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Let’s travel back in time to 2005 and turn on the TV.
If you had the means, you were likely using a cable or satellite box with a subscription to hundreds of channels. However, out of those hundreds of channels filled with sports, news, music and cooking shows, you probably only regularly watched a few.
Why did you have so many channels? Media companies bundled their offerings for cable and satellite distributors. Sure, you could have ESPN, but you also had to pay for ABC and the Disney Channel. If you liked watching CNN, you also needed to subscribe to TNT and TBS, even if you didn’t watch them.
Prices continued to soar until technology caught up and a new alternative emerged: cord-cutting. People wanted to choose what they watched and only wanted to pay for it. Slowly but surely, the erosion of this centralized media consumption is all but complete.
In a consolidating workplace technology space, we are walking the same path as we did with our televisions 20 years ago. Vendors are pushing the idea of a “Work OS,” a digital operating system for the enterprise that promises to unify projects, workflows, data and employee engagement into one seamless hub.
It sounds neat. It sounds efficient. But we’ve heard this pitch before, haven’t we?
The Work OS Big Sell
The Work OS promise is elegant on paper: one platform, one license, one source of truth. A CFO looks at that and sees cost control. A CIO sees fewer integration headaches, cleaner procurement and better security oversight. A CHRO sees a workplace that simply works better.
And who wouldn’t want relief from the chaos of seventy-five apps duct-taped together? Running a modern enterprise often feels like trying to fit together pieces from three different model sets. Consolidation feels like the cure.
But behind the neat pitch is a messy market.
Collaboration platforms such as Asana, monday.com, ClickUp and Smartsheet are jockeying to be the place where you start and end your day. Slack's Work OS ambitions have become part of its boilerplate. Microsoft Teams is trying to expand from chat into workflow orchestration, hoping to become the interface employees can’t live without. Even the full Microsoft Office suite, now more than 30 years old and called Microsoft 365 Copilot, is part of the conversation.
Meanwhile, ERP and HCM giants such as Workday and SAP continue their push to expand beyond back-office dominance into more employee-facing apps. SAP recently acquired SmartRecruiters to keep its expansion rolling, and Workday acquired Paradox in a similar move.
Each of these players claims they can be the Work OS. That means instead of one central hub, organizations are faced with a handful of competing contenders bundling overlapping products and services that employees may or may not use.
It’s cable déjà vu: multiple packages, each bloated, each expensive, each promising simplicity.
CFOs, CIOs and CHROs don’t get what they want, either. Research on the total cost of ownership shows that the upfront savings from consolidation can often be deceptive. Hidden costs appear in the form of clunky features, low employee adoption and the rigidity that comes with vendor lock-in.
Does the OS Even Matter if AI Runs the Show?
Here’s what nobody selling a Work OS likes to talk about: what if the “OS” itself stops mattering? All of this consolidation might not matter in the grand scheme of things.
Gartner predicted that AI will reshape the workplace by flattening hierarchies, automating middle-management tasks such as scheduling and reporting and acting as the connective tissue across tools.
If employees can ask an AI assistant to “generate the Q3 sales forecast” or “kick off onboarding,” does it matter whether the request runs through Salesforce, Workday or monday.com?
It might matter some for CIOs and CFOs. It probably matters much less for employees, though. What matters is whether the answer is right, if it’s easy to get to and if the data flows where it should.
The AI layer becomes the interface. All of the chaos behind the scenes gets masked and everyone is happy, right? It seems like another type of Work OS promise that is just out of reach, though.
Other Roads: Composable, Process-Centric, Human-Centered
If you, too, are skeptical that AI will take over the role of a Work OS, that doesn’t mean the roll toward consolidation is inevitable. Three approaches are emerging as alternatives:
- Composable enterprise: Instead of buying a monolith, companies assemble ecosystems of best-of-breed tools, held together with APIs and integration platforms. It’s more flexible and resilient, even if it requires more orchestration. For most large organizations, this is still the practical reality of today and likely for their near-term future. Accepting and building for it seems wise.
- Process-centric design: Rather than chasing the latest platform, start with the reality of how work needs to flow across teams. This requires understanding the work needs of your people, something that a push to consolidation often doesn’t consider fully. The strategy here is to pick technologies that fit those processes, not the other way around.
- Human-centered design: Measure success by how people feel about the tools they’re given. Do they reduce friction? Do they improve productivity? Do employees actually want to use them? This gets into the domain of UX research, but that could be seen as a more meaningful KPI than feature counts.
Regardless of approach, it’s important to realize that whether you pursue consolidation, AI or some level of orchestration, the operating system of work isn’t a piece of software. The real orchestration is how you’ve brought everything together: People, processes and, yes, technology.
The way people interact, your culture, your processes and your readiness for change? It matters as much, if not more so, than whatever underlying technology is powering your work. A culturally resilient team that's ready to tackle obstacles can work around less-than-capable technology. A capable technology stack of any composition cannot run your business without a good team and culture.
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How Important Is It to Figure Out Your Work OS?
The real answer is to know thyself.
For some organizations, the math works, and the workforce is ready for a true center of the work galaxy. Consolidation simplifies vendor management, improves security and makes life easier for IT, finance and HR.
For many enterprises, the more realistic move is to admit you aren’t going to build a Work OS. Instead, you'll invest in integration and orchestration while keeping a relentless focus on the digital employee experience. If (or when) AI becomes the default interface, the shiny Work OS underneath may matter less, and that orchestration won’t be for naught.
We’ll probably see more vendors continue to acquire and add capabilities while bloating their offerings, but the cord-cutting moment is coming for enterprise software sooner than they probably hope.
Editor's Note: Operating system, digital workplace hub, call it what you will, we've been here before (plus one alternative):
- Here We Go With the Digital Workplace Hub Again — Microsoft claims Teams can provide a single place to get all work done. But is that possible — or desirable? Experts weigh in.
- The Myth of the Digital Workplace Hub — “I just want one place to go for everything” is a common refrain I hear from employees when discussing their digital workplace.
- Connecting Platforms for Humans: The Fourth Principle of Digital Employee Experience — Integrating platforms isn't enough — it's time to design for how people actually work.
