Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

A mid-sized company asks an AI agent to onboard a new starter. The agent creates the email account. It adds the person to the right channels. It books the induction sessions and raises a laptop request. Then it reaches the finance-system access step. The request goes to an approver whose mailbox returns an out-of-office reply. The workflow has no rule for that. The agent is built to keep moving, so it skips the step. It reports: “onboarding complete.” Nobody notices for nine days.

PSA security and compliance means checking two things: that a vendor's controls are independently proven, and that your permissions keep margin data with the right people. PSA here means a professional services automation platform, which connects projects, resources and financials, not the IoT security scheme that shares the acronym. At Teamwork.com I brief agencies and research partners from the client side, and I'll take one dated, readable report over a wall of badges.

Schedule variance is SV = EV − PV: earned value minus planned value at a point in time. Negative means behind plan. The result is in currency, not days, and it has a property most explanations omit — as a project finishes, earned value converges on planned value, so SV approaches zero and the schedule performance index approaches 1.0 even when the project is late.

A talk by Midhun Suresh R and Kieran Lane at The Matrix Conference 2026. Defence and government organisations need to share classified information quickly, with their own people and with allies, without it ever reaching someone who isn't cleared to see it. Speaking at The Matrix Conference, Midhun Suresh R. and Kieran Lane showed how the Mission Partner Environment (MPE) add-on for Element Server Suite Pro (ESS Pro) makes that possible.

Agents need more than access to your tools. They need connected context that shows how work fits together, and where the boundaries are. An account team is preparing a customer renewal, and the customer is asking for a discount beyond standard policy. The contract and the discount policy sit in different systems. A recent support escalation has changed the tone of the conversation, a similar case came up in Slack last quarter, and someone approved a different arrangement for this account.

The main reason why agencies are fully booked but not profitable is that the calendar counts hours worked, not hours billed at the rate you sold. Looking back from Teamwork.com, over-servicing was the biggest drain of my agency years: clients asked for more inside the same retainer, and nothing recovered the cost. A full team that still can't show a profit is exhausting, and it rarely means people are slacking or clients are wrong.

AI adoption has reached the point where people are getting real value from it, but turning those individual wins into business outcomes is getting harder. That gap is what we set out to understand in The State of Intelligent Collaboration, our study of 9,500+ leaders and employees across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, run in September and October 2026.

Skills are coming to Ask AI: saved requests you run with a single command. Type /, pick a skill, and get the status update, late-work list or timesheet check your team needs every week. No more retyping last week's prompt and tweaking it until the output looks right. Your team gets reliable answers in one step and spends its time on client delivery, not on describing it.