How AI is helping workers collaborate on a more human level

In a workplace that increasingly consists of knowledge workers, who are increasingly in remote or hybrid arrangements, collaboration has evolved from something that employees experienced in the office five days a week to something that needs to be coordinated, mostly virtually, with help from the IT and HR functions. Today, artificial intelligence is embedded into technology solutions from providers like HP, Zoom, Atlassian and Asana to reduce meeting obligations and enable smoother collaboration for a working world that is friendlier to remote work.

“We could be heading into a really creative area of work where we’re solving really complex challenges that today or until the recent past were too hard to solve because of the coordination,” Annie Dean, vice president of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, told Newsweek.

With the proliferation of flexible work arrangements over the last five years, re-creating workstreams in a fully virtual environment has become a key challenge that businesses need to get right. Keeping distributed employees engaged and productive requires different tactics from the time when everyone was in the office every day.

“One of the things we learned is that work can be done differently than it historically had been. But the challenge is, then we had to define the framework,” Melissa DiMuro, chief people, culture and marketing officer at Limbach, a 1,300-person building services company, told Newsweek. “In the past, you could manage just by walking down the hall, or, in our case, to large job sites. Today, leaders have to set outcomes and objectives more intentionally.”

Using AI and machine-learning technology, a variety of tools are available to summarize meetings so you don’t have to attend every one and to enable asynchronous communication and collaboration (such as whiteboarding and version management). You can also provide status checks and even guidance on next steps for projects and organizational goals, with the ability to create AI agents to support rapid access to information and to help advance different policies, processes and procedures.

Many of these tools have been crucial for remote and hybrid workers.

“Flexible work is great,” Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, told Newsweek. “It’s also very noisy. So, how do you free up the mental space to really be human and connect with each other on the creative side, or on serving customer needs? That’s where AI can play a huge role.”

Fewer Meetings

At the project management software company Asana, product leaders say they often help cross-functional projects move away from what they call “the lowest common denominators” of workplace collaboration: email, instant messages and in-person meetings.

“That’s where all the context gets lost and people are spending too much time translating and going back and forth versus truly working together,” Anne Raimondi, head of business and chief operating officer at Asana, told Newsweek.

An October 2024 Asana survey found that workers reported wasting five hours per week on unnecessary meetings and nearly half of workers (48 percent) said their last meeting was unnecessary. Workers surveyed also said 53 percent of their time was spent on busywork.

“Collaboration is what we spend most of our time on as knowledge workers,” Rebecca Hinds, head of Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, an internal think tank, told Newsweek. “Companies try to move asynchronously—they realize that it’s more efficient, it’s more effective, it enables better work-life balance—but they haven’t had those proper foundations.”

The time taken up by status-check meetings can be returned to employees, in some cases with the help of AI-driven agents, which can record, summarize and even answer questions about information that would normally be shared in meetings or a series of memos.

“Teams need to stop playing telephone and start using technology to get information,” Dean said. “A lot of our workdays are dedicated to sharing information with one another, and it’s just not necessary anymore, because we don’t need to spend that amount of time [and] we don’t need to wait for a meeting.”

Hashim shared that Zoom added an AI companion an no additional cost to enterprise users, and that meeting summaries and in-meeting questions are two of the most-used features.

“I’m often double, triple booked on my calendar. So, you know, the meetings, I want to know what happened, I feel so relieved that I don’t have to go to them, I can just go and catch up,” she explained.

Hashim added that Zoom’s whiteboarding capability enables asynchronous collaboration for engineering, design or other creative teams. The company also has specialized solutions for different functions, such as sales, lead generation and customer service, with AI-driven features for those roles.

Hinds points to a recent finding from her lab that workers spend an average of nine hours per week searching for information that was shared with them earlier. Today, executives and managers can track discrete tasks and projects as well as progress on larger initiatives using project management tools, and their new AI components allow leaders to benefit from automated suggestions for how to optimize those processes, or their staffing.

“It’s really important to be able to have a place where you share work in progress. A big reason why we see so many meetings today is because there are these status update meetings,” Hinds said. “When you have a source of truth, when you have a centralized layer, you are able to share that work in progress in a way that minimizes the number of meetings.”

Process Improvement, Measurement and Staffing

By bringing the management and tracking of work processes to cloud-based tools, companies can move faster and better understand their drivers of success. AI can also generate first drafts for a summary of multiple documents or presentations that a group needs to work on. The more info fed into the machine-learning tool, the more informed its output can be.

“Sometimes AI can fill in [blank spaces on forms] because it has the context from past projects, from their documents, from input like ‘This is what a great brief looks like,’ ‘These are the last 10 briefs,’ and so AI can actually fill in some of those blanks,” Hinds said. Raimondi added that professional services firms are using AI-driven project management tools to support staffing of projects and that a book publisher has used Asana to get products to market faster.

AI agents can also help with clarity around goals and parameters for project approvals. If information on approved internal proposals, ongoing work in progress and overall team and company initiatives is available transparently to managers and employees, they can collaborate faster and work on value-add tasks more often.

“We are really going with that spirit of how do you actually help users free up time so that we can eliminate the noise, the mundane, and be more productive,” Hashim said.

Dean has embraced AI’s ability to help her implement and enforce internal policies at Atlassian. They’ve uploaded policy documents into an AI agent tool, which can be programmed using prompts, no coding needed, and the agent is available on a 24/7 basis to answer employee questions about policies and to track changes as well.

“Every Monday, I log in, and I can see every single project that contributes to all of my organization’s goals, and I can see a tweet-sized update on all of those projects every single week,” Dean said. “I’m not trying to get into status meetings with people that are four levels, you know, layered underneath me in the organization, and I can really manage my organization with a totally different level of visibility.”

Goal-Setting and Employee Experience

If your team has a goal of raising its quality-control scores or ensuring a certain mix of product output, those goals can be placed into project management tools with associated tasks. And now with AI agents and added support, this software can send nudges, enable cross-functional teams with notifications and provide visibility to all team members on goal progress without any need for regular communication.

In many companies, different teams or different functions may have developed their own new processes over the last few years. Raimondi and Dean advocate for finding ways to simplify systems and make sure that teams that work cross-functionally have one place to share work and report progress.

“We’ve seen this idea of digital exhaustion, the exhaustion we feel because of the addition of so many tools [recently],” Raimondi said. “A lot of that is a reflection of AI being adopted in silos versus thinking holistically about how can we use it to build workflows and support these cross-functional use cases.”

This requires coordination from IT and HR teams, with help and input from employees and department or business unit leaders. DiMuro, the Limbach chief people officer, shared that they’ve deployed digital tools and AI to support learning and development goals.

“We see HR getting really excited [for] having the actual visibility and transparency versus relying on sort of like humans reporting,” Raimondi added.

“We also see HR becoming more involved in the technology strategy of a company,” Hinds said. “The employee experience is increasingly a digital one. We’re seeing a lot of great partnership between IT, CIOs, CTOs and HR recognizing that this digital exhaustion is costly and impacting the overall employee experience, and wanting to play a more strategic role in helping align on a technology strategy.”