With today’s launch of the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot, I want to delve into why Tonkean invests so much in employee experiences with processes and technology, and why we believe these new innovations are crucial for the future of work.
It’s almost too obvious to point out that software has taken over large organizations. I could drone on about how software has made workers more productive, more capable, more interconnected. That’s all undeniably true.
Also true: When software collides with the messy realities of organizational life, it often makes us miserable. The promise of efficiency gives way to a labyrinth of unfamiliar interfaces and a sea of logins. We spend nearly an hour and a half each day looking for information and switching between applications. We pull our hair out over convoluted approval processes.
The irony. We’ve created an ecosystem of powerful, specialized software solutions, each designed to solve specific problems. Yet collectively, they’ve spawned a new monster: a tangled web of systems that buckles under the weight of real world complexities. Processes that look pristine on paper but crumble in practice. People clinging to their preferred tools. Human nature—our tendencies, our workarounds, our need for flexibility—rebelling against rigid workflows.
This isn't just a technology problem. It's a human problem. And it's one that traditional approaches—more training, more documentation, more stringent enforcement—have failed to solve.
Software has become inextricably woven into our core business processes, particularly those managed by shared-service teams like procurement, legal, IT, and HR. For these functions, their core applications are essential systems of record, workflow engines, and compliance safeguards. For big companies, these platforms are often among the most expensive technology purchases, and the most complex implementations. But there's a catch: in order for back-office teams to derive consistent business value from their tools, they need the employees who request services from them—along with cross-functional stakeholders whose approvals and input they rely on—to use them, too.
A procurement team might build high levels of competency in their procure-to-pay platform, learning it inside and out. But if the employees they serve don't know where to go to submit a purchase request, or if they're intimidated by what they see once they get there, they're going to do what they've always done: reach out directly to someone they know on the procurement team, send an email, or walk up to someone's desk.
This is understandable. It's one thing to learn how to use a new software platform when you're going to be using it every day or every week, and when it’s core to your job function. It's another thing to learn dozens of applications that live way out on the long tail of your usage—apps you might only need to use monthly, quarterly, or a couple of times per year.
Most people hit a tolerance wall when they encounter this complexity, and they look for the easy way out. And let's face it: It's no more ridiculous to ask the marketing team to learn to use an enterprise legal management tool than it is to ask legal to learn the marketing automation platform.
This software adoption gap carries significant costs for enterprises. Work executed outside of normal workflows often lacks proper visibility and compliance guardrails. It makes it impossible to properly load balance and prioritize. Moreover, it frequently results in back-office team members stepping in to do intake on behalf of requesters. This takes them away from the critical work where they add the most value. And it perpetuates the cycle of dependence.
Now consider that most enterprise processes don't live in a single application or team—but rather, require multiple points of intake and complex process flows that demand manual follow-up. In isolation, each instance of process circumvention is annoying. At scale, it's a nightmare for your business, an invisible leech on your people's ability to produce, collaborate, and comply. And by now it is clear: No amount of painstaking change management, training, and documentation will move the needle on that.
With the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with large language models, there's been a surge of excitement about AI's potential to transform the way we work. But can AI truly solve the adoption problem for enterprise processes and help shared service teams move at the speed of business?
While many software companies have been quick to add AI features to their platforms, these often serve fairly narrow purposes: answering a question here, drafting a summary there, generating a report or an image. Even the most well-instrumented AI tools in enterprise software suffer from a fundamental flaw: they help you work faster and smarter—but only within one platform.
For AI to fulfill its promise in enterprise workflows and truly close the experience gap for big orgs, it must meet all of the following criteria:
Today, we're proud to introduce the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot—a suite of capabilities that represents a fundamental shift in how enterprises interface with their technology stacks. By combining the power of AI with robust process orchestration, the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot addresses the challenges of software adoption and process efficiency head-on.
Here's how Enterprise Copilot transforms the enterprise software experience:
By meeting employees where they work, anticipating their needs, guiding them through requests, and automating manual steps, the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot enables organizations to:
With Enterprise Copilot, Tonkean is not just adding another tool to your tech stack—we're offering a unified experience that makes your entire ecosystem more accessible, efficient, and intelligent. We're enabling a future where employees can focus on high-value work; processes run smoothly across boundaries of departments, software tools, and data sources; and enterprises can truly harness the power of their technology investments.
We invite you to join us in reimagining how work gets done in the enterprise. The software renaissance has given us powerful tools; now it's time to make those tools work for everyone.
To learn more about how Tonkean Enterprise Copilot can transform your organization's operations, contact us today.
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