Track 3

AI Enabling the Digital Workplace: Turning AI Skills and Safe Adoption into Measurable Value

Most organisations have made the access investment in AI — tools deployed, licences purchased, policies written. What they have not yet cracked is the adoption problem: getting employees to use those tools regularly, confidently, and in ways that translate into real business outcomes. IDC’s 2026 Future of Work Survey puts a number on the gap. While 89% of organisations report productivity improvements from AI, only 49% say the time AI frees up is consistently redirected to higher-value work. The gain is real. The value capture is incomplete. And the difference between organisations that close that gap and those that don’t comes down to how deliberately they invested in their people alongside the technology.

This session is built around that challenge. Drawing on IDC’s latest Future of Work research, we will explore what genuine workforce readiness looks like in practice: how AI-enabled personal devices build employee trust and reduce the hesitation that holds adoption back; how pairing human-skills development with technical upskilling determines whether freed time becomes productive time; and how a coherent adoption strategy across both knowledge workers and frontline employees turns AI access into AI value. If your organisation has deployed the tools and is still waiting for the returns, this is the conversation for you.