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New survey data from study conducted by 451 Research from S&P Global Energy Horizons captures the priorities, tensions and trade-offs shaping organizations’ workplace technology strategy. Insights reveal an environment in which AI integration has become the leading priority, but the organizational and technical infrastructure to support it remains under strain. Survey data also surfaces a structural gap: Organizations are layering AI and automation onto workplace environments that still struggle with integration debt, governance ambiguity and unresolved tensions between centralized control and distributed execution.
The Take
The digital workplace in 2026 is defined less by what organizations are adopting than by what they cannot yet coordinate. AI has moved from experimental to operational, as 55% of respondents already use GenAI assistants and 52% name AI integration as their priority; but this acceleration collides with persistent integration fragility, governance uncertainty and an expanding attack surface. Ops teams are growing in influence (cited by 88%), yet they are also viewed as introducing compliance and sprawl risks that centralized IT is tasked with managing. The real constraint is not technology availability, but organizational capacity: the ability to absorb new capabilities without compounding the complexity that already suppresses returns on existing investments. Vendors that frame their value around isolated capabilities rather than integration, governance and adoption will find a shrinking addressable audience among decision-makers who now rank cost containment and tool consolidation alongside AI as key priorities.
Summary of findings
AI integration is both the priority and the top challenge. Integrating AI and GenAI into workflows is the leading digital workplace priority for the next 12 months, cited by 52% of respondents, ahead of automating employee processes (45%), containing costs (41%) and enhancing the employee experience (40%). Yet managing the complexity of AI integration into employee workflows is also the most cited challenge in digital workplace strategy (35%). While AI is attracting the most investment, it is also generating the most friction. The implication for vendors is that AI capabilities alone are no longer sufficient to support differentiation; what matters is how cleanly those capabilities integrate into existing workflows and governance structures without introducing new coordination costs.
GenAI has crossed from pilot to production, but depth varies. More than half of respondents (55%) report GenAI assistants already in use, with another 22% in discovery or proof of concept — placing GenAI adoption ahead of employee experience platforms (43% in use), intelligent automation (32%) and other technologies. Among current users, 81% report full-scale (48%) or broad-scale (33%) adoption. However, only 63% of organizations access AI through capabilities embedded natively in existing tools, while 48% rely on systems integrators for custom implementations and 40% use pre-trained third-party models. This fragmentation in access methods signals that the GenAI tool landscape remains unsettled, and organizations are hedging rather than consolidating around a single delivery model.
GenAI is already load-bearing, and the workforce is willing. Among organizations using GenAI assistants, just over 71% rate them as highly essential to workforce productivity and operations. For a technology category that barely existed in organizations’ workflows three years ago, that essentiality score places GenAI ahead of established categories such as content management (just under 71%), employee experience platforms (68%) and project/portfolio management (65%). GenAI is no longer supplementary; it has become a necessary function.
The workforce appears to agree: 77% of decision-makers describe employees as either enthusiastic (33%) or open but cautious (44%) toward AI, while 15% are neutral and only 8% report outright resistance. Yet 27% still cite employee resistance as a barrier to scaling AI.
That disconnect suggests the resistance problem is real but concentrated in specific roles or functions, rather than broadly distributed — making targeted enablement, not blanket change management, the higher-value investment.
Productivity gains are real but unevenly distributed. Among organizations using AI in workplace tools, 88% report improvements in employee productivity and 86% in operational efficiency. These are strong self-reported signals. Yet the most impactful AI use cases cluster around task management (47%), support services (42%) and employee analytics (42%), which are relatively bounded tasks. More complex use cases, such as enterprise search (36%) and scheduling optimization (34%), rank lower. The pattern suggests that AI’s productivity impact is concentrated in discrete task automation rather than systemic workflow redesign. Organizations — and vendors — that mistake early wins in bounded use cases for evidence of transformational readiness risk overinvesting in expansion before the integration and governance foundations are in place.
Integration demand is rising, but capacity is not keeping pace. More than half of respondents (54%) report an increase in workforce requests for integrations across their different productivity, collaboration, communication and business systems in the past 12 months, while only 5% say they have built all necessary integrations. The most pervasive integration challenges are security and compliance risks from cross-system data exchange (41%), legacy app limitations (36%) and reliability concerns (35%). This is significant because the push toward AI, automation and analytics presupposes robust inter-application connectivity. Rising demand for integration, counterbalanced by flat or constrained capacity, creates a bottleneck that suppresses the return on investment from adjacent technologies. Vendors in the integration and integration-platform-as-a-service space have a widening addressable market, but the data suggest that complexity, not budget, is the binding constraint.
