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Live from the Accelerate 2025 Conference, Joel Neeb, Chief Transformation and Business Operations Officer at 8x8, discusses how organizations must adapt for the “insight age,” where competitive advantage comes from curating data and operationalizing insights with AI—not just having access to information. He shares how 8x8 is driving company-wide AI enablement, how OKRs and WorkBoardAI create the focus and alignment required to execute transformation, and how AI-powered workflows, including “digital Chiefs of Staff," will reshape operating cadences and manager effectiveness.
The Challenge
- Cross-functional alignment was largely unverified and inconsistent:
Leaders were told to “go build alignment,” but there was no reliable, evidence-based way to document whether teams were truly connected in execution.
- Critical work was operating in silos (“orphan OKRs”):
Many priorities sat disconnected from other initiatives—effectively behaving like standalone efforts rather than coordinated enterprise outcomes.
- Priority sprawl diluted execution focus:
Teams had too many “important projects,” creating constant pull toward the non-critical 75% instead of concentrating on the critical few.
- Executive operating data lacked standardization for decision-making:
Updates varied by leader, making it difficult to compare progress apples-to-apples and to systematically roll insights up for QBRs, board/earnings preparation, and C-suite action.
The WorkBoardAI Solution
- Alignment became visible and diagnosable:
WorkBoardAI’s alignment views provided an “x-ray” of how work connected across leaders—highlighting clusters, dependencies, and disconnected priorities.
- Radical focus on the critical few:
8x8 used WorkBoardAI and OKRs to set boundaries (“the fence”) and drive the organization to execute faster on a smaller set of top priorities—reducing distraction from lower-priority work.
- Standardized operating rhythm for leadership execution:
Joel mandated a consistent update structure (progress, headwinds, tailwinds, dependencies, next steps), enabling comparable, higher-quality signals across leaders.
- WorkBoard data became fuel for AI-assisted executive reviews:
By centralizing structured OKR updates, 8x8 leaders could analyze recurring headwinds/tailwinds across leaders and use those insights to shape QBR narratives and leadership actions (even before deeper native automation arrives).
Conclusion
By capturing standardized, structured OKR updates in WorkBoardAI, 8x8 was able to feed consistent execution data into AI workflows to identify common headwinds and tailwinds across leaders, strengthen QBR and board-readiness preparation, and translate execution signals into clearer leadership actions. Joel emphasized that these outcomes were already achievable using WorkBoardAI data, but WorkBoardAI’s “digital Chief of Staff” capabilities are expected to make this analysis and follow-through substantially more scalable and self-serve.
