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Don’t read our interview with Ofir Bloch, VP of Strategic Positioning at WalkMe, if you fear change. “IT professionals aren’t just flipping switches to keep the lights on anymore,” he said, “they’re guiding AI roadmaps and championing adoption across all departments.”
Mind you, this is what WalkMe is all about. It’s a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), which aims to “eliminate digital friction from your workflows and turn your tech stack into a competitive advantage”, to quote its website. With that idea comes another: Digital Adoption Professionals.
“These specialists, whether embedded in IT or Learning and Development, ensure that employees fully leverage new technologies, eliminating friction and maximising productivity,” said Ofir .
There are a couple of buzz phrases in there, it’s true, but it’s hard to disagree with Ofir when he says that “IT will have an increasingly important role to play in orchestrating a seamless partnership between employees and AI”. This may well turn into the great challenge of the next decade, what separates the good companies from the great.
And Ofir reckons there’s no time to wait. “At this time, there’s a growing risk of ‘transformation debt’. Or the gap between IT investment and the value that investment realises. The more leaders stall or poorly implement AI and other technologies, the more this debt builds up.”
He goes on to explain how to avoid this debt – it doesn’t involve tariffs – in the course of the interview. As warned, it does involve change. By the end, you won’t be shocked to hear that Ofir holds a Disruptive Innovation Strategy certificate from Harvard Business School…
AI is driving huge change, and businesses need to ensure the impact on IT and the wider business is positive. Large-scale AI adoption has only really begun in the last couple of years and we’ve already seen real-world examples of AI hallucinations, misuse and failures.
Take New York City’s AI-powered chatbot, MyCity, for instance. Last year, it ended up giving entrepreneurs inaccurate advice and guidance that could have potentially led them to break the law. It’s a stark reminder that AI isn’t infallible, and without the right oversight, things can go awry.
To prevent such risks, organisations must implement robust safeguards and actively manage AI models rather than just monitoring AI trends. AI guardrails have an increasingly important role to play in ensuring business continuity: by 2028, Gartner predicts that 25% of enterprise breaches will be traced to AI agent abuse from external and malicious internal actors.
Gartner also reported that in 2023, 29% of organisations reported having an AI privacy or security incident, with 62% of these incidents attributed to internal actors. This emerging risk is giving rise to Guardian Agents – applications autonomously safeguarding against the risks of AI itself. Think of it as the same steel being used to create both the sword and the shield. Guardian Agents will allow organisations to solve the Catch-22 of stimulating company-wide creativity while safeguarding the organisation against AI risks so that AI has a positive impact.
Over the next few years, organisations will also begin collaborating on an international level. Decentralised AI consortia, such as the European-based Decentralised AI Society (DAIS), bring together competitors to co-develop ethical AI models, ensuring a shared understanding of risks and opportunities.
The future is no longer about where you work or even where your colleagues work. It’s about how you work. Looking forward, IT will have an increasingly important role to play in orchestrating a seamless partnership between employees and AI. Organisations must ensure that technology infrastructure, data layers and AI models work in concert to create an ‘agentic workforce’ – a model where employees and virtual agents collaborate fluidly to drive productivity.
For this collaboration to succeed, businesses need to overcome the widening digital skills gap. Nearly half (48%) of employees aged 18 to 24 cannot complete 20 essential digital tasks – threatening to prevent the agentic workforce from getting off the ground. In line, businesses need to ensure AI and related tools are easy for employees to adopt and don’t need specialist knowledge. By making IT as intuitive and integrated as possible, businesses can unlock new levels of operational efficiency and innovation.
Ultimately, the future of work isn’t just about where employees work; it’s about how they work with AI. Organisations that actively foster AI-human collaboration will gain a competitive edge, while those that fail to integrate AI into workflows risk falling behind.
Gartner predicts $5.61 trillion global IT spend in 2025 – much of this will be directed toward AI, as organisations look to harness the benefits of automation and intelligence at scale. The rapid evolution of AI is drawing comparisons to the advent of the internet, and its impact is already reshaping industries and workflows.
