Workvivo HQ: a significant upgrade

Workvivo is becoming Workvivo HQ with significant feature and AI upgrades at no extra cost. Arriving alongside this is HQ Agent, an enterprise-wide agentic AI layer. We’ve had an early look, and we like what we see.

This is a bigger move than a rebrand. It’s a statement of intent about where Workvivo wants to sit in your organisation. We think it’s the right move.

From employee experience layer to central digital destination

Workvivo wants to be more than an employee experience destination. It wants to be the single place people go to communicate, find answers and get work done. We like the “HQ” branding here. It’s easy for us-them gaps to open between employees who work in ‘head office’ and those that don’t. Workvivo HQ is a statement of intent that the HQ is for everyone. We think that’s a smart bet, and a more powerful position to compete from than employee engagement alone.

What’s actually launching

It’s worth being clear about the two things being announced, because they’re easy to blur together.

Workvivo HQ is the upgraded Workvivo platform

Customisable homepages, vastly expanded custom widgets and AI woven throughout: catch-me-up summaries, AI-assisted content creation with tone-of-voice controls, new widget builders, summaries of livestreams you missed, even news articles turned into podcasts for people on the move.

No extra charge.  Expect rollout between Sept-Jan

To Workvivo

HQ Agent is the paid add-on, and it’s the part that goes further

This is the agentic layer: “full enterprise search” across connected systems like Workday, ServiceNow, Google Drive and Salesforce, the ability to retrieve answers from outside Workvivo, and the ability to take action — booking a day off, raising a request, triggering a workflow — without leaving the platform. It runs on the mobile app too, so the frontline isn’t an afterthought. And because it’s powered by Zoom’s AI engine, the AI is native to the platform rather than bolted on after the fact. At a list price of $3 per user we think this is very positive from a cost and infosec POV.

Two things we love

A few of these changes stand out as real, practical wins.

1. Configurable homepages and the ability to create different landing pages for different audiences is something customers have wanted for a long time. A frontline worker, a head-office team and an operating company can each land somewhere that’s built for them, rather than everyone funnelling through the same generic front door. That’s a meaningful upgrade to the day-to-day experience.

2. We also rate the ambition to bring AI to everyone. Most enterprise AI has landed in the hands of knowledge workers. The cost of premium licences means that’s where it tends to stop. Workvivo putting enterprise-wide AI in front of all users, frontline included, at a $3 per user per month list price, is a different proposition entirely. Workvivo deserves real credit for trying to democratise this rather than ration it.

 Usual caveats apply: we’ve not seen it in action yet. But if Zoom continues to develop its AI engine at the same rate Workvivo develops its platform then this looks like an absolute bargain.

Two things we want to see

1. An uncompromising focus on the search experience

 Here’s where our enthusiasm comes with a clear expectation. If Workvivo is going to position itself as the central place - the HQ - then search cannot be a feature. It has to be the foundation.

Search is where trust in your platform begins (and ends). That means relevance you can rely on, results that respect each person’s permissions, and an answer that knows the difference between current information and content that’s gone stale. Bringing AI to everyone is the right instinct; it only pays off if the experience underneath it is genuinely good. We’ll be watching the search experience, and the wider user experience around it, very closely. The (search) bar is high and unforgiving.

2. More choice means more complexity. Make admins’ lives easy

The flip side of all this power and customisability is complexity. Configurable homepages, multiple audience-targeted landing pages, a growing set of connected systems and agentic actions that reach into them: that’s a lot of capability, and a lot to govern.

If Workvivo is offering a central place, then it needs to be well governed, and the admin experience needs to be properly easy. The real test isn’t whether HQ looks great for end users. It clearly will. It’s whether the people configuring it, securing it and keeping it tidy are given the tooling to do that without it becoming a second job. Admin experience has been a Workvivo weak point for a while now. HQ needs to be as good for its admins as it is for its users.

Want a sneak peek?

As Workvivo partners, we get access to HQ and HQ Agent as it’s being built, ahead of general availability. That means we can offer sneaky-peek demos from July onwards and walk you through what’s coming before it lands.

If you’d like to see Workvivo HQ and HQ Agent in action, and talk through what they could mean for your organisation, get in touch with us.

What’s next?

Both HQ and HQ Agent are expected to launch in September, so the Workvivo team has a busy few months ahead. We’ll bring you hands-on experience as soon as we have it.