5 Ways IT Can Increase Employee Productivity with AI
The way employees work is being transformed by AI, expanding digital environments, and rapid organizational change. These shifts create new opportunities for performance, but they also make productivity fragile – easily disrupted by complexity, friction, and underutilized tools.
The businesses that succeed will be the ones that align their technology strategy with overall business objectives – embracing technology not just to streamline workflows, but to increase employee productivity in measurable and lasting ways. The question for IT leaders is: how can technology unlock focus, eliminate barriers, and maximize productivity across the organization?
How to Enhance Employee Productivity Through Technology
1. Leverage Automation and AI to Streamline IT Workflows
Repetitive IT tasks and manual troubleshooting drain time and slow productivity, but automation and AI can change that. By handling routine processes, automation enables technology leaders to focus on strategic initiatives that instead drive real business value.
Common applications include chatbots, automated ticketing systems, and automated remediation workflows. Beyond these familiar use cases, advanced automation can now provide end-to-end issue identification, troubleshooting, and resolution, before employees are even aware of a problem.
For example, consider a forced reboot policy. IT teams can design an automated workflow that checks devices across the entire environment for those that have not been restarted within a set number of days. The system first prompts the user with a pop-up campaign. If the user fails to act within the allotted time, the workflow escalates to automatically enforcing the reboot. This ensures compliance, reduces performance issues, and minimizes security risks without requiring manual oversight.
Some of the benefits for IT leaders include:
- Reduced Level 1 tickets and fewer manual triage requests
- Faster mean time to resolution (MTTR) through proactive remediation
- Improved compliance and device security through policy enforcement
- More time for innovation, as teams spend less effort on routine support
2. Optimize Technology Adoption and Usage
Ensuring employees can effectively use the employee productivity tools at their disposal is critical for performance, and technology itself can help make this easier. Solutions like Digital Adoption Platforms and AI usage monitoring provide IT teams with the insights and guidance needed to maximize technology value across the organization.
Digital Adoption Platforms eliminate the issues employees face with technology through in-app guidance, on-demand training, and AI-driven predictive analytics. This reduces frustration, increases adoption and boosts employee productivity.
The benefits extend beyond employees, for IT, adoption tools reduce support tickets and ensure smoother technology adoption. For the wider business, this means maximizing the ROI of software investments by ensuring licenses are fully utilized as employees gain quicker competency with their tools.
With AI increasingly becoming an integral part of everyday work, it’s equally important to have visibility into how AI are being leveraged across the organization. AI usage monitoring, like AI-Drive enables IT leaders to see how AI is used, where adoption is stalling, and how to support employees effectively. See when users are choosing out-of-policy AI tools and redirect them to approved options. By doing so, the business can scale AI responsibly, measurably, and decisively, securing productivity gains today and a position of strength for the future.
3. Utilize Cloud-Based Collaboration and Communication Tools
Collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack are now essential employee productivity tools and form the backbone of modern work. With employees relying on them for seamless collaboration, any performance issue directly impacts productivity.
Collaboration platforms now offer advanced productivity features to help employees work more efficiently. For example, tools like Copilot for Microsoft Teams can summarize meetings, extract action items, and suggest chat responses. These capabilities can significantly boost efficiency, but they also create a deeper reliance on the platform, meaning that when disruptions occur, the impact on employee productivity is amplified.
For IT and EUC leaders, the real challenge is ensuring these platforms deliver a frictionless experience for employees. That requires monitoring call quality, connectivity, and performance – not only at the global level, but also across individual users, devices, and locations.
For instance, take the case of network issues – if an office reports poor call quality, contextual data can reveal whether the cause is a network outage, a device misconfiguration, or something as simple as an employee needing to move closer to a Wi-Fi router. With solutions like Collaboration Experience, IT teams gain comprehensive visibility to quickly diagnose issues and resolve them before they disrupt productivity.
4. Enable Enhanced Data-Driven Decision-Making
IT isn’t just about keeping systems running – technology gives IT leaders the insight and influence to move beyond day-to-day troubleshooting and into the role of strategic business partner.
By understanding where employees face friction, whether due to slow devices, bandwidth bottlenecks, or underutilized software, IT can proactively remove obstacles that slow work down.
With the right data and visibility, IT teams can drive business decisions with confidence:
- Target investments that directly increase employee productivity, such as device upgrades or bandwidth enhancements
- Optimize tool usage by aligning software deployment to how employees actually work
- Inform leadership on how to leverage technology to accelerate performance and innovation
By connecting technology performance directly to employee outcomes, IT helps the organization work smarter and positions itself as a key driver of employee productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction. These insights also strengthen IT’s role in executive decision-making, giving leaders a clear voice in shaping investments and initiatives that further remove friction and enhance employee productivity.
5. Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning and Skill Development
Keeping employees’ skills up to date is essential for maintaining productivity in a world of rapidly evolving technology. When employees continuously learn and adapt, they work more efficiently, adopt new tools faster, and have greater ability to drive innovation across the organization.
Technology plays a critical role in this process. AI-driven learning platforms, personalized learning journeys, and microlearning modules embedded directly into daily workflows make learning accessible, relevant, and actionable. These tools help employees upskill without disrupting their productivity, whilst preparing them to leverage new technologies effectively. The outcome is a workforce that continuously grows in capability, adapts quickly to change, and applies its skills to improve both efficiency and business outcomes.
Consideration: Achieving success through continuous learning requires strong alignment between HR and IT to ensure learning programs are strategically designed, closely tied to business goals, and seamlessly integrated into employees’ daily workflows.
Capturing the Full Value of AI Driven Employee Productivity
The strategies outlined above, from automation and AI to digital adoption and continuous learning demonstrate how IT teams can drive measurable improvements in employee productivity. However, these solutions don’t deliver results alone; success begins with a mindset shift that encourages employees to embrace change and work differently.
Leaders play a critical role in this transformation. Executives must clearly communicate the purpose and benefits of the changes in their work, employees need to be willing to adopt and learn them, and the organization must provide the right processes, guidance, and support to make adoption effective.
When organizations combine skilled talent, optimized practices, and capable platforms, IT moves beyond managing systems to becoming a strategic driver of employee productivity, delivering measurable value across the business.
Unlocking Productivity with Nexthink
Nexthink gives IT teams complete visibility into their digital environments, offering clarity on everything happening so issues can be detected, diagnosed, and resolved before they impact employee productivity.
From real-time detection to root-cause diagnosis to AI-driven resolution, the Nexthink platform enables IT to stay ahead of problems to proactively remove friction and empower employees to stay focused on high-value work.
Ready to increase employee productivity and elevate IT’s role as a true strategic partner to the business? Discover how Nexthink can help.