The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us, changing forever the way companies operate and grow. Machine learning (ML) now helps to predict and minimize delays, reduce time spent on mundane tasks, and optimize the skills and talents of the human workforce. [caption id="attachment_475270" align="aligncenter" width="868"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] PwC refers to AI as a ‘game changer’ in digital transformation, contributing as much as $15.7trn to the global economy by 2030. Wrike is at the forefront of this wave, developing the best AI tools, solutions, and features on the market, saving 20,000 organizations time and money every year. But what does AI in a work management platform look like? And where might it take us in the future? The adoption of AI is underway They don’t look like the futuristic robots we once imagined but, in reality, machines are already part of our daily life. At home, we use AI every time we ask Siri or Alexa a question, open our phones using facial recognition, or scroll through a streaming service’s TV suggestions. [caption id="attachment_475276" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] AI also has a major influence on our work. We might rely on AI to help us manage customer relationships through chatbots, scan for fraudulent activity in financial systems, or turn documents into data via optical character recognition (OCR). Gartner estimates that a third of organizations are currently applying AI across several business units, a figure that is only set to grow. There are many reasons why companies choose to use the best AI tools available. For example, they may wish to: Save time spent on tedious tasks Optimize processes through automation efficiencies Accelerate and ameliorate customer service Gather and analyze data for better decision-making Seek out opportunities for new revenue streams The benefits of AI are clear to most stakeholders, particularly during a challenging economic climate. Research from Forrester indicates that 80% of executives say AI boosts productivity and creates new positions. At the same time, about 20% of all workers say they will use automated assistance technologies to make decisions and get work done. [caption id="attachment_475282" align="aligncenter" width="730"]Source: Forrester[/caption] “We see similar statistics in Wrike as well,” says Igor Akimov, Head of AI Solutions at Wrike. “More than a quarter of our users work with AI Recommended Tasks every day.” He has ample experience leveraging ML systems, and believes that AI can help us reach significant breakthroughs without the need for major investment. One of the reasons why Wrike represents such good value to its 2.3m customers is because it delivers the best artificial intelligence tools for project and task management, for a fraction of the cost of bespoke software engineering solutions. The many roles of AI in the workplace The ways in which AI can help us in our work expands every year. Some of the most interesting uses to emerge include: AI as an artist Text and picture generation is more advanced than ever before, with the best AI tools including DALL-E 2, Midjourney.com, Stable Diffusion, and so on. These neural networks are fed with billions of images with descriptions, allowing you to generate content with just a single text prompt. This means that AI can not only copy famous images and create psychedelic graphics, but also generate award-winning masterpieces like this one by Jason Allen and Midjourney AI. AI as a developer Platforms such as Copilot from GitHub can now accept requests and write code based on your comments, saving developers or software engineers countless hours in the process. For example, if you need to write simple but time-consuming code to program a form to access a database, you can simply enter the instruction, select the data from a table, put it into an array, and let AI write the code for you. This has the benefit of extending basic coding abilities to people outside of the developer audience. AI as a writer Drafting high-quality content for books, education materials, or blogs takes time. While AI won’t be as natural or nuanced as a professional writer any time soon, it can significantly accelerate the researching, writing, and editing process. With GPT-3 from OpenAI, you can generate whole articles from one sentence. For example, AI suggested that this piece of text should follow the previous sentences: Artificial intelligence is also being used to create music. For example, Google's AI Magenta project is creating algorithms that can generate original music. For example, teams can overnight data, feed it to personal learning models, and use AI to craft statements that leverage key elements. Some creative teams are using this technology now to generate raw content that can be later finessed by human editors. Startups such as Jasper.AI help thousands of companies to create marketing materials. On a day-to-day basis, almost all writers use some level of AI-driven technology to find relevant search terms, auto-complete predicted text, and check spelling or grammar. AI as an administrator The best AI tools in project management have the ability to take care of time-consuming tasks and monotonous work with automations, suggestions, and search intent technology. Robotic process automation (RPA) or standard automation can replace tedious work like opening an item in one app and then