On my first grocery run after Scottsdale, the screen at the entrance of my local H-E-B, a regional grocery chain based in Texas, was showing the same weekly promotion to every shopper, no matter who walked past or why. Somewhere behind the Employees Only doors, I'd bet a break room screen was showing a stocker a safety message or internal announcement. This employee will likely never log into an intranet, and those two screens almost certainly belong to two different departments.
Every organization has a version of that store, where different departments own different pieces of the employee's day and, in most cases, each buys its own software to do its part. Appspace, a Tampa-based software company, builds for that situation, and it has the market recognition to show for it.
For context, here is a little about Appspace. Gartner named Appspace a Leader, the upper-right quadrant, in two Magic Quadrants: the first-ever Magic Quadrant for Workplace Experience Applications in April 2026, and the Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions in 2025. The company reports more than 3,000 customers, including 180 Fortune 500 companies, across 170 countries.
It sells four products: Signage for workplace screens, Intranet for company news and resources, Workspace for booking desks and rooms, and Visitors for checking in guests. Each one usually lands with a different department, and all four run on one shared platform, so what one team publishes or books can shape what another team's product shows.
H-E-B was on my mind for a reason. It is a signature Appspace customer, and Appspace President Holly Brogan cited it in her WOW26 keynote, noting that the chain evaluated more than 20 signage providers before choosing Appspace to reach its stores, warehouses, restaurants, and drive-up pharmacies. And Appspace solved the multi-message, multi-department challenge for H-E-B with a single solution.
So, what is WOW26? It is Appspace's annual workplace experience conference, and in September it brought customers and partners to Scottsdale, Arizona. I was the only analyst invited, and no media were there, so what follows is a view you are unlikely to read anywhere else.
I've worked with Appspace before, moderating a customer council of its large enterprise customers and writing eBooks for the company, and I have watched the workplace experience market closely for years. WOW26 was a field trip for me, a chance to talk with the wider range of customers Appspace serves beyond the big enterprise names I usually meet.
CEO Pete Schmied opened the keynote with the question that framed the entire three-day event: "Who owns the workplace experience in your organization?"
It is a hard question to answer, because in most organizations the workplace experience has no single owner. It is split four ways:
There is no single playbook for who owns the whole. Pete named that gap from the stage and put a price on it. He cited the Workplace Friction Index, research my firm, The Collab Collective, conducted in 2026, which found that a 1,000-person organization can lose up to $9 million a year to time spent coordinating work instead of doing it.
"It's everyone's problem, but it's nobody's job to fix it."
Pete Schmied, CEO, Appspace
Pete framed the event around a theme Appspace calls “The Experience Reset.” In his words, it is "a different set of assumptions" about two things: who owns the experience, and what technology should require of people. For years, employees have adapted to their workplace tools, digging through menus and channels to find what they need. Pete argued that people now expect the reverse: information that finds them, the way AI tools already work in their personal lives. The rest of this article takes each assumption in turn.
In my view, Appspace is answering the ownership question in two ways. First, it hyper-personalizes each of its four core products, shaping each one around the job of the stakeholder most likely to buy it, so HR, communications, facilities, and IT each get a product built for their own work. Second, it is pulling the data those products generate onto one infrastructure, a single data plane that holds the common record of people, spaces, content and activity. In an AI-enabled workplace, that unified data is what makes the platform useful to employees and IT alike.
The H-E-B story Holly told on stage was a signage story, and signage is one of Appspace's four products. The larger story is an enterprise running all four. In July, Appspace organized its platform around those four products, each one giving a different department a clear way in. Whatever a customer adds later connects to what they already own instead of becoming, in Pete's words, "the fifth disconnected thing in the pile."
In a featured customer panel, the head of internal communications at JF Ahern described the cost of the old model. Every new audience group on her current intranet needs IT to build logic against the HR system, and IT takes those requests once a year, in a batch of 20. She expects audience targeting in Appspace to put that decision in the hands of the person who owns the message.
Most organizations I talk to run signage, intranet, space booking and visitor management on four separate tools, or try to stretch a productivity suite to cover all of them. Appspace is betting that department-sized products on one shared data plane beat both approaches, and I think the bet is sound.
My read is that Appspace has moved from cautious to confident on AI. At the customer advisory board I moderated for Appspace in May, customers asked for AI that recommends and lets people approve. At WOW26, AI ran through every demo, with guardrails stated up front: agents act within the user's permissions, keep a full audit trail, and use only the tools an administrator allows.
The steps were visible across the year. In March, Appspace introduced its Custom Assistants Framework, a built-in layer that lets organizations set up AI assistants for specific roles inside the flow of work. Since then, the company has built two ways for customers to use AI on their own terms:
I expect both approaches to become table stakes across workplace software.
