TechFinitive Awards 2026 – Digital Workplace Excellence

The Digital Workplace Excellence category at the TechFinitive Awards 2026 recognises technology that addresses the everyday challenges of modern working life, from persistent IT issues to inefficient processes and fragmented systems. This year’s five finalists demonstrate how digital tools can tackle these problems, whether by anticipating technical faults, automating routine tasks or simplifying the way employees interact with business software.

Their approaches range from automating thousands of IT remediations each month and helping IT teams resolve problems faster to using AI to streamline sales meetings and improve employee onboarding. The results include millions of dollars in potential savings, thousands of hours reclaimed and less time lost to technical disruption. Together, the finalists show how carefully targeted technology can deliver measurable improvements without adding unnecessary complexity. You can read more about what our judges had to say about each submission here (scroll below).

Without further ado, the nominees for Digital Workplace Excellence in 2026 are:

• ControlUp
• Lakeside Software
• Pipedrive
• Click Boarding
• Riverbed Technology

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Here’s what our judges had to say about the nominees

Riverbed Technology 

Tech promises a lot to companies and their employees, but this is one many would actually like to see kept: avoid disruption. Achieve that and staff go home on time. Riverbed designed its Aternity DEX tools to expand beyond standard desktops to the wider workforce, avoiding fragmentation that keeps employees trapped reacting to problems, rather than predicting — and avoiding — them. That’s measurable: Riverbed points to one US wireless service provider that’s automated 9,000 remediations monthly, saving $1m annually — as well as 1,500 hours of IT staff time. Software that truly helps IT staff, rather than just the bottom line, is worth celebrating. 

ControlUp

Workplace IT is increasingly complex — hybrid working, multiple devices, SaaS sprawl, and security concerns — and legacy IT can’t keep up, chewing up employee time. That’s where ControlUp steps up: bringing together all aspects of modern workplaces into one AI platform with automated remediation fed by real-time telemetry. One customer, architecture firm SimpsonHaugh, reports that ControlUp protects 15% of productive working time that would otherwise be lost to IT disruption, and has even managed to retire a now unused legacy remote support tool. Measurable results, serious cost savings, all while helping employees get their job done — it’s the whole point, isn’t it? 

Lakeside Software

Institutional knowledge is deeply valuable — but it doesn’t scale. After all, your Excel expert can only do so many Zoom calls in a day, and what do you do when they retire? This is one question that Lakeside SysTrack helped portfolio management company PIMCO to answer with specific automations for Excel solving that issue, with the ability to build out further automations.  That’s aided by data transparency that enables IT teams to see what’s really wrong, rather than limit them to an opaque confidence score. The aim, says Lakeside, is to help IT teams find and fix problems before staff even notice them, with a survey revealing half of customers asked said they’d reduced mean time to repair by a quarter.

Pipedrive

Small businesses need big help, yet plenty of platforms forget about them. Not Pipedrive, which has created a simple system to help, including newly released AI meeting intelligence tool Nova. Nova builds a brief before a call, transcribes the meeting, and summarizes the conversation, updating CRM dashboards so sales professionals can stick to the human side of the work — indeed, human oversight is key to the platform, ensuring trust. One company says Nova saves its six-person sales team as much as an hour per meeting. This is a prime example of AI to help rather than add complexity, while letting employees get on with their work. 

Click Boarding

Digital hiring processes can leave a lot to be desired — and then entirely disappear after an employee is hired. Click Boarding aims to automate employee transitions to improve the first 90 days of a new starter at a company, as well as before they even start. Rebuilding the platform to integrate fully with Microsoft Teams keeps communications inside existing collaboration tools, rather than a separate HR portal no-one remembers to look at. One client slashed onboarding labour by 8,000 hours thanks to automation via Click Boarding, while another reached a near-zero no-show rate on new hires — marking the end of the doom-loop when it comes to hiring.