copying or moving it somewhere else. However, these days AI can also infiltrate our creative and management work, something that was not achievable even two years ago. Automating workflows makes progress from project planning to delivery far more efficient. It can adjust tasks, assign owners, ask for approvals, and offer updates in the background while humans take care of the more valuable work. AI and work 3.0 [caption id="attachment_475312" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] The way we work has been transformed in recent years. While we may be working remotely, or outside of the 9-5, we’re also dealing with high levels of complexity, with some knowledge workers using up to 14 different applications every day. Choosing the right work management platform is vital to effectively manage more data, more connectivity, and more expectations than ever before. If organizations want to drive results and reduce busywork in this new modern environment, the best work management software option for them will be one that includes artificial intelligence tools. Take Wrike’s ability to analyze computing behavior to predict a user’s next actions, for example. This means that if a Wrike user tends to start their day by viewing their dashboard or opening request forms, AI can learn and then replicate these steps every morning. The best AI tools can also take care of the most time-consuming data entry tasks, like transcribing meeting notes. Automation such as Wrike’s AI engine can then use those notes to find actionable tasks and create action lists and project plans. Users can further extend this process by highlighting key parts of the text to create subtasks, instantly transforming a meeting discussion into tangible actions — something we can do today with AI Subitem Creation. Wrike’s advanced AI Search can even recommend who might be the right person to carry out these subtasks, saving yet more time in the planning journey. AI has been able to analyze large volumes of complex data for some time but, in the near future, it’ll also be able to summarize the contents for humans. For example, a manager who wants to check on a project could click to receive a short video reel, a one-page brief, or an AI-voiced verbal update. As with most things, artificial intelligence tools are only as good as the data that powers them. Some work management software providers have limited access to good-quality data in the system, but Wrike is different. We’ve invested heavily in the area of AI in project management, which led to our exciting Work Intelligence technology. This creates a structure that understands the issues, dependencies, and human input challenges of your working environment, and puts that knowledge to work to suggest accurate answers to your queries. This type of differentiating factor will become all the more important in the future, as work continues to become more complex and the data we deal with more dense. Humans and machines: The dream team [caption id="attachment_475318" align="aligncenter" width="811"]Generated by Midjourney[/caption] Much has been written about ‘robots replacing humans’ and the possibility of machines taking over our roles in the workplace. Like the Industrial Revolution in the past, the global embrace of AI may well result in a shift in job roles, but that doesn’t have to mean job losses. In fact, Forrester research predicts that cognitive technologies such as robots, AI, ML, and automation will create 9% of new U.S. jobs by 2025. These new jobs may include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators. A recent Stanford study titled ‘How to Survive the A.I. Revolution’ recommends a human-centred approach to AI, which envisions “a future where people and machines are collaborators, not competitors.” We shouldn’t expect machines to be just like humans, they say. They can do some tasks very well, while we have more time to excel at other types of work. For example, creatives could channel the technology to take care of the research stage, so they can focus on crafting engaging visual or written messaging. It’s also important to recognise that there will always be cases where a human’s input is needed. Take chatbots, for example. Sure, they can answer quick queries or funnel users into specific categories. But for more complicated questions, most people will opt for the ‘speak to an operator’ option. On the upside, that operator will have more time to spend on resolving your problem, because the chatbot is taking care of the rest of the queue. The best outcomes are achieved by combining human expertise and experience with the speed and efficiency of ML. One can benefit the other, ultimately providing customers, clients, and companies with a better experience and service. AI and Wrike — An exciting future AI is advancing at such a rapid pace, every year brings huge leaps forward. Connected devices are one of the most exciting frontiers, representing a way for humans to feel at home, wherever they are. As machines continue to learn, they will better understand humans’ habits, particularly as our interactions extend from our laptops to our phones, cars, and even the kitchen fridge. Over time, these computers will know a lot about us, which will allow them to recognize our pain points and deliver bespoke solutions. Wrike already does this for us at work. Every time the platform digitizes data and connects to different integrations like Slack, email, or