For a customer with no single owner, the design lets AI work across teams while inheriting the permissions each team has already set. Back in the H-E-B break room, the stocker will probably never open an AI assistant, but the person writing his safety update might, and the rules that govern her work come along with it.
“Communications in the context of the space” has grown into the context of the person, the place, and the situation
That H-E-B entrance screen is what most of us in the industry know as narrowcasting: a message aimed at a specific screen and audience, set up in advance by someone who guessed well. Situational Signage, announced at WOW26, will let a screen respond to occupancy, visitors, and nearby activity without anyone having to rebuild rules. Appspace says Situational Signage is available only in Appspace, a claim I have not tested.
Picture a rainy afternoon when the H-E-B is packed, and the checkout lines reach back into the cereal aisle. A situational screen at the end of that aisle could tell me the self-checkout wait is 15 minutes and point me to the two staffed lanes that just opened. That is the difference between a screen that knows where it hangs and a screen that knows what is happening around it.
Holly made the frontline case in her keynote: not everybody sits behind a desk, and for many workers the screen in front of them is the only way to reach them. That is where context matters most. A screen in the break room that knows a shift change is coming, or that a safety notice applies only to the warehouse floor, reaches the stocker in a way a static playlist never will.
Appspace applies the same idea to its software with Organic UI, the company's name for an interface (UI) that rearranges itself around the person using it. Instead of fixed menus and modules, the screen brings forward the information, tools and actions that fit a person's role, location and task, and lets the rest recede. Both sit under Appspace Context, the vision the company unveiled in Scottsdale.
I first described communications in the context of the space in a 2022 report called “Welcome to the Hybrid Lobby: A Perspective on Workplace Experience Platforms.” What Appspace showed expands that idea into “communications in the context of the person, the place, and the situation,” and I see it as a healthy evolution of the concept.
The vision Appspace laid out in Scottsdale is sound, and parts of it already have proof points, from H-E-B's rollout to one global customer that moved space booking and signage across 135 offices in 67 countries in six weeks, against a plan of 12 to 18 months. Other parts still have to prove themselves before they become tangible for HR, communications, facilities and IT alike. Each one below comes with the checkpoint I will use to judge it.
The customer owns the ownership gap. Appspace has named the gap, and a platform can make it easier to live with, yet it cannot appoint an owner inside a customer. Pete's answer was that Appspace decided the job was theirs, while the experience itself still belongs to four teams with four budgets and four definitions of success. The managing director of IT at an international law firm, recently formed by merging U.S. and U.K. firms, said as much in the featured customer panel: her IT team is ready to move, but leadership priorities and the merger still set the pace.
Checkpoints: customers on stage next year can name who owns the experience across the products they run, and a customer who came in through one department adds a product that another department owns.
"A platform can make the ownership gap easier to live with, yet it cannot appoint an owner inside a customer."
Craig Durr, The Collab Collective
Meeting people inside other AI tools means giving up some control. BYOM and MCP put Appspace where employees already work, which is the right call for adoption. The tradeoff is that ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot now shapes how that experience looks and how well it answers, and Appspace becomes less visible to the people who decide whether to renew it.
Checkpoint: an organization can confirm that different AI tools return the same Appspace answer under the same permissions, and Appspace can show customers the value it delivered through those tools.
The vision is ahead of the product, by design. Appspace Context, Organic UI and Situational Signage were presented as where the platform is going, and Thomas Philippart de Foy, Chief Design Officer, said the best version will be built together with customers.
Checkpoints: a named customer shows a screen that dynamically changed because all the desks on one floor filled up, with no one republishing it; always-on agents ship with the same permission and audit controls the assistants have today; and a communications lead can customize a newsletter with one content block targeted to a specific field team without filing an IT ticket.
On the way out, I passed the entrance screen again, still showing the same promotion to everyone who walked past. That screen is the workplace experience before the reset, one that asks people to adapt to it.
The reset Pete described has two halves, and Appspace has built much of the technology half: a platform that can reach the shopper at self-checkout, the stocker in the break room and the communications lead waiting a year on IT, all from one data plane and increasingly through the AI tools those people already use.
The ownership half is the one Appspace cannot reset for a customer. Someone inside H-E-B, or inside any customer, still has to make those moments add up to one experience. WOW26 showed me a vendor that has decided the ownership gap is its problem to help solve, and the customers on stage next year will tell me whether they have decided the same.
Disclosure: Travel and hospitality for WOW26 were provided by Appspace. The Collab Collective has an existing working relationship with Appspace. Analysis and opinions are independent.
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