MetriNote – Enterprise Connect 2023 Workplace Collaboration Announcements

Author: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst Three areas dominated this year’s Enterprise Connect conference: generative AI, hybrid work, and security. Numerous vendors delivered, or announced future delivery of, solutions that leverage generative AI to deliver collaboration features ranging from meeting summary and assessments to content-creation tools and conversation monitoring to support roles such as sales. On the hybrid work front, companies focused on delivering products and services that provide for equitable meeting experiences for both in-office and remote employees. These include cameras and AI technology to capture and frame in-room participants. Additionally, a number of established and startup vendors showcased apps designed to provide a virtual office space for ad-hoc meetings and group collaboration, regardless of physical location. Finally, security and compliance took center stage, as witnessed by Theta Lake taking a share of the overall Best of Enterprise Connect prize for their compliance solution. As companies expand the ways they collaborate, the tools and apps that they use, and as the content generated within those apps increases, companies must take necessary steps to protect themselves against threat and risk. These announcements, taken together, highlight trends we’ve most recently shared in our Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 global research study of 440 organizations. Notably:

• The primary collaboration success metric is improving productivity – 44.3% of workplace collaboration leaders say that they measure productivity gains as a key performance indicator for evaluating collaboration success. That’s more than measure any other KPI. IT and business leaders are likely to see technologies like generative AI as a way to drastically improve productivity by eliminating rote tasks and speeding content creation and data analysis.
• Hybrid is the present and future of work – Currently about 31.2% of employees split time between the office and home. About 25% work remotely on a full-time basis. Just 37% are in the office full-time. Going forward, the majority of companies (52.0%) plan to have employees in the office at least a portion of the work week.
• Security strategies are lacking – Just 37% of research participants have an overall workplace collaboration security strategy covering external and internal threats, data loss prevention, and compliance. Yet in more than half of companies, security and compliance teams have influence over product and vendor selection. Clearly as threats and regulatory requirements increase, companies must do more to protect themselves from attack and ensure compliance.