Zoom, it better understands our everyday needs. It can then offer a variety of ways to make the process smoother and faster, such as suggested to-do lists via AI Recommended Tasks, daily due date reminders, and nudges for overdue approvals. That means greater clarity around your workflow and much improved focus on the priorities at hand. A good example of this is Wrike’s risk predictor, which leverages an advanced work graph model, the user’s interactions with the platform, and thousands of other data points to help flag at-risk projects. “Our AI Project Risk Prediction can help managers and owners track their projects without active involvement,” Akimov explains. “The system monitors your projects for any risks that may cause you to miss your deadlines, then assigns a risk level (low, medium, or high). It was developed using our custom-built AI and learning from millions of Wrike projects.” This all helps to focus teams on the work that matters most, ensure consistently on-time delivery, and position the organization for growth in a rapidly changing environment. A transformative technology Forbes writes: “There has been no better time to be in the world of artificial intelligence than now. AI has achieved an inflection point and is poised to transform every industry.” This means that the time is now for organizations to build the technology into their daily operations. Those who don’t might find themselves left behind, as competitors harness the best AI tools to pull ahead. The good news is that Wrike makes taking the first step easy. When you become a Wrike customer, you open up a world of possibilities, which includes 360° operational visibility, cutting-edge collaboration features, valuable data analysis and powerful automation. Wrike can help you create a more productive, efficient, and profitable work environment by enhancing your human resources with AI. Ready to see how? Get a free two-week trial today to see how Wrike can put machines to work for you.
The age of remote work has brought a number of realizations. We now know that with the right work management solution, we can work effectively from anywhere. We understand that great work doesn’t have to be done in the hours between 9 to 5. Above all, we appreciate the value of digital collaboration more than ever. The challenge of modern collaboration At one time, busy offices and hectic workplaces might have disguised poor communication and siloed teams, but now the cost of ineffective collaboration is clear. Wrike’s ground-breaking Dark Matter of Work research proved this: Nearly 80% of knowledge workers surveyed said they work at cross-purposes with colleagues because they have been given tasks that contradict one another, understand instructions differently, or don’t have access to the right information. This type of ‘dark matter’ or invisible work costs businesses up to $60M annually. As Forbes recently pointed out, effective collaboration across teams, offices, and regions is often the difference between success and failure for a business. This will only become more acute in an unpredictable economic environment, with additional pressure, scarce resources, and increasing employee burnout. In fact, the estimated $60M annual cost of invisible work is expected to increase by 53% in the next five years. The solution is Wrike Lightspeed As the world’s most powerful work management platform, Wrike has been a pioneer in digital collaboration since 2006. It has constantly iterated to improve users’ interactions with each other, introducing ever-more impressive collaboration features. In October 2022, Wrike launched Wrike Lightspeed, its most exciting innovation yet. With a universal work management process that covers the A-Z of modern work, Wrike Lightspeed has all the features any team, department, or organization could need. It’s more customizable, scalable, and easy to use than any other solution, offering a fast, easy onboarding experience for new users, as well as complex, configurable features for fast-growing companies. With more than 400 integrations with popular tools like Google, Slack, Salesforce, and Adobe Creative Cloud, Wrike Lightspeed is the all-in-one work management platform you’ve been looking for. The perfect combination of speed, technical proficiency, and style, Wrike Lightspeed delivers an exceptional new user experience. Our designers have breathed new life into the interface with fresh-looking Table, Board, and Calendar views and a fully revamped Analytics dashboard that makes seeing work progress fun and informative. Our intuitive navigation makes it easy to get to the features you need, including our best-in-class Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and library of ready-to-go templates. It’s packed with collaboration tools for remote teams, as well as those based in offices all around the world. Every Wrike Lightspeed feature and integration is designed with the customer in mind. It strips away work complexity, surfaces essential tasks, and facilitates unparalleled digital collaboration. Wrike Lightspeed powers: 50% faster project delivery: By providing a single source of truth, Wrike offers complete visibility into any project journey, including any potential roadblocks, resourcing issues, and workload imbalances. Teams can see project progression at a glance in multiple views. This means fewer delays, fewer budget overruns, and much, much faster delivery. 