AI is coming for your office productivity suite, too

Office-style productivity tools are due for a major disruption from AI over the next year, with competing products and new user interfaces coming soon, several experts say.

Generative AI and AI agents will bring the first real challenge in the past 30 years to mainstream productivity tools such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, with a $58 billion market at stake, Gartner predicts.

The basic functionality and interfaces of office suite products has remained nearly the same since the 1990s, even as the software has moved to the cloud, but AI tools are likely to shake things up even further, says Joe Mariano, a senior analyst with Gartner’s employee experience IT team.

“We’re talking about the Microsoft Offices, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints of the world that we’ve been using for essentially the last 30 years or so,” he says. “The user experience is still the same. The technology, the way you create the documents is still the same.”

Generating new documents and other content will increasingly begin with gen AI accessing vast amounts of content and synthesizing it, rather than starting with a blank canvas, Gartner predicts. Editing will increasingly involve AI to rewrite content rather than having the author do it manually.

New creation options

While productivity software is already integrating AI as copilot-style assistants, a second wave of change will come with a new set of add-on tools, similar to Grammarly, that will bring new functionality to existing products, Mariano says. At the same time, new UX options will pop up, with voice and interfaces like Google’s Gemini Canvas replacing traditional keyboard-driven input, he predicts.

Gemini Canvas, for example, enables users to generate code with voice prompts, create apps, games, and quizzes based on research, and generate and edit text with AI assistance.

“Instead of making a document in a specific doc app, I open the Canvas and I can start building a document there, or working with code there, or manipulating images in that space and having a back-and-forth conversation with the AI,” Mariano says. “At the same time having the power to physically make changes myself in the Canvas.”

CIOs should be flexible

CIOs and other IT leaders responsible for choosing and operating their organizations’ productivity software suites should keep an open mind about the way employees want to generate documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, and other content, Mariano says.

“We’re getting closer to Star Trek: The Next Generation, where you just say, ‘Computer,’ and you start talking,” he says. “I advise many of our clients, even today, to start using the microphone to have conversations instead of the keyboard. Because as human beings, most of us can talk faster than we can type.”

IT leaders will have to pay close attention to their specific use-case needs when exploring other options for productivity tools, Mariano says. Organizations will have unique needs, and not all new productivity products will fit every situation.

In addition, the big guys aren’t going away, he adds. “One thing I want to make clear is that we don’t think Microsoft is, all of a sudden, going out of business,” he says. “You have so much data in SharePoint OneDrive, and the expectation is that you want to start using Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as that data layer, that anchor that is where all your data stored.”

To make the best use of new AI tools, CIOs will also want to ensure their organizations’ data is cleaned up and stored in places where the AI can access it, he adds.

“It sounds basic, but we need to make sure that these services have access to the right information and that we’re prioritizing the right integrations and interoperability, so that when you are starting to deploy these, you’re doing it in such a way that you’re having integrations directly into the data that those employees need,” Mariano says.

AI-driven collaboration

Several AI experts see the same trend toward new productivity tools. IT leaders should be ready to shift to a mindset where the core office suite is an AI-centric collaboration layer, with conversational interfaces and AI agents that automate workflows, says Alix Gallardo, chief product officer at AI assistant vendor Invent.

“Instead of static apps where people click through menus and manually move information between tools, we’re moving toward conversational workspaces where you simply describe what you want done in natural language and the system orchestrates the rest,” she says. “This shift will make productivity tools far more accessible and far less manual. People will talk, type, or use short commands, just as email and spreadsheets once redefined office work.”

At the same time, productivity tools will start to look less like a bundle of separate apps and more like a shared workspace for humans and AIs to work together, Gallardo adds.

“You won’t think in terms of ‘open the doc, then the task app, then the CRM,’” she says. “You’ll ask the workspace to ‘pull the latest numbers, create a client-ready summary, and schedule a follow-up,’ and AI agents will collaborate with you and your teammates to make it happen.”

Gallardo predicts that new players will emerge to challenge the office productivity leaders, with Harvey, an AI for legal and professional services, and Perplexity Finance early examples.

New entrants in the office productivity space will pop up with fresh UX and workflow features, predicts Anthony E. Tuggle, of AI integration advisory firm TAG US Worldwide. Meanwhile, big platform players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI will embed powerful AI models into productivity suites and acquire or partner with complementary tools, he suggests.

IT leaders should prioritize API-first tools and carefully evaluate model governance to avoid vendor lock-in, Tuggle adds. “The flexibility will allow for enterprises to pilot best-of-breed combos rather than betting everything on one vendor,” he says. “The winners will be those who blend seamless AI, strong data controls, and real workflow value, not just flashy generative demos.”

Leaders may need to rethink the way they think of AI to ensure that the technology simplifies complex work and allows them to focus on better managing humans, he says.

“Tech leaders must move beyond anxiety over bad integrations to embrace a human-centric AI formula where technology plus emotional intelligence doesn’t just equal two, it equals three,” he adds.

The value creation layer

While some AI experts see a major overhaul of the UX of office productivity tools, others see the market moving in a different direction. For many current use cases, the existing interface for office software gives users more control and fidelity than chat-based AI, says Olli Salo, founder of Skimle, an AI-powered platform for analyzing qualitative data.

However, new office tools will allow AI to change the way users interact with manually created documents and will give users the ability to analyze and visualize patterns in large data sets, he says.

“I would consider what new types of knowledge can be created with the help of LLMs,” he adds. “AI can understand text and meaning and opens new avenues for understanding and structuring qualitative data at scale.”

Sato sees new entrances coming into the space, with the winners making it easier for users to accomplish their tasks.

“AI represents a new era for competition, and the cards are being dealt again,” he adds. “For understandable reasons, the old Microsoft Office products have not really evolved for a decade, and their AI Copilot efforts have been lackluster. So while formats like .docx, .xls and .pptx might remain, the value creation happens on a different layer.”