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With our devicenow DaaS solution, we operate in a fast-moving, modern environment. Speed, performance, and efficiency are our standard. But let’s be honest: sometimes there’s just no time to step back and explore the ideas shaping our industry and discover the great minds behind them.
That’s why we’re launching “3 Questions to…”, a compact Q&A series with thought leaders from our partner network. Only three questions. Only three answers. But plenty of insight. Your knowledge snack for in-between.
NORDA Advisory is a boutique consulting firm focused on the intersection of people and technology, combining international best practices, proven methods, and tools with a distinctly Nordic leadership style. The firm guides corporates and mid-sized clients across the DACH region and the Nordics through every stage of business transformation, from software and system integrator selection to project delivery and change management. Its work is consistently structured, methodical, and held to high quality standards, with collaboration and communication shaped by the openness and pragmatism characteristic of Nordic working culture.
Antje-Kathrin Schumann is the Founder and Managing Director of NORDA Advisory, which she launched five years ago after two decades at Big Four firms, most recently as a partner at KPMG Germany. Over more than 25 years and across 50+ projects, she has helped companies achieve excellence in people and technology by modernizing CRM and ERP landscapes and the business processes that depend on them. Years of living and working in France, Spain, and Sweden, combined with global and European transformation programs, have given her a perspective that bridges cultural styles as naturally as it bridges business and IT.
1. From CRM and ERP to device management and workplace tools – the systems employees use every day are starting to merge into one connected experience, driven largely by AI. As an advisor who sits on the customer’s side of the table, which of today’s trends are genuinely reshaping the digital workplace, and which are more hype than substance?
The digital workplace is being reshaped less by new tools and more by their shift to the cloud and their intelligent integration into core processes. The most tangible progress is achieved continuously through cloud solutions and the integration of AI into CRM and ERP systems, where predictive forecasting, process mining, and anomaly detection materially improve decision-making in finance, supply chain, and customer operations.
One prerequisite for this is how well employees adopt new ways of working, be they new processes or tools. Organizations thrive where people and technology move together.
The examination of data protection issues in relation to regulation and risk management is still a hot topic in some industries and must be clarified comprehensively.
Equally transformative is the move towards flexible, subscription-based IT hardware services, which shift devices from depreciating assets to scalable services aligned with workforce needs. This model improves cost transparency, accelerates refresh cycles, and supports sustainability goals through reuse, circularity, and reduced e-waste, without increasing operational complexity. It therefore represents a great lever for cost reduction and asset efficiency to increase shareholder value.
In short, the trends that matter are those that combine cloud-based core systems, pragmatically embedded AI, strong employee adoption, compliant data governance, and subscription-driven hardware models to deliver measurable efficiency, sustainability, and long-term shareholder value.
2. AI agents are moving into the core of business systems, and analysts expect them in a large share of enterprise applications by the end of 2026. For an employee, that means the device in their hand, their CRM, their ERP and their service tools increasingly behave as one. What should IT leaders be doing today to prepare for this shift, and where is the biggest gap between what vendors promise and what actually arrives in the workplace?
As AI agents move into the heart of CRM, ERP, device management, and service tools, IT leaders should focus less on the agents themselves and more on the foundations they depend on: clean data, well-defined processes, identity and access management, and robust governance. Preparing now means standardizing core processes, simplifying architectures, and embedding AI governance, security, and compliance by design, not as an afterthought.
The biggest discrepancy between vendor promises and workplace reality lies in autonomy and speed. Vendors present agents that operate independently across systems, but in practice their effectiveness is only as good as the underlying integration, data quality, and organizational readiness. Without clear responsibilities, traceability, and human oversight, especially in regulated European environments, many “intelligent” agents remain limited, underutilized, or manually monitored, thus reducing their benefit to employees in their daily work.
A Microsoft and LinkedIn Work Trend Index study from 2024 makes the urgency visible: 78% of users already bring their own AI to work (BYOAI) and will not wait for companies to catch up, while 90% of power users say AI makes their overwhelming workload more manageable and their work more enjoyable. These power users are also 61% more likely to have heard from their CEO on the importance of using generative AI at work, 53% more likely to receive encouragement from leadership to consider how AI can transform their function, and 35% more likely to receive tailored AI training for their specific role.
The conclusion is clear: companies need to increase the speed of adoption and upskilling, with leaders leading as role models encouraging employees to follow suit.
3. Looking a few years ahead, CRM and ERP landscapes in large enterprises will look fundamentally different – driven by AI agents, composable architectures and new consumption models. Based on what you’re already seeing in your projects, which of these developments will most change how employees actually work day to day, and where should IT leaders start preparing now?
Looking to the future, I believe the most significant change will be the emergence of organizations as workforces composed of both human employees and AI agents. Over time, technology itself will increasingly become a commodity.
What will matter far more is whether leaders, managers, and employees are willing to accept AI systems as fully fledged colleagues and to interact with them accordingly. For this to succeed, AI agents must be designed to take over defined tasks previously performed by humans, reliably and transparently.
At the same time, a successful transition requires leaders, managers, and employees to move into a supervisory role. While they will still need to understand tasks conceptually and professionally, their primary responsibility will shift toward oversight, judgement, and accountability rather than execution.
In my view, the greatest challenge lies in changing human behavior and long-established habits: overcoming the fear of losing control, letting go of possessions and knowledge, and fostering true cooperation between humans and AI agents.
What Antje describes is a shift that is easy to underestimate because it does not look like a single dramatic event. CRM, ERP, workplace tools, and the devices in employees’ hands are quietly merging into one connected experience, AI agents are stepping into roles once held by people, and hardware is moving from owned asset to consumed service. Each trend alone is manageable; together, they redefine what “the workplace” actually is. What stands out in her perspective is how much of the answer sits outside technology itself: clean data, clear processes, governance by design, leaders who model adoption, and the human willingness to share tasks and decisions with AI colleagues. The takeaway for IT leaders is that the next competitive edge will not come from buying the most advanced agent or the slickest platform, but from preparing the organization, technically and culturally, to actually use them.
