At Gartner Digital Workplace this year, one pattern showed up consistently across sessions, analyst conversations, and discussions with attendees. Digital workspaces aren't at peak performance because of technology. They're struggling because most organizations don’t have a consistent way to operate it.
By this point, most teams have what they need to see the problem. They’ve deployed platforms, invested in monitoring, and built out reporting. But visibility hasn’t translated into consistency.
Issues are easier to find, but not easier to resolve. The same friction shows up across onboarding, access, and day-to-day work—just with better data attached to it. That’s the gap our team learned as we took in the event from the different perspectives.
Michael Meyer, our Product Manager, spent most of his time in sessions and with vendors. His observation? On paper, the market looks mature. There are tools for everything: monitoring, DEX, automation, AI agents, service desks.
But the more time he spent digging in, the more a pattern emerged. Organizations have more visibility than ever. What they don’t have is a clear way to act on it.
As he put it: “Measurement without action is worthless. You can see the issue, but if you can’t actually move the workload or resolve it, the dashboard doesn’t help.”
That showed up in multiple forms:
This aligns with broader industry trends. As Gartner notes, the digital workplace is shifting from tool-centric thinking to intelligence-driven environments, where value comes not from data alone, but from how it is acted on.
Jacci Robinson, our VP of GTM & Growth gave a talk on Monday afternoon to a packed house. The topic? A Blueprint to Navigate Transition for Digital Workspace Leaders.
Last year she observed that the larger sentiment across Gartner Digital Workspaces was focused on exploring the topic, discovering what it meant for organizations, and making a roadmap for what they could do in the first 3-6 months. This year, cross-functional complexity had stalled projects across the board. According to Gartner, more than 40% of agentic AI projects are expected to be canceled due to unclear value, governance challenges, and operational complexity.
With AI accelerating change across the digital workplace, expectations about what “should be done” is soaring, but what most organizations aren’t talking about is that it’s also introducing new layers of complexity.
Most organizations aren’t starting from zero. There are people, platforms, and processes in place. What they lack is a clear, controlled way to find a way to run the digital workspace in a way that bridges the internal politics, language gaps, and decision models already in place.
Terry Tiernan, our SVP of Sales and seasoned customer advocate, came to Gartner armed with curiosity. The main questions he came with were “how are environments evolving?” and “how are the changes impacting infrastructure, security, and AI?”
His big takeaway: everything is interconnected.
AI is no longer a standalone initiative. It’s influencing security models, operating workflows, and even how support is structured. At the same time, governance is becoming a primary constraint, not an afterthought. In fact, Gartner research shows that organizations are struggling to operationalize AI safely, with only 23% of IT leaders expressing strong confidence in their ability to manage security and governance components when deploying GenAI tools.
This aligned with what he was seeing in the market as well. Customers are finding that as environments become more complex, decisions are less isolated. The tradeoffs between security, performance, cost and user experience are happening constantly. But where organizations get into trouble is when those tradeoffs lack clear framework for resolving them.
That complexity reinforces the same underlying issue: the need for a more deliberate operating model.
Maureen Jann, our Director of Marketing for North America, had a goal to better understand the market challenges. So, in true marketing director style, she did something weird. She brought a 1960s typewriter with the hopes that people would use the analog channel to vent their digital frustrations. Instead of another screen or demo, she went intentionally low-tech.
Her learnings? People who stopped by the booth shared a few common themes by CLICK, CLICK, CLICKING out their frustrations on the vintage typewriter:
It’s interesting when you take away the digital interface and the noise of a sales pitch, people don’t talk about platforms, they focus on the friction.
If there’s one takeaway from this year’s conference, it’s this:
Digital workspace doesn’t fail because of a lack of technology. It fails because it isn’t consistently operated. For most teams, the next step isn’t another tool. It’s stepping back and asking a different question:
Do we have a clear way to evolve what we’ve already built?
That means getting specific about where experience matters most, aligning ownership across teams, making metrics usable beyond IT, and being honest about how decisions actually get made.
Do you have a clear baseline?
For teams working to evolve their digital workspace infrastructure, it can be difficult to map out a clear next step. If you were our customer, we’d recommend a Health Check to ensure you know what you’ve done, where you’re at, and what you need to do going forward.