70% fewer meetings: Is your weekly calendar filled with time-consuming meetings? Well, with Wrike, every meeting, email, and message can be converted into instant communication in one shared space. Update tasks in real time, tag colleagues across functions, and spend your time on the work that really matters. 90% less email: Email is a great tool and a fantastic way to talk to external stakeholders. But as the threads grow, so too does the time spent writing, responding, and searching for details you need. All this ‘dark matter of work’ has a real cost, estimated to amount to $93m a year by 2027. This is where Wrike can help, offering one secure place for all your conversations, which means far fewer emails and much more alignment. Lightspeed offers the fastest way to productivity by helping teams, departments, and whole companies Work as One™. It’s also the only remote collaboration software that doesn’t require customers to make tradeoffs — you can interact, communicate, and collaborate seamlessly with internal colleagues and external partners alike. Introducing External Requester Collaboration Advancing digital collaboration has been Wrike's primary goal for more than 16 years. We’ve always acknowledged the need to collaborate with other teams outside the work environment and keep all work-related data together. We’ve also long understood that this means more than being able to message a colleague or work on a document together, which is why we introduced reviews and approvals for guest users. This proved a game-changer for service teams of all types, who were able to bring every external stakeholder into the Wrike fold. Since then, we’ve continued to develop our collaboration capabilities, helping keep people connected in the most effective way. With the launch of Wrike Lightspeed comes our most innovative feature yet — the new External Requester Collaboration. Now, Wrike and non-Wrike users can communicate, collaborate, and create — all in one place. That means toggling between Wrike and third-party email accounts becomes a thing of the past, as the entire request journey can be managed within Wrike. Communication can be displayed as ‘internal comments’ and ‘email to requester’ so the different paths are clear to all users. All of this will be great news for our customers, especially service providers who interact with external clients as well as internal stakeholders. This new feature empowers those teams to deliver effective service management, allowing them to continue to do their best work in Wrike’s platform while also communicating smoothly outside of it. For example, many IT service teams field multiple requests from people outside of their company, including many who aren’t in Wrike. Those requesters will often need to provide more information, such as a screenshot, photograph, or attachment. Similarly, the provider will usually respond seeking extra information or providing a status update. All of these daily back-and-forths can now occur and be tracked in Wrike, offering a seamless experience for both parties and a single source of truth for future reference. This exceptional collaboration feature will also allow advertising agencies and marketing teams to maintain end-to-end digital collaboration on asset creation, proofing, and publication with temporary freelancers, partner agencies, creative contributors, and many more. No need to download assets into client-friendly PDFs or email approvers separately — now you can just invite them into Wrike, where the task, assets, campaigns, and discussions are happening. Permissions can be adjusted to give them visibility where needed while sensitive information is safeguarded. How External Requester Collaboration works Available for all Wrike customers on Team and higher Wrike plans, External Requester Collaboration is a native email integration feature that allows Wrike users to communicate with people outside of Wrike. You can do this by receiving and sending emails directly from Wrike tasks to external email addresses. This way, you can collaborate on tasks with external colleagues and partners without adding them to your Wrike account and avoid switching to email to provide updates or request approvals. It also means that all of your questions, responses, comments, and assets are stored securely within the task, so it’s easy to refer to them in the future when following up on a query or planning a similar project. This promotes a more structured work intake, reducing back-and-forth email communication, fostering much faster response times and preventing you from toggling between tools. To start using this great collaboration feature, you just have to follow three simple steps: Set your external request forms to allow email communication Create a task from this request form Click ‘internal comment’ or ‘email to requester’ You will now be able to communicate with external request collaborators via email and vice versa. Making collaboration truly possible Wrike Lightspeed is revolutionizing collaboration. It’s a big-picture platform that connects teams, departments, and companies — as well as every type of colleague, client, and customer outside of the organization. By opening up digital collaboration to include external stakeholders, Wrike Lightspeed will put you far ahead of the competition. While they’re still waiting on clients to download a PDF, your client could be commenting on the asset directly in the task. This remarkable configurability, usability, and scalability can be applied across a customer's entire work management process, enabling teams to work together as one. This is what makes Wrike Lightspeed the most powerful solution on the market for every team, every business — and every external user, too. Ready to send your team on the path to smooth collaboration and unparalleled productivity? Start a free trial of Wrike today.
