Making AI Work For Employees

For CIOs, the employee technology experience is becoming much more than an IT issue. HP's 2026 Work Relationship Index identifies technology enablement as the second-largest contributor to workplace health, behind organizational confidence. That finding should change how we think about our role: as AI becomes part of everyday work, we need to make devices, software and intelligence work together around employees, removing complexity so people can do their best work.

What technology helps employees do their best work?

HP's Work Relationship Index reinforces something deceptively simple: people want technology that helps them get work done without getting in their way. Among workers who report a healthy relationship with work, 82% say their company gives them the tools they need to be successful, and 77% say their devices and accessories work seamlessly together. In other words, the technology experience is not a side issue -- it is part of the employee experience.

Among knowledge workers, a majority (51%) say faster, more reliable devices would help them do their best work. And business leaders recognize the stakes: 64% say poor employee technology experiences affect their ability to retain top talent.

Employees don't experience a PC, application, meeting room or AI assistant as pieces of an IT architecture. They experience a workday. Every time those technologies fail to work together, we put friction between people and what they're trying to accomplish.

Employees shouldn't have to spend their time making technology work together. Technology should work together for them.

How should CIOs approach AI in the employee experience?

At HP, we've learned through our own "customer zero" experience that scaling AI requires more than deploying a new tool. It requires the right data, processes, infrastructure, security and governance. For CIOs, it also requires designing AI around the realities of work: the roles people perform, the workflows they rely on and the trust model the enterprise needs.

There is no one-size-fits-all employee experience. Some employees want new AI capabilities almost as soon as they become available; others can find the pace of change overwhelming. General training only gets you so far. People need to understand what AI can do for their role, their workflow and the tasks they perform every day.

For CIOs, success should not simply mean adoption. It should mean delivering the right intelligence, in the right context, with the right guardrails for the work at hand.

Why does the future of employee AI need to be hybrid?

The future of AI will not be defined by a single place where every workload runs. Some intelligence will need to happen on the device, where local processing can support responsiveness, privacy and context. Other experiences will depend on cloud-scale compute. As HP's Prakash Arunkundrum recently explained, the opportunity is to intelligently orchestrate across these environments based on performance, economics, security and user experience.

But employees shouldn't have to think about that underlying architecture.

The best hybrid AI experience brings intelligence to where the work is happening, while the complexity behind it largely disappears.

How is the CIO role changing?

Security, reliability, cost and operational performance remain fundamental. But technology leaders increasingly need to consider the experience those systems create together.

That means moving from reacting to technology problems to identifying and addressing friction before it disrupts work. At HP, we're doing that with HP Workforce Experience Platform (WXP), which turns endpoint telemetry into actionable insights for IT. Today, WXP proactively resolves 96% of internal HP issues before an employee even files a support ticket.¹

That's the kind of shift I believe matters: using intelligence not simply to manage technology more efficiently, but to make the technology experience less visible to the employee.

For CIOs, the questions are getting broader: Are we removing friction from employees' days? Are devices, applications and AI working together? Are we delivering technology that reflects how different people actually work?

That's the opportunity for CIOs: to move from managing individual technologies to orchestrating the experience they create together. The winners will not simply deploy more AI. They will make intelligent experiences feel seamless, trusted and useful in the flow of work.