Editorial
Research Report
The AI Transformation 100: 100 Concrete Ideas for Fixing How We Work
Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" jolts you awake. But shock! It's the same day as yesterday. And the day before. And before that.
But rather than the performative groundhog indicating the end of winter , our workplace Groundhog Day is wading through notifications, multi-tasking during never-ending meetings, ignoring emails about the broken fridge in the Doha office and reacting to the relentless ping of chat messages. And repeat day-in, day-out.
Welcome to the digital workplace of 2026. Much like 2025 and 2024, but with expectations that AI is increasingly part of the mix (more on that later). The digital workplace has always been about exactly that — digital work — but the choice of apps, the scale of reach, the level of noise and the impact on traditionally non-digital practices is moving us faster to an 'everything digital' workplace and life.
Productivity Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink
I recently posed the question "what would you do to make work less crap tomorrow?" to the attendees of the Digital Workplace Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand. "Stop all notifications" was the first answer, with a solid murmur of agreement.
The message remained the same across all tracks and conversations: we are drowning in notifications, we are behind in the skills we need and are not making the most of our investments. Agent-to-agent is where the buzz is, but the experience for our employees is a long way from this automated utopia.
The reality is that we're drowning in tools. Need to improve productivity? Here's another productivity app. All well and good if we're all consistently using them together. However, we're not. It all falls apart when – due to habits, preferences and a general lack of agreement – we all use different tools to do the same thing, within the same team.
It's great to use planner to visibly organize our task load. It's not great if the manager keeps calling ad-hoc meetings on task updates. It doesn't help that our commercial manager uses Teams channels to keep tabs on things. Even worse when half the team uses chat to figure out what's going on.
Is AI Making a Difference or Making Everything More Complicated?
Struggling to stay on top of your week? AI is here to help us. And to an extent, yes. But experience is showing that rather than integrating AI into regular workflows, for many of us, AI adoption is ad-hoc. We're using it to help solve problems, figure things out, improve our communications or simply experimenting with it.
The thing is this is incredibly time-consuming as not only do we need to develop our use cases, but we also need to test our prompts over and over again. The whole operation often takes much longer than when, with knowledge to-hand or after a quick chat with a colleague, we could come to a decision or take action reasonably quickly.
No longer do we go with our guts or run something past a colleague. We've replaced this by trying to get the perfect outcome. Which we do, until we run the prompt again and get a completely different perfect outcome.
Designed to Be Addictive
Here we see a new layer of tool overload: the battle for tech dominance in our work and personal lives. AI tools are designed to be addictive: the way they speak nicely to us in that gushingly insincere way, try to give us the answer they think we want to hear — then apologize profusely for getting it wrong (again). The technology we use at work and home wants us to become dependent on it. How else are these organizations going to get the payback from these eye-watering data center investments?
Yes, they can help, yes there is value in using them. But there is also value in not using them. Not every answer has to come from AI. Not every communication has to be honed to make it "perfect," rather than authentic.
Don't Race to the Bottom. Stop, Think, Talk
For many employees, there is pressure to increase their AI use in pursuit of greater productivity. We've seen the metrics, the reported time savings, the promised personal gains. However, rushing to implement AI risks making things worse. In the absence of clarity, the expectation to get some form of AI output risks more noise in the form of slop, unwanted summaries and tasks being assigned without the context of the meeting. Even if we don't do anything, Copilot agents in Microsoft Teams are popping up to helpfully summarize a new channel — whether we want it or not.
I'm unfairly calling out AI here, when the proliferation of chats, channels, communities, meetings, notebooks and content are equally to blame for drowning us in noise (along with the general enshittification of technology). What we need to be productive is somewhere in there, it's just hard to know where or what it is.
The underlying issue isn't the tools. It's our habits. We keep adding more productivity tools, adopting the latest collaboration apps, connecting AI into our meetings without stopping to ask 'why'?
Have we agreed which tools we need to best deliver our work? Consistency is far more powerful for productivity than using every "best of breed" tool.
Secondly, have we stopped to consider what we are trying to achieve? Is AI the best way to get there? Quite often, we don't know. And that's where we need to use the most powerful workplace tool we have: having a conversation. That's how we shape problems into solutions. It's how we apply context, experience, novel thinking and critical thinking.
The Solution to Workplace Noise?
However, an alarming trend is happening: we are replacing conversations with surveys, systems and formal communication. Teams recognize the problems they are facing, but, according to Psychology Today, lack the psychological safety or space to talk about them.
Teams need to allow the time for these conversations and to normalize them. The role of leaders here is to provide spaces where we are encouraged to share frustrations and — most importantly — to schedule time to stop and work this out with the team. To surface issues and priorities, agree on preferred spaces for collaboration, channels for communication and the specific role AI should play in the team.
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However, this will only partially lower the volume of noise if we continue to layer on productivity tools (and those unasked for AI summaries). Much of this comes back to the old conundrum of "what tool when?" If we haven't addressed this, nothing will stop us from inundating colleagues with notifications from our favorite app. And they will simply return the favor — in a totally different place.
Just as we make a conscious choice to step away from social media for our mental health, we should consider if we need to limit our reliance on tools at work. Productivity doesn't come from apps, it comes from having the time to get stuff done. Do we need a technology diet?
Editor's Note: What else can we do to reclaim our focus?
- Ruthless Prioritization: How to Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome — The inability of leaders to prioritize introduces risk beyond missed deadlines or budget overruns. The danger is a loss of organizational focus and momentum.
- Work Design Is How Performance, Engagement and Well-Being Scale — When leaders organize work around how people actually collaborate, they'll drive performance and help workers finish their days with energy, not exhaustion.
- Multi-Tasking Is a Myth: How to Reclaim Focus and Productivity — If you’re moving between budget reviews, time-off approvals and confirming the correct images in a PR all at once, you are likely to make a mistake.
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