It’s no secret that the pace of work has increased exponentially in recent years. In less than half a century, we’ve moved from typewriters, to word processors, all the way to laptops packed with software to help us deliver ever more work in the fastest way possible. In fact, knowledge workers now use up to 14 applications in their roles, toggling through more than a dozen work management tools every day. This heavy workload, coupled with resource scarcity, unexpected pivots, and employee burnout is contributing to a major loss of productivity — in the second quarter of this year, U.S. worker productivity plunged again, leading to the largest year-on-year decline on record. Businesses need to address these issues fast in an increasingly pressured and unpredictable market. They urgently need work management software that focuses on maximizing output, minimizing expenses and allocating resources efficiently. What they need is Wrike Lightspeed. Introducing Wrike Lightspeed Launched in October 2022, Wrike Lightspeed is the latest innovation of the world’s most powerful work management platform. Combining speed, style, and substance, it’s got everything an organization could need to manage diverse types of work. It’s more intuitive, easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable than any other solution, growing in tandem with your team as you soar to new heights of success. It strips away work complexity, surfacing essential work, and illuminating a path towards productivity. With more than 400 integrations with popular collaborative tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce, Wrike Lightspeed is the all-in-one solution that can replace those towering tech stacks, break down silos, and help you take back your team’s time. It’s also a lot of fun to use, with an attractive and modern UX design that will make working with Wrike every day a joy. Our designers created new Table and Calendar views, and a fresh look for our Analytics dashboard, so users can watch as they hit goal after goal. It’s easy for new and advanced customers alike to navigate through the wide range of dynamic work management software features like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and customizable calendars. Every tool, feature, and integration is built to help companies maximize team performance, accelerate growth, and deliver real impact, including: 50% faster project delivery 70% fewer meetings 90% less email 100% real-time visibility Savings of up to $60m* *The estimated annual cost annually of wasted time, canceled projects, duplicated efforts, and employee churn. This can rise as high as $1.65B for organizations with over 100,000 employees. Revolutionary in its approach and unrivaled in its capabilities, Lightspeed offers the fastest route to productivity — by helping teams, departments, and whole organizations to Work As One™. It still features the exceptional versatility Wrike’s work management platform is renowned for, with extra layers of customization so users can tailor individual work that matches team needs. It’s the only platform that doesn’t require customers to make tradeoffs,it has it all, wall to wall, intuitive interface, customizability you need in today’s dynamic work environment and the ability to scale indefinitely as you need it. That means that you don’t have to adjust to work in Wrike. It adjusts to work for you. Managing multiple ways of working More than 2.4m people around the world use Wrike every day. They’re based in hundreds of countries, speaking multiple languages, and operating in a wide variety of industries, professions, and fields. That means that they need a powerful work management platform that reflects their unique requirements. Most out-of-the-box work management software solutions force teams to work within a rigid workflow template. That means squeezing their round work pegs into the provider’s square holes, using whatever templates, layouts, and business processes are included. Take a simple work request form, for example. That might look like a technical support ticket for an IT provider, a creative brief for a marketing department, or a repair order for a facilities team. Each request will need different fields, ranging from software error details, to creative asset requirements, all the way to photographs of a broken window that needs to be fixed. The organization could include dependencies to funnel the request to the right team, and use acronyms or shorthand to denote different types of queries. Modern work is complex enough: busy teams need to receive, organize, and expedite their tasks in a way that works for them as fast and as easily as possible. Without it, they risk losing valuable hours, jeopardizing on-time delivery, and compromising the uniformity, quality, and efficiency of their work. Here at Wrike, we’re aware of this problem — we’ve seen it happen, time and time again in our 16 years of pioneering modern work management software. So we built the solution, with unrivaled versatility and next-level customization