Enhancing digital workplace experiences with AI ft. Sangeeta Roy

“The future of work is now,” remarks Sangeeta Roy, VP of Digital Work Experience at Zuora, as she discusses on how AI is revolutionizing workplace experiences and enterprise operations in our latest episode of Atomic Conversations with Lenin Gali, Chief Business Officer at Atomicwork.

Sangeeta is a veteran digital transformation leader and has been at the forefront of enhancing both employee and customer experiences for around three decades.

As a valued Atomicwork customer, Sangeeta takes us through Zuora’s journey in implementing AI for their modern workspace, offering unique, battle-tested insights along the way.

Tune into the conversation here or read the highlights below.

Navigating the complexities of digital wokplaces

Given her wealth of experience, Sangeeta has closely witnessed how organizations naturally accumulate technologies, processes, and complexities as they grow.

“More and more employees are demanding a seamless, frictionless work experience. But because we have so many technologies, it has introduced friction again in the workplace,” Sangeeta explains.

The digital work experience challenge has fundamentally shifted from a lack of information to an overabundance of it.

“We have reached a point where information is not the scarcity. What is the scarcity? How do we get to the information that we need at the right time, at the right place and with accuracy?” said Sangeeta.

She emphasizes that a truly great digital work experience ensures that employees don’t even realize they’re going through a process; they just get things done.

This is where AI becomes transformative.

We’ve talked about the future of work for a very long time as something that’s going to happen in the future, but the future of work is now. AI is changing how we work, live, play, learn, and all of that.

Zuora’s main goal: Empowering employees

When Zuora began transforming its digital workplace experience, it had clear goals centered around empowering employees.

“We need to give some sort of a self-service mechanism by which our employees can search for information reliably and find it in a timely manner and be able to take action,” said Sangeeta.

Their journey started with ITSM, which they saw as “foundational to everything else that we needed to set up.” Moving away from fragmented systems like JIRA Service Management, they aimed to build an enterprise-grade platform where self-service is not just a feature but a way of working.

Zuora established ambitious targets: achieve 90%+ accuracy in AI responses, establish effective self-service information search, reduce case volume by 80% through AI, and expand to an enterprise-wide solution.

The partnership with Atomicwork emerged from a strong alignment in vision. “Your vision for your product and your roadmap was, I would say, 80%, 90% aligned to what we are still trying to get done,” said Sangeeta.

While AI was always central to their roadmap, Zuora had previously struggled with other solutions. The challenges of hallucination and inaccurate responses from “single model” approaches had hampered adoption. Atomicwork’s “multimodal approach to how the responses are managed” created a “big shift in getting adoption” through improved accuracy.

Tackling the AI implementation journey

Implementing AI at an enterprise level comes with unique challenges, particularly around data security, privacy, and content accuracy. Sangeeta emphasizes the importance of patience during this transformation.

“Patience is extremely important. We had to adjust our goals because we didn't know how long it would take to stabilize,” said Sangeeta.

The journey revealed unexpected needs across multiple dimensions.

They had to rethink about their:

• Testing methodologies: Because traditional testing proved insufficient. As Sangeeta noted, “We didn't actually know how to test. It is not like standard application testing.”
• Content management processes: Which required answering fundamental questions like ‘Who manages our knowledge? Who's monitoring it, who's maintaining it?’
• Feedback mechanisms: Analytics and feedback loops became critical infrastructure as Sangeeta explained, “In order for us to manage the AI agent effectively, we need to understand exactly what it is doing correctly and what it is not.”

The truth is that AI adoption isn’t plug-and-play. From setting the right expectations to rethinking content management strategy, it’s a deep organizational shift.

For example, her team developed a prompt regression suite of over 150 questions to ensure AI accuracy. This evolved into a feedback loop between Zuora’s teams and Atomicwork’s product roadmap.

The Atomicwork-Zuora partnership succeeded because of their shared willingness to navigate this uncharted territory together.

“We are going through this humongous transformation phase. And so, we needed to find a partner who would really work with us as we go through our journey,” said Sangeeta.

What ultimately made the difference was Atomicwork's responsiveness.

What I was very impressed with is the speed at which Atomicwork addresses our problems. That customer centricity, which is very important for us, when we met you guys and saw that same approach to work, that was the point where everything clicked.

What’s next in the digital workplace transformation roadmap?

While Zuora has made significant progress in its digital workplace transformation, Sangeeta sees much more ahead.

“Agentic AI is the next evolution. We are still responsive to prompts. And over time, we want to get to a point where we are doing things proactively; and maybe autonomously at some point,” she said.

The vision remains clear: remove workplace friction so employees can work efficiently without even realizing the technology enabling them.

Our ultimate goal is really to remove all kinds of friction from the workplace so that as an employee, including myself and everybody else, we come into work, and we get done what we need to get done in the fastest, quickest, most efficient way possible.

Transformations don’t happen overnight

For organizations beginning their AI journey, Sangeeta offers valuable guidance.

She encourages IT leaders to:

• Ensure data privacy and security fundamentals are in place
• Establish an accurate, well-managed knowledge base
• Secure top-down support with proper expectations
• Find the right transformation partners whose vision aligns with your goals
• And finally, practice patience through learning and stabilization phases

The Zuora-Atomicwork partnership demonstrates that with the right product, people, and mindset, AI can transform workplace experiences, not overnight, but through thoughtful, collaborative evolution.

To catch all the insights shared by Sangeeta, watch the entire conversation here.