What if the only thing scarier than your CEO sending out the “we’re now an AI-first company” memo is if they don’t?
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a wave of top-down declarations from CEOs saying they’re pivoting to become “AI-first.” While these memos can be unnerving, they’re also pretty clear. They signal companywide alignment and give everyone permission to think differently.
But what if your CEO never sends that memo? What if there’s no all-hands vision statement, no roadmap, or no moment where the future is announced from the top down?
You might initially breathe a sigh of relief, thankful you’re off the hook and won’t have to deal with AI quite yet. But you’re not off the hook, because this transformation is happening whether your leadership acknowledges it or not.
Your workers aren’t waiting for a strategy memo
Regardless of your leaders’ position, your workers are embracing AI tools. We’ve seen this story before, when workers brought personal iPhones and cloud apps into the workplace long before IT acknowledged or supported them. Back then we called it the “consumerization of IT” (or “shadow IT”). It’s the same story today, just with generative AI:
- Workers are using ChatGPT to write documents, create project plans, and as strategic thought partners.
- They’re using browser extensions and copilots in office and collaboration tools.
- Some are even taking photos and videos of screens and feeding them into LLMs for analysis and support.
The vast majority of workers are not doing these things to be rebellious, they’re just trying to get their work done.
Of course every worker has their own motivations and individual journey. A support agent using AI to summarize a ticket isn’t the same as a finance analyst using a GPT to build a forecast model. These aren’t new types of jobs or AI-based roles, they’re the same worker personas we’ve supported for decades, just augmented by AI in various ways.
And I’m not talking about full-on autonomous AI agents operating computers on behalf of workers. While that’s certainly coming, it’s important to not let that wild future distract us from what’s actually happening today in our workplace filled with human workers using AI tools across every level of work.
So if there’s no memo, what should you do?
You don’t need a five-step plan to adopt AI, you need a place for AI.
If your workers are using AI, (and they are!), that work needs to happen somewhere secure, observable, and scalable. That means being able to monitor app behavior, protect sensitive data, control session access, and enforce context-aware policies, regardless of whether the input came from a user, their AI assistant, or both.
That’s where the workplace comes in. Not as a device or a browser tab, but as a dynamic control plane, where apps, data, identity, security, and context come together around the worker. It’s the same workplace Citrix customers have trusted for decades. And it turns out it’s exactly what AI needs too, which is the:
- Same apps
- Same access policies
- Same security and session controls
It doesn’t matter whether the worker is human, AI-assisted, or even fully autonomous (one day). The work still gets done in the workspace. If you’re already delivering a secure workspace with Citrix, you’re already doing the hard part. Citrix already supports identity-driven access, app-layer controls, session recording, zero-trust policy enforcement, and detailed analytics & device posture enforcement through features like uberAgent and deviceTRUST. You’re more ready for your workers using AI than you may realize.
This is just the beginning
The memo may never come. The roadmap might stay vague. But the AI transformation is already underway, in a very real, non-theoretical way.
So don’t wait for perfect alignment. Start with what’s real, which is the behaviors of your workers today. We’ve been here before: consumerization, BYOD, shadow IT—our answer then was to meet workers where they are. We can follow the same playbook this time around too.
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Video of my most recent talk
Last week I gave the closing keynote at the EUCtech Denmark 2025 conference, called The Future of Work in an AI-Native World. I talked about a lot of what I covered today and walked through how AI will evolve and impact the workplace in the coming years. You can watch it on YouTube.
My upcoming talks
- Citrix Connect London: Opening Keynote: Citrix Vision & Strategy — London, June 16-17
- MAICON 2025: AI at Work: The Employees’ Revolution! — Cleveland, Ohio, Oct 14-16