Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Managing remote employees requires clear expectations, structured communication, transparent time tracking, outcome-focused productivity measurement, and the right tools to improve accountability, engagement, and performance.

Your intranet can showcase beautiful branding and engaging content, but it still needs internal champions and partnerships to succeed. The organizations recognized by the 2026 Simpplr Employee Experience Excellence Awards demonstrate how executive visionaries, technical experts, and cross-functional collaboration create intranets that deliver results.

Customers have learned to expect that service should work like a conversation: describe the problem in plain language, get it resolved. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini set that bar, and most contact centers fall short of it. The obvious fix is to add AI, yet MIT's NANDA initiative found that around 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots never reach measurable value. So the question worth asking is not whether to put AI into customer service.

A Project Manager is the professional responsible for planning, coordinating, and delivering a project on time, within budget, and according to the agreed scope. They oversee people, processes, timelines, and resources to ensure projects achieve their intended goals while minimizing risks and keeping stakeholders informed.

On June 23, 2026, Anthropic launched a product that should keep Slack’s leadership awake at night, and it launched it inside Slack itself. Claude Tag lets any employee mention @Claude in a Slack channel and hand it real work: watch threads, draft documents, fix code, chase forgotten follow-ups. It doesn’t behave like a bot. It behaves like a colleague, one that never sleeps, never forgets what was said in the channel last Tuesday, and never needs to be trained twice.

Most organizations have access to a large amount of workforce data. They track: Yet operational problems still happen. The problem is not a lack of data. The problem is that traditional workforce reporting mainly looks at the past. Modern operations need visibility into what is happening right now. This is why more organizations are adopting operational intelligence software.

HR teams handle hundreds of employee requests every week. Without a system to manage them, requests arrive through email, chat, walk-ups, and forms — spread across channels with no single owner, no SLA, and no visibility into what is open or overdue. The consequences are direct: tickets get missed, the same question gets answered differently by different agents, and sensitive employee data sits in inboxes with no access controls. The median HR request resolution time is 82 hours.

To reduce bench time, IT consulting firms need to forecast staffing needs weeks ahead of project end dates, maintain a live searchable skills inventory, structure idle time into productive "active bench" work, and replace spreadsheet-based tracking with real-time visibility tools. Firms that implement these practices typically bring bench rates down from the 20–30%+ range seen during poor management to the 5–10% "frictional" range considered healthy. ‍

AI makes your organization’s knowledge easier to find and use. That’s the whole point. But it also means sensitive data moves faster, surfaces in more places, and becomes harder to track. The pressure to act is real, but the playbook isn’t new. You still need to know where sensitive data lives, govern how it’s being used, and prevent it from unauthorized exposure. AI is now giving you a reason to revisit your data security posture and make sure it’s strong enough to keep up.

Less than six months ago, the Atlassian Rovo Model Context Protocol (MCP) server went GA, giving Claude, Cursor, and every major AI agent direct access to Atlassian for our customers. Today, over one million users trust it every month to do real work through agents. But that number isn’t the story. The story is what’s happening inside those interactions: how AI agents are actually being used at enterprise scale, and who’s getting the most value.