Skip to main content

AI Drives New Wave of Digital Transformation

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink.

Similar majorities agreed that their organization's success over the next three years will be highly contingent on their ability to effectively deploy AI (94%) and the emergence of AI would require them to invest in more tailored digital adoption support than they can currently provide (94%).

The research found deep concerns among IT leaders around whether their coworkers have the digital dexterity needed to adapt to the AI era. In particular:

  • 96% said that they would need to enhance their digital adoption support to help employees adapt to AI.
  • 88% agreed that users were more likely to be daunted by new technologies such as generative AI.
  • 92% believe that digital friction is going to increase in the coming years.
  • On average, IT leaders believe that less than half (47%) of employees have the requisite digital dexterity to adapt to inbound technological changes.

"The AI era is going to be a radical break from previous waves of digital transformation," said Vedant Sampath, CTO at Nexthink. "Unlocking the potential of AI is going to be the competitive differentiator of the next decade, but this research shows that businesses face a huge challenge in upskilling their employees to meet the moment. Otherwise, executives risk finding themselves having spent millions of dollars on software and IT services that are just gathering dust."

Respondents were almost unanimous in their view that AI is set to transform the way their business operates (96%), and that digital dexterity will be integral to organizational success in the near future (95%), while a large majority (82%) also reported that failing to appropriately invest in AI would result in them falling behind competitors.

However, there is broad awareness that realizing ROI on such investments may be difficult, with 93% acknowledging that they need to improve their ability to identify underperforming digital investments while 91% feel that it will be necessary to invest in AI tools specifically to monitor and enable adoption of other AI tools.

"Managing the transition to the AI era is going to require businesses to be smart around digital adoption," added Sampath. "Having application owners act as knowledge gatekeepers is neither efficient nor scalable. Instead, businesses need to provide employees with timely context-relevant assistance for the task they are performing, in addition to application monitoring, and real-time resolution when issues occur."

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

AI Drives New Wave of Digital Transformation

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink.

Similar majorities agreed that their organization's success over the next three years will be highly contingent on their ability to effectively deploy AI (94%) and the emergence of AI would require them to invest in more tailored digital adoption support than they can currently provide (94%).

The research found deep concerns among IT leaders around whether their coworkers have the digital dexterity needed to adapt to the AI era. In particular:

  • 96% said that they would need to enhance their digital adoption support to help employees adapt to AI.
  • 88% agreed that users were more likely to be daunted by new technologies such as generative AI.
  • 92% believe that digital friction is going to increase in the coming years.
  • On average, IT leaders believe that less than half (47%) of employees have the requisite digital dexterity to adapt to inbound technological changes.

"The AI era is going to be a radical break from previous waves of digital transformation," said Vedant Sampath, CTO at Nexthink. "Unlocking the potential of AI is going to be the competitive differentiator of the next decade, but this research shows that businesses face a huge challenge in upskilling their employees to meet the moment. Otherwise, executives risk finding themselves having spent millions of dollars on software and IT services that are just gathering dust."

Respondents were almost unanimous in their view that AI is set to transform the way their business operates (96%), and that digital dexterity will be integral to organizational success in the near future (95%), while a large majority (82%) also reported that failing to appropriately invest in AI would result in them falling behind competitors.

However, there is broad awareness that realizing ROI on such investments may be difficult, with 93% acknowledging that they need to improve their ability to identify underperforming digital investments while 91% feel that it will be necessary to invest in AI tools specifically to monitor and enable adoption of other AI tools.

"Managing the transition to the AI era is going to require businesses to be smart around digital adoption," added Sampath. "Having application owners act as knowledge gatekeepers is neither efficient nor scalable. Instead, businesses need to provide employees with timely context-relevant assistance for the task they are performing, in addition to application monitoring, and real-time resolution when issues occur."

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...