AI meeting assistants now come packed with powerful features to improve employee productivity and meeting workflows. So, which AI tool is best for your organization?
For many business professionals, opening a weekly calendar app can be fraught with anxiety. Among their concerns: How do they find time for heads-down, productive work with so many meeting blocks? How can they keep track of post-meeting to-dos? What if they join a meeting late or not at all — are they going to miss critical discussions and decisions?
As enterprises look to ease these concerns and address employee experience challenges, it’s worth considering certain technology to improve meeting workflows and outcomes.
In Metrigy’s “Employee Engagement Optimization 2025” global research study, conducted in fall 2024, 45.8% of the 400 participating companies already allow use of AI virtual assistants as part of their workplace collaboration suites, while nearly as many are either planning to adopt by the end of 2025 (20.8%) or are evaluating their potential use (23%). The percentage of employees with an AI virtual assistant license is growing, too. Today, 49.2% of employees, on average, have a license for an AI virtual assistant. By the end of 2025, that percentage is expected to grow to 65.7%, on average.
What to expect in an AI meeting assistant
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A look back at some of the digital workplace trends in 2024, including collaborative work management, return to office versus work from home and video meetings.
No Jitter asked frequent contributor Beth Schultz for her thoughts on the year that was and the year that will be – with respect to digital workplace trends.
NJ: What are the major ‘digital workplace’ trends you’ve seen in 2024?
Carrying forward from 2023, one of the biggest digital workplace trends I see is the continued move toward connected workspaces for collaborative work management (CWM). This trend crosses market segments, from productivity to project management, content collaboration/management, and, increasingly, team collaboration apps.
Just looking at the latter group, we’ve seen Slack continuing to expand beyond team messaging to support content creation/sharing, collaboration, notes, and lightweight project/task management all within team workspaces. Similarly, Zoom Workplace now features Docs, for content creating/sharing, collaboration, templates for project briefs and tracking, and an information hub for creating knowledge bases and wikis. Microsoft, of course, also supports such capabilities. Microsoft Loop is one example, for content and project co-creation and collaboration.
AI assistance and automation come into play for each of the above-cited products, as well as elsewhere across the digital workplace—and it almost goes without saying that AI has been a major trend in 2024. This includes everything from AI-powered scheduling and advanced meeting features to writing assistance, automating project creation and task assignment, surfacing insights from reports and other content, providing next-best-action recommendations, and much more.
NJ: There were some high-profile examples of companies mandating RTO – a contrast to the ‘magnet’ rhetoric in 2023. Are these outliers? Where are things at with respect to the RTO vs WFH balance overall? Has the debate settled at a new equilibrium?
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As generative AI copilots and virtual assistants grow in adoption, many organizations still struggle with how to measure ROI. This is especially true for those deploying, or considering, generative AI platforms that require the purchase of additional licenses. In this webinar Metrigy will share our latest research data on generative AI virtual assistant addition for employee engagement, and ways that companies can measure benefits including gains in productivity, cost savings, and revenue gain.
Measuring ROI for Generative AI
Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Date: January 14, 2025
Time: 11:00 am ET
Expect GenAI and agentic AI to dominate unified communications and collaboration trends, plus employees and businesses weigh return-to-office edicts and heightened cyberattacks.
The year 2024 is when generative AI arrived in unified communications and collaboration. But 2024 wasn’t just about AI. Companies are increasingly focused on optimizing hybrid work models to improve in-office and remote work. These trends will continue to evolve in 2025.
1. Widespread GenAI adoption
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Space shifting to meetings and hot-desking, with mixed results.
Metrigy’s recently published Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025 global study of 400 organizations showed that work location is in a state of flux and that hybrid work strategies are driving significant changes to office space allocation and management and challenges in determining success.
Hybrid Work is Evolving
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Ease of use is the top decision factor, but app integration, dashboards, AI capabilities, and other criteria come into play as well, according to Metrigy research.
Connected workspaces optimized for collaborative work offer their customers a lot of benefits: streamlined workflows, productivity boosts and improved teamwork. These benefits have stoked business interest; in turn, that’s incentivized different kinds of cloud-based application providers to reframe their products to meet that interest.
For enterprise buyers, that means plentiful options for enabling connected workspaces. These include:
- Pure-play hub/team workspace apps from providers such as ClickUp, Coda, and Notion
- Task/project management platforms from providers such as Airtable, Asana, Smartsheet, Wrike, and Zoho
- Communications/collaboration platforms from providers such as Microsoft, Slack, and Zoom
- Productivity suites from providers such as Microsoft and Google
- Content collaboration/management apps from providers such as Box, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom
However, such diversity of focus and function can make the task of selecting—or standardizing on, as the case might be—the right collaborative workspace platform rather daunting.
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In this episode we talk with Janine Pelosi, CEO of Neat, about Neat’s vision for making video engagement simple. We’ll get Janine’s take on what brought her to Neat, how Neat differentiates in the video conferencing and employee engagement market, and how she sees meetings and meeting spaces evolving in the age of AI and hybrid work.
IT and business leaders should consider how they will roll out AI in the future, how they will integrate collaborative data sources, and what platform(s) makes sense for their environment.
At the recent Cisco WebexOne conference in Fort Lauderdale, I was struck by something that featured guest Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale, said during the opening keynote with Jeetu Patel. When Jeetu asked Alex to share his thoughts on how companies should be thinking about AI, Alex responded (I’m paraphrasing) that every enterprise is sitting on data that is unique, specialized, and differentiated, and that the most exciting area is how companies will use their data to advance AI.
This view highlights the evolution of AI in the enterprise. The last year or so largely focused on bringing AI into organizations in somewhat limited fashion, with a great deal of attention paid to how companies can restrict what is shared with large language models for training purposes. Companies in the collaboration space have introduced opt-in policies to assure customers that no company data is being used for training purposes. This paradigm is now changing.
The Value of AI Comes from the Data
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Driven by the need to gain control and optimize costs, many companies are looking to standardize on a single connected workspace app for collaborative work management.
As IT professionals have seen time and time again over the years, some applications are just so easy to use and meet team needs so perfectly that widespread adoption of freemium or free versions happens before they even know it. We’ve seen this for team collaboration, video conferencing, and, as I’ll focus in on here, connected workspaces for collaborative work management.
The initial pandemic-driven work-from-home days propelled many teams to adopt connected workspace apps, such as Asana, Notion, or Wrike. With them, they could get their work done as individuals from within one landing place, but also coordinate work as a team. From a connected workspace, they could search and find information needed for their work while also supporting the ability to communicate and collaborate on this work in real-time or asynchronously (often via integration with third-party apps) and allowing them the ability to automate work tasks and processes. These connected workspace apps, by providing capabilities such as task and project management, knowledge management, and content collaboration, went well beyond the communications and collaboration orientation of Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Zoom Meetings, which saw their own skyrocketing adoption during this period (and more recently have been layering in capabilities akin to those offered by connected workspace apps). Metrigy’s “Connected Workspace & Collaborative Work Management: 2024-25” research study with 157 companies headquartered in North America, shows connected workspace tools in use at 58.0% of companies today, with the majority of those (69.2%) having adopted in 2020 if they hadn’t already.
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