Frontier Watch: Digital Workspace at the Edge

The Workspace Is Becoming an Active Layer, Not a Set of Apps

The digital workspace is becoming an active layer rather than a set of apps. Through early 2026, vendors have begun embedding agentic execution directly into the workspace: Microsoft's 2026 Copilot direction positions it as a "Work IQ" layer that reasons across your mail, files, and tools and carries out multi-step work with visible progress. The shift worth tracking is that the workspace itself begins to understand context, hold goals, and act. Google, Salesforce, and ServiceNow are moving the same way, embedding agents that act across records and documents rather than waiting passively to be opened — which tells you this is a platform shift and not one vendor's feature. The governance, trust, and design questions around an active workspace are still unresolved, which is exactly what marks this as the frontier.

The 6xD Read

This sits within D5, Digital Workers and Workspace, where the environment becomes part of the capability. As the workspace gains context and agency, the design question moves from which apps you provide to how the surface supports judgment and action. Watch the workspace become something leaders configure deliberately rather than simply procure.

Design the Workspace Now, Before Vendor Defaults Decide for You

If you own how your teams work day to day, the early move is to treat the workspace as a capability you design. Shape how agentic tools sit inside your team's surface now, and you set the conditions for productivity before the defaults are decided for you by whatever the vendors happen to ship.

Pull-quotes

1. "Shape how agentic tools sit inside your team's surface now, and you set the conditions before the defaults are decided for you."