Editorial
Research Report
The State of the Digital Workplace
A conversation is happening in boardrooms and budget meetings across the corporate world. Some organizations are having it structurally: Moderna merged HR and IT under a single Chief People and Digital Technology Officer. Bunq, the Dutch online bank, runs HR and IT as one unified team with a target to automate 90% of operations. Others are having it aspirationally: HR and IT just need to work more closely to build the blended human-AI workforce.
The framing isn't wrong. HR and IT do need to work together. But the framing is incomplete in a way that guarantees the very outcome organizations are trying to avoid: an AI deployment that people just use as a resource-guzzling search engine.
The discipline that's missing is internal communications. IC professionals have been asking for a seat at the table for so long that the phrase has become a running joke in the industry — a perennial conference theme, a LinkedIn rallying cry, a thing senior communicators have been saying since the table was a different shape. But even granting the premise — even imagining a world where IC finally gets its seat — the problem isn't solved. Because the problem was never really about seniority. It's what we think putting IC in the room will fix.
The Gap Isn't Coordination. It's Conception.
When organizations deploy AI tools — Copilot, an AI-powered intranet, an automated HR assistant — they typically build a project team that looks like this: HR defines the people requirements. IT handles the infrastructure and rollout. Communications is brought in to draft the announcement email. Maybe, in more enlightened organizations, to run an adoption campaign.
The pattern repeats even when the three functions are nominally collaborating. IC is treated as a delivery mechanism for decisions already made upstream. The message is handed over, the channel is selected, the communication goes out. Adoption remains disappointing. The post-implementation review blames change management. Nobody questions the process that produced the problem.
What's missing isn't simply a seat at the table for IC. Internal communicators have long been the accidental custodians of employee experience — the function that ends up responsible for how people feel about technology, change and organizational decisions — not because anyone formally assigned it, but because someone had to do it, and comms was standing nearest to the door. Informal ownership is not the same as genuine accountability. What's missing is shared responsibility for what happens in the space between capability and comprehension — the gap where employees encounter new technology and decide, in about 30 seconds, whether it's worth their attention.
It's a question of channel design as much as change management — how information is structured, sequenced and delivered shapes whether people engage with it at all. (It's also, not coincidentally, the subject of my forthcoming book, "Digital Communications at Work.")
That gap is not a communications problem. It's not an IT problem. It's not an HR problem. It's a design and decision-making problem that belongs, collectively, to all three.
AI Makes This Structural Failure Expensive
None of this is new. Organizations have been failing to connect HR, IT and communications since roughly the invention of the org chart, a document whose primary achievement, in most large enterprises, has been to make it visually clear why nothing can ever be anyone's fault. The silos predate the intranet, predate email, predate the kind of change management frameworks that were specifically designed to fix this and largely didn't. AI doesn't create the problem. It just makes the consequences of ignoring it more expensive, and significantly harder to explain away in a post-implementation review.
When the new tool was a refreshed intranet or a new performance review platform, a suboptimal rollout meant low adoption, some organizational grumbling, and a line in a digital workplace maturity report. When the tool is an AI system that shapes how employees access information, complete tasks, get answers to HR queries and interact with organizational knowledge — poor adoption isn't an inconvenience. It's a risk.
Employees who don't understand what an AI tool does, what it has access to, what it can and can't be trusted with, will either avoid it or misuse it. Neither outcome is acceptable for organizations that have staked significant investment on these platforms delivering productivity gains. And neither outcome is fixed by better emails.
The Question Isn't Who Leads. It's What You're Accountable For.
There's a tempting answer to this problem: make IC the lead function in the triumvirate. Give comms professionals the strategic seat, rather than the execution seat. Have them shape the rollout before it reaches the announcement stage.
This is an improvement on the status quo. But it still organizes the work around departmental ownership rather than employee outcomes. Whoever "leads" still has to negotiate across functional boundaries to get the inputs they need to do their job. The employee — who is trying to do their actual job, not navigate your org chart — still falls through the cracks.
A more useful frame is to ask: what does this employee need to do, understand and trust in order for this to work? And then work backwards to identify which function owns each part of that outcome — not which function owns the platform, or the process, or the communication channel.
That is a fundamentally different way of designing a rollout. It requires HR, IT and IC to agree on success metrics that belong to all three, not metrics that let each function declare victory while the employee experience fails.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In organizations where I've seen this work well, a few things tend to be true. Channel design decisions are made with input from the people responsible for the message, not handed down from IT platform owners. HR policy changes and technology changes are sequenced together, not announced in separate emails from separate teams on the same day. Adoption metrics are shared across functions — and a low adoption number is everyone's problem, not a signal to increase communications volume.
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None of this requires a new organizational structure. But it does require a shared definition of what you're trying to achieve and a willingness to be accountable for the outcome rather than the output.
HR–IT partnership is a start. Adding internal communications is the right instinct. But the blended human-AI workforce won't be built by any two-party or three-party partnership that still treats the employee experience as a series of departmental handoffs. It'll be built by organizations that design for what employees need first, and organize their functions around that — rather than the other way round.
Editor's Note: Read more about the cross-functional partnerships that make work work:
- The Silent Exit of Employee Experience: A CIO's Call to Action — An open letter to CIOs on the role they play in protecting EX as a strategic priority — and why it matters for the long-term of their own functions.
- Creating Exceptional Employee Experiences: Where HR, Communications and IT Unite — Employee experiences cross departmental boundaries. So to create exceptional EX, multiple departments must work together – with internal comms in the lead.
- Internal Communications Is the Glue That Binds Hybrid Work — Effective internal comms keeps employees informed, included and engaged, no matter where they work. So design communication strategies for today’s reality.
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