Workplace technology has been undergoing a renaissance over the past five years. A post-pandemic workplace has operational challenges that are difficult to meet through manual operational processes. With increasing rates of both Hybrid and Remote working, the days of the everyday office are quickly disappearing. Supporting your employees’ ability to work asynchronously is now mission-critical.
The problem with the Workplace technology renaissance (some may call it a PropTech revolution but the term PropTech has never sat well with me) is that the customer base does not know what it needs. From 2020 to 2022, the focus was on attendance registration apps with a health and wellness focus. Then 2022 to 2024 saw the dual rise of desk booking and employee experience apps. In 2025, the era of AI is now trying to predict and pre-assign employees to their best in-office days auto-magically.
None of these stuck because they have not addressed the core employee concerns. They are solutions to what managers believe the problems of the workplace are. One of the biggest excuses in 2022 for why employees were not returning to offices was that they did not want to leave home and then get to an office that did not have a desk. This was not a concern by the employee, it was just their excuse for why they were not in. In a similar vein, managers thought that employee experience apps announcing events, free lunches, and social events would pull employees back to the office. These were tools trying to address a problem that managers did not understand.
The newest AI-powered workplace technologies seem destined to experience the same lack of adoption. The companies behind them (and the managers hiring these companies) believe they can put people into buckets and drive behavior. They are not treating employees as trusted adults. They are treating employees as cogs in a bu