Digital Workplace Group

Dear Diary Today’s ponderable: What are the strongest signals to emerge from the 2026 DWG Awards shortlist? Every year, the DWG Awards shortlist offers a snapshot of what is changing in digital workplaces. Some years the pattern is obvious: a wave of intranet redesigns, a rush toward mobile, a new appetite for employee listening, a sharper focus on measurement. In other years, the signals are more layered.

The AI gold rush is well underway. It is shiny, new and moving fast. Organizations are deploying AI chatbots, agents and assistants at a dizzying pace. DWG’s latest research shows that employees are already using multiple AI tools in parallel, with very few relying on a single AI tool. And this is unlikely to change. It would be misguided to plan for a future in which AI experimentation stalls and a single AI tool becomes the default front door to work.

Dear Diary Every now and again, a single phrase does what a dozen trend reports fail to do. It slows the room down. This is the backdrop for today’s ponderable: If AI value shows up in spikes rather than averages, are digital workplace leaders looking closely enough at the jagged edges of work? ‘Law is not one thing’, a recent blog published by Matt Pollins1, reflects on the uneven impact of AI across legal work.

Your AI journey starts here. Many organizations recognize the potential of AI, but few have a clear roadmap for turning that potential into measurable outcomes. Questions around governance, AI literacy, employee adoption, use-case prioritization and the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape can make it difficult to know where to begin or what to do next. DWG combines independent research, practitioner expertise and real-world experience to help organizations move from exploration to implementation.

It would be easy, right now, to assume the pressure around the EU AI Act is off! With its key deadlines pushed back to 2027 under the recently adopted AI Omnibus, ‘the AI Act’ might now feel like a looming issue – but one for next year. For the obligation that matters most to your workforce though, that assumption is very wrong. The duty to build AI literacy across your workforce has actually been in legal effect since February 2, 2025.

Dear Diary As a JPMorgan Chase alumna, I continue to follow the company and its executives with interest. This is partly personal, of course – but it is also because JPMorgan Chase remains one of the clearest examples of how a large, complex enterprise is turning AI ambition into governed, operational reality. In recent months, I have paid especially close attention when JPMorgan Chase – and in particular its CEO, Jamie Dimon – talk about AI.

In a recent DWG Insider Insights session, Kerry O’Donnell, DWG Luminary, DWG CEO, Nancy Goebel, explored a subtle but consequential shift underway in the digital workplace. It’s not a single disruption or visible transformation but more a gradual erosion of the structural advantages that have historically kept intranets at the centre of the employee experience.

AskDWG Canvas: Where AI-based desk research meets DWG insights. This edition scrutinizes ai-related charges. Over the past year, a new pattern has emerged across enterprises, startups and developer communities. Organizations that have moved quickly to deploy generative AI are now reporting unexpected and, in some cases, extreme cost overruns. These are not isolated incidents.

A senior digital workplace leader described their organization in a recent DWG member poll like this: “The dynamic is a bit of an ‘AI goldrush’ where so many different groups are trying so many different things. The result is too much duplication and fractured experiences for end-users.” In most organizations, AI is not the problem. Tools are rolling out, pilots are running, departments are experimenting.

There are moments in a technology cycle when the conversation needs to pivot. Not incrementally, not cautiously, but decisively. Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the enterprise to become AI-native is one of those inflection-point books. Melissa Reeve does not set out to write another guide to artificial intelligence. In fact, she actively rejects that approach. Instead, she reframes the challenge entirely: this is not about AI adoption as a technology programme but about organizational evolution at scale.