Grant Gross at CIO.com has written a sharp piece on AI's imminent disruption of the office productivity suite — Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace included. The argument: the $58 billion office productivity market has been essentially unchanged since the 1990s, and AI is about to end that three-decade stasis.
The article covers the full picture: new interface paradigms (voice, canvas-based UX), the rise of specialised add-on tools following a Grammarly-style model, and the advice for CIOs trying to navigate the transition without getting locked in. It is a useful read for anyone thinking about where enterprise software is heading.
Skimle co-founder Olli Salo is quoted in the piece on what this shift means in practice:
"I would consider what new types of knowledge can be created with the help of LLMs. AI can understand text and meaning and opens new avenues for understanding and structuring qualitative data at scale."
And on the incumbents:
"AI represents a new era for competition, and the cards are being dealt again. For understandable reasons, the old Microsoft Office products have not really evolved for a decade, and their AI Copilot efforts have been lackluster. So while formats like .docx, .xls and .pptx might remain, the value creation happens on a different layer."
That last point is where we spend most of our time at Skimle. The document formats may persist. What changes is what you can do with the content inside them — and for researchers, consultants, and HR teams sitting on hundreds of interviews, survey responses, and expert call transcripts, that shift is already happening. Skimle is in the centre of building this "value creation layer" that CIO.com highlights.