Since ChatGPT’s debut three years ago, generative AI has evolved from niche experimentation to near-universal enterprise adoption.
Consider the latest data from McKinsey. Their November State of AI Report states that 88% of organizations now report regular AI use in at least one business function. That’s up from 78% a year ago, signaling a significant chunk of organizations with their toe in the AI waters.
With such high experimentation levels, business and technology leaders are naturally seeking to scale the technology – and the ROI – just as deeply. What does this signal for the future of AI, and how does software support such an evolving digital landscape?
Planview CEO Razat Gaurav sat down with Nasdaq’s Kristina Ayanian to explore those questions; plus, they discussed how AI is reshaping enterprise decision-making and the pivotal launch of Planview AnviTM.
Whether you’re a business leader planning digital transformation or exploring AI solutions for the workplace, this conversation offers valuable insights and predictions about the impact of enterprise AI on productivity, team structure, and organizational success.
Note: The transcript below has been edited for flow and clarity.
What is Connected Work and How Has Planview Evolved?
Razat: Planview started as a quintessential All-American startup in Austin, Texas. Our whole genesis was to bring together resources, projects, and financials into a single frame. We evolved from there into a portfolio planning solution provider and got into lean-agile ways of working.
As our customers evolved, we found that organizations were looking to manage all sorts of work. That’s when we connected the dots between how projects, products, resources, financials, and outcomes all relate to each other.
Combining that with all these new data technologies – including graph technologies, semantic layers, and more – we created what we call “connected work” in the enterprise. That foundation, layered in with all the advancements in AI, is what brings us here today.
Kristina: You’re really that connecting bridge between all the verticals of an enterprise.
Razat: That’s exactly right. It’s connecting their strategic priorities to the actual execution of work and outcomes. It’s also connecting ideation, planning, delivery, and ultimately the outcomes that happen, as well as the handoffs.
It’s connecting the dots between all the different ways of working, because organizations and projects have different approaches – some are more waterfall, some are more agile, some are more hybrid. We support all of those different combinations through our platform.
Enterprise AI in Action: 50+ Million Projects and Real Results
Razat: As we grew and scaled our business, we ended up managing an increasing number of projects and product initiatives in our platform.
Today, we have over $400 billion in transformations that are planned and delivered through Planview – over 50 million projects over the last couple of years.
Customers across financial services, manufacturing, insurance, telecom, retail, and logistics – they all are managing projects and products through our platform, so we’re sitting on a massive data set.
And we were on this journey of adding intelligence, predictions, optimizations, and simulations with what’s now called “classic AI.” We already had those capabilities in our platform.
With the advent of generative AI, which was less than three years ago with the ChatGPT demo, we jumped in full throttle and we architected the capability that allows our customers to reimagine how work is done in the enterprise – and it allows them to think about how to bring automations into new sorts of decision-making in a very simplistic, conversational interface.
Digital Team Members: How Anvi Functions as Part of Your Enterprise Team
Kristina: It sounds like Anvi is a team member for the enterprise – it’s a member of their team. How do you ensure this new platform acts as a complement rather than a replacement to existing investments?
Razat: We think of Planview Anvi as a digital persona — to your point, a team member. And the team member today can work as an assistant to human personas. It can also automate work as a team member and allow humans to do other things in the organization while it just does work for you. It automates tasks and a chain of events for you.
Over time, as we develop more capabilities in Anvi, it will also take on the form of a digital persona by itself, where the digital persona is not just executing on workflows or automating them, or just responding to your prompts. It will actually make human-type judgment calls and understand what inputs to look for, what decision framing to have, and then ultimately what outputs to have.
We’re in our labs developing those capabilities – just like the rest of the world – but soon, they will allow us to think of resources and teams in an unconstrained way, leveraging data and leveraging the modern forms of AI.
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How AI is Supporting Business and Technology Leaders
Kristina: You brought up a really interesting point. How do you see Anvi changing the role of leaders?
Razat: As leaders are grappling with what this could mean for the future, what we’re finding is that you can do a whole lot more work and create a whole lot more velocity.
We have this notion of “flow” in how work gets done – whether it’s project work or digital work – and the flow velocity can grow tremendously, leveraging AI like Anvi. We’re also seeing productivity grow significantly. We have the instrumentation, the metrics, and the framing of how we’re measuring that with our customers.
Everyone wants the answer today – but it’s going to take some time to evolve – AI can have a lot more profound implications around what roles exist in organizations, between human roles vs. digital roles.
How are organizations structured? Do the functional structures of organizations make sense today? Or do they need to change?
There are a lot of “known unknowns” to navigate, and we want to do all of that in a way that is still safe and has the right level of governance, security, and privacy elements. Those are the things we’re innovating on and working through very closely with our global base of 3,000 customers.
The Future of Enterprise Work: What to Expect by 2035
Kristina: Speaking of the future, where do you see connected work really going in the next five to 10 years? And how does Planview fit into that?
Razat: The immediate opportunity is to increase velocity and increase productivity for existing forms of work. Over time, though, we’re going to see the next wave of evolution where these digital personas – these agents, like those within Anvi – they encompass either an agent as a team member, like a digital persona, or playing an orchestration role across multiple digital agents and human resources.
Over time, I see AI being able to take on a lot more work in the enterprise. That doesn’t mean that humans become irrelevant – I think there’ll be a role for humans, but the role will be different than what it is today.
Also, the scaling of organizations will look very different. You could have organizations that are a lot smaller today, but have an outsized impact because of the digital agentic framework and the access to the right datasets.
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Now, that all doesn’t impact every industry. AI will impact different industries differently. If you’re a bank, an insurance company, or more of a services-oriented business that is less tied to a physical asset, AI is going to have a bigger impact. If you’re tied to a physical infrastructure with operations and assets, it will have a different approach. But the work in the enterprise is going to be reimagined in a dramatic way.
Ultimately, it’s going to lead to positive things. Are there a lot of things to watch out for, and the right safeguards to have, and the right guardrails to have? Absolutely. But over time, I’m an optimist.
We as a human society will figure out the right guardrails to keep AI for creating value for humans, as opposed to creating value for some other unknown digital entity. This is going to be good for human individuals, organizations, and teams, but also for society, in general.
Adaptability: The Key to Enterprise AI Success
Kristina: It’s all about adaptability.
Razat: You’ve got to adapt – Darwin taught us that. That’s easier said than done, because, as humans, we resist change. I don’t like to change every day. But we’re going to have to – it’s going to really tax our muscles around change, agility, and adaptability.
Ultimately, what will help us in that journey of change and adaptability is why we’re doing it – what is the value in it? And if there is incremental, marginal unit value in that change, then we will do the right things as a human species.
Kristina: Well, I for sure am excited for our future conversation so we can reflect on this one and see how far we’ve come.
Explore AI-Powered Connected Work
As Razat and Kristina’s conversation shows, we’re still in the early stages of understanding AI’s full impact on enterprise operations. The shift toward digital team members and connected work platforms is happening now, but each organization’s journey will be unique.
If you’re curious about how these concepts apply to your enterprise, watch the Planview Anvi demo on demand. The demo offers a practical look at how conversational AI can help teams navigate complex enterprise data and streamline decision-making processes.
