Most companies in 2026 are already using AI somewhere in their hiring pipeline, their customer support queue, or their project management software. What fewer companies have figured out is how to use it well, in ways that actually improve working life rather than just adding surveillance overhead.

Buying employee monitoring software without a plan is expensive in ways that don't show up in the licence cost. The real costs are the trust you spend if the rollout is handled badly, the IT hours lost to a tool that doesn't integrate with your stack, and the compliance exposure if your data practices don't survive scrutiny.

Most articles about low productivity blame the worker. The data tells a different story. According to the OECD, productivity growth across advanced economies has slowed from 2.4% in the 2000s to under 1% today, and that drag shows up on every team’s dashboard, not just on national balance sheets. For Indian and APAC operations leaders, the question is no longer whether productivity is slipping, but which of the seven root causes is hurt