capabilities — empowering you to work your way in Wrike. Unveiling Custom Item Types With the launch of Wrike Lightspeed comes Custom Item Types — the ultimate in configurability. Teams can now adapt their workspaces for their own specific use cases, business processes, terminologies, and behaviors. They can add their own item types in addition to native task and project types. They can even configure the layout of each item's processes to work with their own business logic, designing a specific set of fields to reflect their unique needs and requirements. It’s like having custom project management software, without the expense of bespoke software engineering. How would that look in a modern workplace? Well, marketing teams can now work with campaigns, assets, and creative briefs; Agile teams can create user stories, epics, and releases; and IT departments can raise tickets, issue first fixes, and phase rollouts. You can rename all the item types to fit neatly with your organization’s culture, linguistic style, and shorthand — like how HR and talent acquisition teams deal with job descriptions, candidate profiles, C.V.s, interviews, feedback, and postings in multiple locations. Wrike speaks your team’s language. Wrike’s work management platform is the most cutting-edge solution available, deploying advanced AI to make all our users’ lives easier. With the release of Wrike Lightspeed and Custom Item Types, we’ve taken Automations — one of our most valuable productivity-boosting features — to the next level. Nobody knows your business like you, so that’s why we made it easy for you to design your own workflow. Power users and admins can now automate some of their most routine work, utilizing easy-to-use, no-code workflows that streamline every item type into a natural business logic that’s designed by your team to meet your needs. Custom Item Types support team-specific processes and automations that are unique and relevant for your use case. Item types also speed up team operations and cross-functional collaboration with the flexibility and customizability needed to automate best practices directly into a daily-use system. By creating Custom Item Types in response to requirements, you can build your very own library of no-code automated work items, define workflows and item relations that adjust fast when needed. Custom Item Types now work seamlessly with request forms and co-exist alongside Blueprints, helping teams of all sizes to get the answers they need fast and expediting their work. They also connect with Wrike’s powerful analytics, so that key results can be viewed in formats that best reflect the requirements of your team or organization. Share this valuable data in seconds, by generating pre-built or customized reports, complete with helpful infographics and visual insights. Custom Item Type features Available for all Wrike Customers on Wrike’s Business and higher plans, Custom Item Types are packed with powerful features that will drive productivity in your organization. With Wrike Lightspeed’s groundbreaking work management software, you can now: Create your own library of easy-access item types that can be defined and adapted to mirror business processes of your team, department, or company Access out-of-the-box types that come with ready-made use-case templates Facilitate work filtering in dashboards, reports, and other tools using item icon and type identification in item views, as well as visible titles in Table, Gantt, and Board views Enable power users and admins alike to tailor Wrike for team members’ needs using a Custom Type Editor — without advanced skills or coding knowledge Make it unique with team-specific item types that help define and highlight each team member’s role You can also use Custom Item Types to: Support consistent company processes with account-wide item types Enable or disable item types in an instant when your requirements and team needs change. That means no confusion between old and new across your organization Configure item views so that different sections and fields can be hidden from users, added in-flight, or adjusted during different phases Customize context creation menus incorporating multiple views and adaptable hierarchies Enable item-specific workflows and automations rules that execute for your specific type of work Define parent-child relations between item types to build logical hierarchies of work — for example, you may wish to create an event that consists of deck, copy and venue subitems and not the other way around Putting you in control of your work — and your future Wrike Lightspeed helps to put you back in the driver’s seat and take your team to new heights of productivity through one powerful work management platform. It offers the best of both worlds: teams can customize almost everything in their own space, while the platform unifies and centralizes the work and reporting. That extraordinary configurability, scalability, and ease of use is game-changing in our unpredictable economic environment. Wrike’s Custom Item Types in particular help to pare back the complexity of modern work, enabling every team to build their ideal work environment, navigating through familiar terms, and accessing the right work in seconds. This means less time searching, adapting, or using third-party tools — and more time delivering great work. Ready to transform your team with Custom Item Types? Start a free trial of Wrike today.
