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."

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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."

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Manufacturing Organizations Doubled AI Investment Yet Only 37% Fully Prepared to Operationalize AI

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Many organizations rely on cloud-first architectures to aggregate, analyze, and act on their operational data ... However, not all environments are conducive to cloud-first architectures ... There are limitations to cloud-first architectures that render them ineffective in mission-critical situations where responsiveness, cost control, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable; these limitations include ...

The New Perimeter Is the User: Why Identity Is the Real Network Edge

For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

When AI Infrastructure Stops Behaving Like Infrastructure

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

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Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile Users Expect Perfection in 2026

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

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AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

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