By Raj K Gopalakrishnan, CEO & Co-Founder, KOGO
Businesses have always relied on technology to improve efficiency and productivity. Today, productivity tools are adopted by many enterprises the world over, which has led to a situation where they have more tools than they know how to manage, with new technologies constantly emerging that solve problems businesses didn’t even know they had.
Business leaders agree with 93% saying that poor technology hurts productivity. In fact, 40% say they are losing 2-4 hours a day due to poor technology, resulting in up to a loss of 6 months per working year. When workers encounter technology that constrains productivity, 62% said they would look for a tech-based solution to use on their own, 14% would look for another job, and 16% said they would ‘quiet quit’ or tune out. 40% of employees are considering quitting their jobs in the next 6 months because of work technology holding back productivity.
These multiplying efficiencies of tool sprawl come at a high price: For starters, unused software is costing businesses upward of $44 million every month. Business leaders must understand the need to remedy the burden of tool sprawl on overall productivity and why it is important to choose the right solutions that help them improve productivity, keep employees engaged, and costs down.
Choosing the right productivity tools
Productivity isn’t merely about saving costs or increasing efficiency. It’s about unleashing potential, and creating a space for workers and AI to work hand-in-hand. The world is on the brink of AI transformation and it would benefit businesses to adopt AI tools that make employees’ lives easier rather than complicate it more.
Simplifying the process starts with business and IT leaders identifying installed licences that aren’t being used, those used sparingly, and those used regularly. A comprehensive software-usage audit can help IT leaders avoid the problem of tool sprawl and identify what types of tools employees need to be more productive.
The future of work lies in tools built on large agentic frameworks. Large agentic frameworks are a groundbreaking shift in AI, pushing the envelope further as understanding is turned into tangible actions within the real world. This transformative technology is more advanced than LLMs as it can comprehend language, and execute tasks in the real world. AI Agents built on large agentic frameworks can take over the repetitive, mundane tasks employees perform seamlessly, without too much spend on building the AI tool from scratch.
AI Agents can act as personal assistants, scheduling meetings, managing routine emails, organising calendars, reviewing or approving work and more. It can help employees in project management by curating action plans with a step-by-step guide on tasks to be performed to get the job done. It can automate tasks such as interpreting complex data sets, identifying trends, and even predicting future outcomes based on historical data. Large agentic frameworks are great tools for research as they are faster than search engines for gathering sources and summarising key information.
AI Agents combine the elements of goal inference, action planning, and reasoning with adaptability, holding the capacity to navigate the complexities of the real world and transform user intent into concrete actions. This human-AI collaboration is key to unlocking the true potential of AI in improving productivity.