HP's Digital Services platform advises clients to optimize their hardware fleet, even if it means buying fewer HP machines. This counterintuitive strategy prioritizes customer ROI and long-term trust over short-term hardware sales, positioning HP as a device-agnostic partner focused on employee experience.
In an AI-driven workplace, the manager role shifts from overseeing people to directing AI agents. Experienced professionals will become high-level individual contributors (ICs) who orchestrate agent fleets to perform tasks like purchasing or merchandising, moving their value from people management to agent-driven execution.
AI's primary impact isn't eliminating individual contributors but the layers of middle management. Tasks like monitoring, data collection, and reporting—traditionally done by managers in a hierarchy—can now be automated. This forces a flatter organizational structure where managers must evolve beyond simple oversight.
With AI agents reducing the need for human users, the per-seat SaaS model is becoming obsolete. The future lies in outcome-based pricing, where vendors charge for tangible results like cost savings or tickets resolved. This aligns incentives, forces vendors to prove ROI, and creates a true partnership with customers.
Aggressively adopting AI without guardrails leads to low-quality "slop." AI should be a component that serves a broader strategy, not the entire strategy. It is a powerful tool for informing and consulting, but human judgment remains critical to curating quality outcomes and preventing an increase in remedial work.
To gain market credibility, HP "dogfooded" its workforce management software on its own 80,000-device IT environment. Only after proving tangible results internally—like a 40% reduction in support tickets—did they take the product to market. This internal success became their most powerful sales tool for skeptical CIOs.