digital workplace strategy. Organizations that fail to align with these emerging trends risk falling behind in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Take the product tour yourself of the Unily platform or get in touch with our EXP experts for a demo to learn more about how Unily can help your enterprise navigate the future of work
