AI + HI: The best of both worlds

Hyper adoption: An avalanche of AI tools

We recently commissioned a global study into AI adoption, titled “The Age of Connected Intelligence.” Our researchers surveyed 1,000 employees in five different countries, finding that:

• 82% of employees use AI in their work, including GenAI, copilots, and agents
• 38% operate three to five different AI tools weekly
• Almost one in 10 use five or more tools every week
• 42% of employees have used unapproved AI tools at work

The most common uses are GenAI — like ChatGPT — as well as AI assistants like Wrike Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude. 

All of this data makes it clear that AI adoption is surging, but in a scattered, inefficient way. As a result, most AI tools enhance individual productivity but don’t significantly impact the overall organization. In fact, they might negatively impact a company’s bottom line due to poor ROI.

That’s backed up by a recent report from MIT, which found that 95% of AI initiatives fail, representing an enormous waste of time, effort, and, crucially, capital expenditure. 

Missed opportunities and lost information

The main problem with this ad-hoc approach to AI adoption is disconnection. We’re not properly uniting our people, processes, and proprietary data, which is leading to handoff problems. Information is slipping through the cracks, context is being lost, and tool-based siloes are appearing. 

In increasingly complex workflows, that can spell disaster, with modern workers wasting an average of 89 working days a year chasing down information, searching through emails, and repeating work already completed. The cost of this? According to our Dark Matter of Work research, it could be as much as $60 million a year for large organizations.

The effects of this are amplified by AI. As our Chief Marketing Officer, Christine Royston, has said, “If information isn’t connected, clarity disappears — and automating scattered work only creates scattered results, faster.”

Teams are realizing that it’s not enough to deploy AI tools and send them on their merry way. We need to think strategically about how we can marry this era-defining technology with existing human skills to produce nuanced, effective solutions to workplace challenges.

A new competitive edge: Organizational intelligence

The meeting of AI and HI was a major theme at Collaborate 2025, our recent annual work management conference. There, we discussed how AI plus HI leads to organizational intelligence, which George Saadeh, Wrike’s Chief Revenue Officer, defines as “the convergence of artificial intelligence for speed and automation, and human intelligence for creativity and strategy.”

Despite all the transformative benefits of AI, human judgment remains indispensable. Automation can accelerate workflows and streamline steps, but it requires proper commissioning. AI can identify trends and surface insights, but humans can interpret them within the context of an organization’s values and culture. GenAI can write perfectly structured emails, but only a true teammate knows who prefers snappy messages and who needs a gentler, more polite tone.

That’s why we need to level up our HI alongside our AI. The five most in-demand skills this year (according to Forbes) reflect this, with hiring managers calling for:

1. AI fluency
2. Digital transformation leadership
3. Perpetual learning agility
4. Strategic foresight and complex problem solving
5. Emotional intelligence

These are the indisputable skills that make you much more than the fabled houseplant. And AI can nurture, enhance, and empower this natural edge — in the right platform.

How Wrike bridges the gap between AI and HI

At the core of our powerful platform is the Work Graph™ — a proprietary data model that captures both structured and unstructured data across projects, tasks, approvals, and outcomes. This “living system” processes billions of work events every year, empowering your AI tools with deep, real-time context. 

That means that every time you make a human decision — such as pushing out a project date, or assigning a new task — you’re teaching AI how you really work, equipping it with new understanding and more advanced abilities. It’s a little like the difference between college and an internship. Sure, you learn a lot in the classroom, but only workplace experience teaches you how to really navigate a multistakeholder project with an urgent deadline and limited resources in a tumultuous market.

It’s this rich organizational knowledge that “enables AI to move beyond simple automation and into true orchestration,” according to George Saadeh. 

Let’s see what that looks like in real life.

Amplifying human potential with tailor-made tools

We’ve been pioneering machine learning in the workplace for almost two decades, ever since we first started. That means our AI features were designed to work together as a truly cohesive, supportive ecosystem — not just shiny new buttons with vague promises. 

Our award-winning Work Intelligence® suite includes:

• GenAI that helps humans go from an idea to a fully written description, comment, or report fast. It can create entire project plans and meeting agendas, edit comments to adjust tone, and even translate into multiple languages. The best part is that it works the other way, too, reducing reams of comments to one simple summary in seconds.
• Workflow automation, which has transformed our clients’ organizations, drastically reducing human error and rapidly accelerating time to execution. Automating approvals, reminders, and handoffs saves hours each week — freeing that time for the type of creative work that humans excel in.  
• AI agents that can be deployed anywhere you need help, from managing intake queues to scanning for risk. Choose from three prebuilt options or use our agent builder to commission your own and watch as it uses human-like judgment to make short shrift of your most mundane, time-consuming, or plain old boring tasks.
• Mobile inbox prioritization, which is a game changer for busy teams on the go. Instead of manually wading through multiple emails every morning, Wrike Mobile users can lean on AI to organize, categorize, and summarize notifications, facilitating quick responses so you can clear your backlog fast.
• Digital brainstorming support that can transform ideas on Wrike Whiteboard into ready-to-go tasks and projects automatically. This maximizes collective intelligence, slashing time spent moving from ideation to execution and supporting Agile, fast-moving teams that want to stay ahead of the competition. 
• Wrike Copilot, which acts as a digital assistant, surfacing relevant information, summarizing tasks, and delivering real-time answers to natural language questions. It draws on your organization’s work history, so the responses are accurate, detailed, and genuinely useful to human teams.