Nexthink CEO: AI agents to enable ‘personal IT manager’ for every worker

Amid the hype around AI’s productivity potential, many businesses still face slow adoption among their employees. Pedro Bados, CEO and co-founder of Nexthink, believes that digital employee experience (DEX) tools could help close that gap by giving companies insights into how staffers actually use generative AI (genAI) assistants.

AI will influence Nexthink’s products in a variety of ways, according to Bados. Automated agents will be carrying out routine IT tasks, he said, freeing up IT teams to take on more strategic work. 

AI has been central to Nexthink’s business since its inception. Two decades ago, the company spun out of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where Bados studied. “We were born as an AI company, probably 20 years too early,” he said. 

Pedro Bados, cofounder and CEO of Nexthink.Nexthink

With expertise across the company, Nexthink moved quickly to integrate large language models (LLMs) after the first version of ChatGPT arrived three years ago.

Now majority-owned by Vista Equity following a deal last month valuing the company at $3 billion, Nexthink is entering the next chapter in its journey, Bados told Computerworld. The investment will enable further expansion of its operations as Nexthink works to bring DEX into the mainstream.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How are you building AI into Nexthink’s products? And how can you help customers to deploy AI to their staff?“There are three areas in which AI has been transformational. With DEX, you have this telemetry — information and insights about how employees are consuming services — so you see all the problems and the adoption metrics. When you apply LLMs on top of this data, you can do three things. 

“The most important is that you can take DEX to employees. Before, DEX was for IT departments, but with chatbots or agents nothing prevents an employee from fixing their own problems. An employee would open a ticket, then IT would go to Nexthink to fix it; now an employee can do some of this themselves. We have an agent called Spark which is basically your personal IT manager — we think that every employee will have a personal IT manager ready to help for any application. It’s an immense opportunity.

“The second thing is AI Drive. We understand how people are adopting AI — whether that’s Copilot, ChatGPT,Anthropic, or agents in Salesforce — and can give these metrics to CIOs and  AI leaders: this is how your organization is adopting AI, this is the benchmark, this is what you should do to enhance adoption. It’s a big pain for customers now.

“The third point is we see a democratization of DEX. DEX is not just for digital workplace leaders anymore, but also security and HR teams. Through what we call Assist — a conversational interface on top of our data — HR can say, ‘How many people do I have in this office?’ Or network professionals can say, ‘How many people are having Wi-Fi problems in this particular location?’ Before, you needed to be an expert in DEX, but now you can do this with a conversational interface. 

“So there are these three buckets: take DEX to employees with a personalized IT agent; support AI transformation in your company with AI Drive; and expand DEX to other teams. It’s a huge revolution.”

A lot of the AI market is now moving toward agents. How will Nexthink’s platform evolve as you integrate agents going forward? “First of all, our vision for agents is as ‘helpers.’ We don’t want to replace people, we see it more like the pilot on the plane: you have an autopilot that is doing maybe 80% of the work, but there’s always a pilot supervising, giving feedback, and configuring. We see the job of IT becoming much more about supervising, training, and more strategic, with less busy work. 

“We want to offer a personalized IT manager to every single employee: that mission alone is a roadmap and a journey, because it’s very complicated and very ambitious. 

“We want to convert Assist into a kind of IT coach or professional for IT teams. There are lots of things to do there: we need to integrate data to make sure it’s very knowledgeable.  

“You can call them an IT agent for employees and an IT agent for IT professionals and those two missions are going to take us a few years.”

Whatare  the biggest challenges that organizations face around tracking digital employee experience? And what benefits do your customers typically see when they deploy Nexthink? “The No. 1 challenge that they are facing issupport costs increasing, so they want to automate. They don’t want to wait for the employees to report problems, and when they do report problems, they want to automate the resolution and fix it right away.

“They get around a 50% to 80% reduction in support costs [with Nexthink’s platform]. They get probably 20% to 30% cost reduction in hardware, because they see how computers are used, so they can optimize the refresh cycle of the computers. And they get about 20% to 30% cost reduction in the software metric, because they can see which applications are used, which are not used, and how to optimize them. 

“That’s one of the reasons why DEX is growing so fast.”

Vista will take a majority share in Nexthink in a deal that values the company at around around $3 billion. What does this say about Nexthink’s business and, more broadly, about demand for DEX applications? “Vista is probably No. 1 in enterprise SaaS in the world right now in terms of private equity, private capital. They have more than 100 software companies and have a really good radar on emerging trends and what enterprises will need in the next few years. They see the opportunity of digital employee experience because it’s something that customers are investing in. 

“They came to us and we were talking for a few months. We didn’t want to do an IPO in the short term because we are still going through a transformation: we are investing, and we don’t want to go under the scrutiny of public investors and things like that right now. I think we’ll be ready in three or four years.  We thought it was better to continue being private because of the innovation we are putting out there and because of the freedom it gives us.’

Will the deal involve fresh additional capital that can be used to invest in Nexthink’s business and operations? If so, where would that money be directed? “First of all, the company is profitable with a strong cash flow, so we have enough to invest and to continue investing in the future. With these additional investors, we have more ability to raise debt, to have additional capital for M&A, to open new markets that we were maybe limited from doing before. 

“We just opened the Japanese market in April, and we opened the federal market in the US — also a big market —earlier this year. We are very present in Europe and in the US so the idea is to expand and to continue investing in all these areas.”Nexthink CEO: AI agents to enable ‘personal IT manager’ for every worker – ComputerworldRead More