Technology Rewired: Collaboration and Productivity

How has the collaboration and productivity team changed across five eras?

1. Era 1 · On-prem

   Before 2005

   0.1

   Work ran on on-prem email, shared drives, desk phones, and meetings in rooms. Executive assistants managed calendars and travel, a secretary kept the filing, and project status lived in someone's spreadsheet or a printed Gantt chart.

   The IT team ran the mail server, and a full mailbox was a genuine operational event.

2. Era 2 · SaaS and cloud

   2005 to 2020

   0.8

   Cloud office suites, team chat, video meetings, and project management tools made work real-time and remote. A new function appeared: the workspace admin who owned the chat tool, the wiki, and the integrations between them. They also multiplied channels, notifications, and meetings, and a lot of time went to reporting status. The project management tools category grew mostly to serve that reporting.

   Everyone had a tool and nobody had one place to look.

3. Era 3 · AI-assisted

   2020 to 2024

   1.8

   Transcription, meeting summaries, and writing assistants arrived in every suite. They saved the note-taker's hour and gave everyone an AI-written recap to skim.

   People still turned notes into tasks and chased follow-ups themselves. The assistant wrote things down; a human still made them happen.

4. Era 4 · Agentic

   2024 onward

   2.1

   Agents now attend meetings, write notes and action items, update tickets, draft replies, and find time across calendars. Teams treat them as AI co-workers with their own scope of work, and the chief of staff job gets partly automated. The risk is that these agents read everything, so permissions and data exposure matter, as the Chrome extension backdoor showed for productivity add-ons.

   A workspace admin now has to answer a new question: what is this agent allowed to see, and who approved it?

5. Era 5 · Next 5 years

   2026 to 2031

   3.0

   My bet: status meetings and manual updates mostly disappear, and each person works with an agent that keeps their commitments, docs, and calendar in order. Collaboration tools compete on how well their agents act across apps, not on features. Fewer coordination roles are needed, and the ones left are about judgment and relationships.

Which collaboration and productivity software is being rewired?

No deep dives yet. The first ones are in the queue below.

Coming next

• Email clients
• Calendars and scheduling
• Meeting notes
• Project management
• Docs and wikis
• Team chat
• Whiteboards
• Enterprise search

Also wired into this category: Email Security.