The digitally exhausted workplace - and what to do about it

In Is your workforce digitally exhausted? Here’s what you can do about it as a boss!, Cath continues her series on a pressing workplace issue. Check this blistering quote from the Chief Executive of Twello:

High-performing people leave first. They have options and recognize the system is unsustainable. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Decision quality degrades because exhausted brains make riskier, more impulsive choices. Innovation tanks because deep thinking requires cognitive stability you don’t have when you’re fragmented. And healthcare costs spike—digital exhaustion looks a lot like burnout on the medical side, but it’s a system design problem, not an individual resilience problem.

What to do about it? Of all the tips Cath breaks out, this is my fave: redefine workplace metrics into outcomes:

Performance metrics shape digital behavior. As a result, by shifting performance metrics from outputs to outcomes, it becomes possible to reduce employees’ unnecessary digital activity.

But I’ve got one provocative thing to add: this includes all the "AI First" and up your productivity by 5x now that you have these magical tools executive proclamations also. We should not be evaluated not by our AI literacy, but by the outcomes we deliver. Guess what? The same AI tools that enable one employee to excel don’t do much for another.

Top performers have always figured out the tech that enables their peak performance. Let them be the judge of which AI tools help them the most; no one wants to be left behind if there is something that genuinely helps. Make the tools available in a secure way, and you’ll get plenty of adoption - in the service of outcomes, not tedious mantras of behavioral enforcement tool mandates.

diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week:

• CIO interview - Dwaine Thomas sets secure pace of change in FinTech PXP - Mark Chillingworth’s latest CIO interview takes us through a move to a new orchestration platform, and the lessons learned.
• As Ocado fails to deliver, Kroger’s CEO has a new shopping list drawn up for the retailer’s e-commerce future - a tale of two retailers, going in different directions... Stuart has the story.
• Don’t panic! What Sam Altman’s OTT declaration of a ‘code red’ for OpenAI tells us about the race he thinks he’s running - George on OpenAI’s latest warning cry. My take: we call them "frontier models," but they are converging into (expensive) LLM commodities, with only small(ish) moats, not unassailable market advantages. Highly-leveraged, expensive non-moats? Yep, that’s a code red for OpenAI. As a corrective to the out-of-the-box limitations of LLMs for enterprise use cases, check George’s How an AI Bill of Materials could build trust in enterprise AI.
• OutSystems One - low-code vendor remodels its appeal with an AI agent strategy - Ian shares his on-the-ground view on OutSytems’ move from from developer tool to business platform.

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here’s my three top choices from our vendor coverage:

• Atlassian acquires Secoda to democratize enterprise data analysis for business teams - Phil makes sense of Atlassian’s (latest) data move: "This latest acquisition follows hard on the heels of Atlassian closing its $610 million purchase of The Browser Company and its $1 billion deal for software engineering analytics platform DX."
• UiPath posts first profitable quarter. Here’s why it thinks orchestration is the missing piece - UiPath hits a notable milestone. Alyx is on the case again: "While much of the market is chasing the ‘AI agents will do everything’ hype, Dines is making a more nuanced case – the future isn’t pure agentic or pure deterministic, but a hybrid where orchestration does the heavy lifting." Did I hear a bingo?
• Samsara hits profitability as large customers continue to drive growth - Another vendor crosses the threshold. Derek: "Safety is very sellable as a ‘win’ internally at these companies and it often translates into financial returns e.g. fewer crashes on the road, fewer accidents in the factors, and lower insurance premiums. Once that win is established, buyers feel more comfortable expanding."

Salesforce posts earnings, reveals agentic use cases at Agentforce London World Tour. Stuart has the roundup, starting with the earnings: Agentforce use cases now number 18,500 as Salesforce turns in a $10.9 billion quarter. We all understand why Salesforce is pressing on Agentforce, but my eye was drawn to this: "More than 70% of top 100 wins included five or more clouds." My view: Yes, SaaS is still relevant; better enterprise AI seems to land near unified data platforms and the discipline of standardized data models.

But I was really interested in the agentic use cases/project lessons. Stuart provides some context in Salesforce’s Agentforce London World Tour - agentic messaging from both sides of the Pond as customers move beyond pilot phase. Project lessons come in via Stuart’s Agentic tech sparkles at jewellery giant Pandora - here are some of the lessons learned to date. This from Pandora jumps out:

It removes a lot of the toil at the end of having a conversation with a customer, updating casework and things like that in order that we know this was the problem, this is what we did about it, etc. [We are] utilizing this in order to be able to capture [that data] reliably, without the human agent needing to do much work. That means that the bit that they can spend their time on is speaking and engaging with more customers, rather than doing typing.