Cost discipline and consolidation are counterweights to expansion. Containing costs and maximizing the ROI of current tools ranks third among 12-month priorities (41%), and 31% cite consolidating tools to reduce app sprawl. Meanwhile, 29% of respondents identify operational inefficiencies as a strategic challenge, and 28% cite an overabundance of applications resulting in silos and tool fatigue. This creates tension, as organizations are simultaneously under pressure to adopt AI and automation while rationalizing and consolidating their existing tool estates. The data suggest that the next phase of workplace technology spending will be shaped as much by subtraction — retiring, consolidating and extracting more value from what exists — as by addition.
The collaboration stack is still stratifying. Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) tools are approaching settled infrastructure status, as 53% of organizations have them in use. Among users, 81% rate these tools as highly essential, marking the top essentiality score across all categories surveyed. However, the layers above UC&C remain in active sorting. Collaborative work management tools are in use by 48% of respondents, with another 23% in discovery or planning, indicating the work management layer is consolidating as a distinct category. Knowledge sharing and wiki tools (35% in use, 28% in discovery) and visual collaboration tools (33% in use, 26% in discovery) show large discovery-to-deployment ratios, signaling heavy evaluation activity. For vendors in these adjacent categories, the window for establishing category position is open but narrowing. For organizations, the risk is that parallel evaluations across overlapping categories can produce exactly the sprawl they are trying to contain.
Ops teams are ascendant and contested. The role of ops teams within business functions is growing: 88% of respondents agree with this assessment, and 47% strongly agree.
Decision-makers also broadly agree that ops teams enhance agility (86%) and reduce IT workload (80%). But the data reveals a structural tension: 82% simultaneously agree that ops teams introduce new governance, compliance and security risks, and 70% agree they cause process inefficiencies through duplicated effort and tool sprawl.
This dual characterization of ops teams as both an accelerator and a risk surface reflects the broader challenge of distributed execution in organizations that still rely on centralized governance models. The cost of ops team autonomy is often borne by IT in the form of expanded oversight responsibilities.
Security and compliance are investment drivers, not afterthoughts. Strengthening data security and compliance is the second-highest driver of workplace tool investment (53%), just behind improving employee productivity (54%). It also appears in every adjacent concern, including integration challenges (41% cite security risks from data exchange), AI adoption barriers (35% cite data privacy concerns) and digital transformation barriers (36% cite data security failures). Security is not a stand-alone category in this dataset — it is a cross-cutting constraint that modulates how aggressively organizations can pursue AI, integration and distributed work. For vendors, this means security and compliance capabilities are table stakes for procurement conversations, not premium features.
The front-line workforce remains an underserved technology constituency. Among organizations with front-line workers (96%), the priorities are quick IT support (45%), improving internal communications (43%) and on-demand training (41%). Yet the biggest adoption challenges are employee resistance (32%), tool fatigue (27%) and worker privacy concerns (25%). Front-line technology investment is constrained by a user-experience gap: Tools designed for knowledge workers are being pushed to populations with different device access patterns, connectivity conditions and tolerance for complexity. Our data also reveals that 21% say tools are not adapted for front-line use, and 18% cite unfriendly interfaces, which signals that this is a design and delivery problem, not just a deployment issue.
Vendor support expectations are high and nonnegotiable. Decision-makers place extraordinary weight on vendor support: 92% rate 24/7 technical support as important (63% very important), while 91% rate clear SLAs as important, and 91% say the same about proactive customer success programs. Notably, 90% also value opportunities to influence product road maps. These are not aspirational preferences — they function as selection criteria. In a market where tool consolidation and cost discipline are rising priorities, vendors that cannot demonstrate robust support infrastructure and genuine co-development engagement will lose to those that can, regardless of feature superiority.
Strategic spending is the stated direction, but tactical gravity is strong. When asked whether digital transformation has shifted IT spending, 58% report a preference for strategic (new investment) spending today.
Meanwhile, 64% of organizations have a formal digital transformation strategy in execution, and nearly half of respondents (48%) allocate between 20% and 49% of their IT budget to digital transformation.
The data suggests that while the strategic narrative around digital transformation is well established, a significant share of spending remains anchored in maintaining existing systems. The gap between strategic intent and budget reality is where many transformation initiatives stall — and where vendors focused on modernization, migration and rationalization find their most receptive buyers.