At this time, there’s a growing risk of “transformation debt”. Or the gap between IT investment and the value that investment realises. The more leaders stall or poorly implement AI and other technologies, the more this debt builds up.
There are two sides to solving this: first, IT leaders need to ensure they maintain visibility and governance as the technology environment rapidly expands. Second, they also need to ensure they are closing any user experience gaps – to be confident that technology is empowering employees rather than posing a burden.
IT leaders will need this visibility to ensure the rising tide of ‘citizen developers’ is not doing more harm than good. Growing numbers of employees are using AI to build applications in a matter of hours without coding experience. This democratisation of development is a great opportunity for IT professionals but can also introduce new risks if they don’t fully appreciate how their applications behave in a wider IT environment.
To mitigate these risks, IT professionals must take a proactive role in developing governance policies and ensuring they are followed – as well as making sure they have the relevant knowledge and security the front of mind.
As AI and daily workflows become symbiotic, ethical considerations such as transparency, user consent and responsible data practices will come to the fore. Organisations need to play a balancing act: understanding how AI is being used, where data goes and when personal information is involved, but stopping short of making employees feel they are under constant surveillance.
To get the right balance, businesses should prioritise clear communication about the role AI is playing in the workforce, giving employees the knowledge they need to engage ethically. If employees adopt their own AI-powered apps or develop their own LLM use cases, organisations should provide guidance and frameworks to ensure ethical standards are upheld.
Frameworks like ISO 42001 help ensure that AI is built and deployed responsibly, balancing innovation with ethical integrity. By proactively embracing transparency and accountability, organisations can foster a culture where AI enhances productivity without compromising ethical standards.
IDC predicts that worldwide spending on digital transformation will hit almost $4 trillion by 2027. As investments increase, businesses are increasingly expecting returns, but if employees are not using the technology they’re being given, the benefits will remain unlocked. IT professionals need to focus on digital adoption at all times: we’ve seen enterprises that adopt only one best practice, such as evaluating and measuring current technology use or unifying experiences across applications, see an enormous boost in ROI.
IT professionals aren’t just flipping switches to keep the lights on anymore; they’re guiding AI roadmaps and championing adoption across all departments. That’s where Digital Adoption Professionals really shine. These specialists, whether embedded in IT or Learning and Development, ensure that employees fully leverage new technologies, eliminating friction and maximising productivity. As AI applications continue to proliferate, DAP Professionals play a crucial role in setting guardrails for secure AI use while enabling employees to harness generative AI effectively.
DAP Professionals are much more than a simple IT support function. They focus on the human side of digital transformation, working to eliminate confusion and wasted spend and prevent transformation debt – setting up the workforce for true hyperproductivity.
The way businesses use AI is changing, with more specialised and vertical models emerging, representing the next evolution in enterprise technology. These are more reliable and accurate for their particular use cases, using a specialised set of information to make them much more focused than broader LLMs. Smaller models are starting to have an impact across a range of industries – with early examples including Shopify Sensei for retail, Bloomberg GPT for finance and Med-PaLM 2 for healthcare. Models also serve key departments such as HR (Paradox Olivia), customer support (Ada Chatbot) and sales (Gong AI).
Over the next few years, we will see growing numbers of businesses adopt these more focused models. We’re on course to enter a future in which each department picks a specialised model designed of its exact need, from HR to finance.
This ‘service mesh’ cannot grow unchecked. CIOs will be in charge of ensuring enterprise spending on AI model subscriptions is targeted as efficiently and effectively as possible. They can use the visibility provided by a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to act as a concierge, helping employees choose the right model for their specific use case, bringing accuracy, lower costs and compliance benefits. As the number of models available continues to grow, CIOs must proactively ensure employees are asking the right questions to the right models, or they will struggle to manage this new budget line item, and ultimately, the anticipated productivity benefits may fail to come to fruition.