Now that’s the kind of agentic AI workplace I would personally sign up for... rather than the kind I see so often in my PR pitches, where hyper-automation creates magical mechanistic efficiencies, and the remaining human workers look over their shoulders while they try to stay one step ahead of the digital exhaust. More Salesforce use cases? Also see Stuart’s Fore! How LIV Golf is pursuing a hole-in-one when it comes to playing with agents to bolster fan experience.

A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:

• How’s life after Tom Siebel for C3.ai? Still pretty bad, all told, but there’s a plan, according to the new CEO - Stuart
• Enterprise CEOs are piling too much AI pressure on their CIOs. Why Rimini Street’s Seth Ravin wants to bring more realism as part of his firm’s Act 2 - Stuart
• Why the next wave of AI advice tools must draw sharper boundaries - and how Purpose is attempting it - Alyx
• The future of Industrial Operations in an AI age - here’s the IFS vision - Brian. Also see: Alyx’s use case analysis: IFS.ai Unleashed - Boston Dynamics and Siemens on AI’s next phase and its infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.

**Jon’s grab bag - **Thanks to Alyx, I finally got a Stranger Things mention into Hits and Misses: The easy AI use cases are running out - Neo4j used Stranger Things data to show what comes next - and it’s via a graph database vendor (Neo4j) that is well worth watching. But, diginomica headline of the week still goes to Katy, for Who let the robodogs out? TCS awaits clearance for physical AI in the aerospace sector (just don’t let that song anywhere near me please).

Chris continues his series on the potent conundrum of "online safety" in Online safety - regulators faces impossible choices between privacy, competition, and child protection. Stuart skewers social media regulatory fisticuffs in Something for the weekend - X marks the spot as Europe takes on Elon with a €120 million fine. Now, what will his on/off BFF in the White House have to say about that? Finally, Chris parses the AI-versus-media tensions in It might be RAGs to riches for AI, but not for us warn news media.

Best of the enterprise web

My top seven

• Hybrid cloud security must be rebuilt for an AI war it was never designed to fight - Louis Columbus bears down: "Hybrid cloud security was built before the current era of automated, machine-based cyberattacks that take just milliseconds to execute."
• React2Shell flaw exploited to breach 30 orgs, 77k IP addresses vulnerable - a security issue businesses should note; Cloudflare for example had to initiate a fix (and caused their own outage in the process of fixing).
• AWS re:Invent 2025: This one was different - Constellation’s Larry Dignan says this year’s re:Invent was different - why? "AWS is doing what it does–launch building blocks, combine them into services and solve problems. Yes, AWS made strides in abstracting the creations of AI agents and customizing models, but it’s still very early... There. Isn’t. An. AI. Easy. Button." Indeed!
• The AI reckoning: How boards can evolve - One of McKinsey’s better AI pieces this year...
• Is RevOps the New CRM? - I don’t know, Thomas Wiebeneit, what do you think? "We, as an industry, failed because we confused the map with the terrain." Yikes!
• Three years on, ChatGPT still isn’t what it was cracked up to be – and it probably never will be - this is strong tonic from Gary Marcus, and not all of it lines up with the viable enterprise use cases we document. But understanding the downside of AI is the best way to get to the upside, and understand some of the economic pressures that fuel the broader "bubble" talk.
• Podcast binge: I just produced two new podcasts if you’re in the stuck-in-traffic-need-audio mode: The hot seat - customers ask us anything, live from ASUG Tech Connect ’25 - my version of the podcast we co-produced with ASUG Talks. And: Enterprise Month in Review - is AI changing the B2B buyer? The optimized audio from the last month in review show with my co-host Brian Sommer, and special guest Barb Mosher Zinck, a long-time diginomica contributor who had fresh data on B2B buyers and AI for us to air out.

Whiffs

Seems like some services firms might be taking this "AI disruption" thing too far?

This rollout is going well:

Hey, I made it two or three weeks without a Meta-related whiff... But it’s hard to hold off for too long:

Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company "Meta" https://t.co/tVvDlDUw7q

-> wearing VR goggles might be fun (for some), but it clearly damages your strategic thinking skills lol.... acting on the obvious shouldn’t take this long

— Jon Reed (@jonerp) December 7, 2025

If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed.