Workers are struggling to understand how to best use AI tools for their daily tasks due to a widening disconnect between employers and their employees, new research has claimed.

A new study from Mitel found that AI tools are often misaligned with how employees actually work, leading to widespread frustration.

This is leading many workers to bring in their own familiar tools from outside of work, potentially opening up their organisation to security threats and other risks.

The study found 71% of workers admitting to have used non-approved communication tools for work-related purposes, increasing the risk of the likes of data exposure, compliance breaches, cybersecurity threats, and a loss of visibility and control.

A similar proportion (71%) said they felt pressured to just “make it work” with tools not designed for their needs, showing the apparent disconnect or disinterest from senior management.

Overall, while just over half (51%) of workers said they regularly use AI tools, only 37% reported feeling very comfortable using them in their day-to-day work – with 70% saying they felt their organisation does not adequately support AI use.

“Organisations are making significant investments in AI, communication infrastructure, and modernisation,” said Eric Hanson, CMO at Mitel. “Yet more than half of employees report that these tools fall short at the moments that matter most.

“The challenge is not a lack of technology, but a lack of alignment with the realities of work. In fast-moving, high-pressure, and increasingly mobile environments, communication must be immediate, reliable and context-appropriate — or it risks breaking down precisely when it is needed most.”

“Closing the experience gap is now essential to reclaiming control and ensuring that communication investments translate into real-world performance and impact.”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is taking a closer look at Microsoft’s business software empire, launching a strategic market status investigation into the company’s ecosystem.

The probe, which is the fourth since the UK’s digital markets competition regime came into force last year, will determine whether Microsoft should be designated as having strategic market status, which would allow the CMA to implement interventions to support competition.

In March, the CMA announced that the investigation was coming. The regulator was concerned that Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in the cloud.

In the most recent announcement, the CMA said it had “heard that UK customers may not always be able to effectively combine software from Microsoft with that of other providers, limiting their ability to get access to the best products at the most competitive prices.”

Microsoft is no stranger to regulatory friction. In 2025, it described calls from AWS and Google for the UK competition regulator to “intervene and constrain the price” it charges customers to run wares on those rivals’ cloud platforms as “extraordinary and unprecedented.”

Two year prior, Google branded Microsoft’s cloud software licensing a “tax” paid by customers as a penalty for not running Microsoft software on Azure infrastructure. It claims that Microsoft charges up to four times more, for example, to run Windows Server on GCP. AWS has previously moaned about this too.

As well as assessing whether Microsoft is using its position to limit customer choice, the CMA investigation “includes looking at how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft’s business software, giving customers access to AI software across suppliers to best suit their needs.”

Microsoft is pushing Copilot AI into as many Microsoft 365 subscriptions as it can, even creating a new tier, E7, aimed specifically at AI services.

In a statement, Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition – a trade association Microsoft previously dismissed as a Google lobby group – said:

“This investigation needs to be both rapid and conclusive. It must address Microsoft’s unfair licensing practices once and for all, giving the UK cloud market a level playing field and the confidence to innovate and invest for the long term.”

Readers should not expect results anytime soon. It took 21 months for the CMA to publish the results of an investigation into the UK cloud services market, in which it said Microsoft and AWS were using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers. It claimed Microsoft, for example, could have charged UK enterprise customers £500 million more annually to run its wares in AWS and Google clouds than they’d have paid to run them in Azure.

A key concern from that investigation – whether Microsoft’s software licensing practices were reducing competition in cloud services – has informed this one.

This latest inquiry must be completed within nine months, and a decision on designating Microsoft with SMS is scheduled to be reached by February 2027.

For its part, a Microsoft spokesperson said “We are committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market.”

The investigation will be wide-ranging, encompassing productivity applications, operating systems, databases, and security software.

Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, said, “Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft’s position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organisations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices.”

Authorities in the US, Europe, Brazil, South Africa and Japan are also closely monitoring Microsoft’s licensing policies.

For decades, enterprise software has acted as a digital filing cabinet or system of record where human workers painstakingly log the daily operations of a business. Now, Oracle wants to flip that dynamic, turning its software into an autonomous engine that does the work itself.

The move hinges on what the tech industry is calling agentic artificial intelligence (AI), where software agents with the ability to reason and collaborate can execute multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention.

Speaking on the sidelines of Oracle AI World Tour Singapore, Rondy Ng, Oracle’s executive vice-president for applications development, noted that enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are evolving from passive repositories of data into autonomous systems of outcome that execute tasks based on high-level business goals.

However, Ng made it clear that Oracle’s latest AI innovations are exclusively reserved for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, such as Oracle Fusion, which is used by about 70% of its applications’ customer base. Legacy, on-premise product lines remain in maintenance mode.

“When people deployed those legacy applications from the past, they were heterogeneous,” he said. “They were not standard processes.

“If you have data demarcated in different ways, you can build agents to recognise all the differences, but the effort of doing that and the likelihood of making mistakes and hallucinations are higher.

“But if you’re on a relatively clean slate, you get faster results, better accuracy and more automation,” added Ng. “Our strategy is for people to go to SaaS. When you’re on SaaS, you can deploy AI much more efficiently.”

Solvimon says companies are adopting more complex pricing models as AI changes how software is billed. According to the billing platform, usage-based charges have risen sevenfold since 2025.

Its data points to a shift away from flat monthly fees and seat-based pricing towards combinations of subscriptions and consumption-based charges. The fastest-growing software and AI businesses now use nearly five pricing structures on average, up from three over the past year.

That shift is putting pressure on finance teams as AI products create value in ways that do not fit neatly into older billing systems. Businesses are trying to bill for credits, tokens, usage and outcome-based measures alongside standard subscriptions, increasing the risk of invoicing errors and missed revenue.

A Bain & Company analysis of more than 30 established SaaS vendors found that 65% have already introduced hybrid pricing, adding AI usage or outcome metrics to traditional seat-based models. Solvimon argues that the spread of these structures is making billing one of the more fragile parts of the revenue cycle for companies with expanding product lines and more tailored commercial contracts.

Research from MGI found that SaaS companies can lose between 1% and 5% of annual recurring revenue each year through billing leakage caused by errors that repeat in each billing cycle until detected. For chief financial officers, that is bringing greater scrutiny to systems once treated as back-office tools rather than strategic infrastructure.

A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced “challenges” in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure.

In a report published last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that “while the VA identified its five most widely used software vendors with the highest quantity of licenses installed, it faced challenges in determining whether it was purchasing too many or too few of these software licenses.”

The GAO said that for fiscal 2025, the VA planned to spend about $985 million on software, including commercial software licenses.

In 2015, the GAO identified “the management of software licenses as a focus area” for the VA in a high-risk report.

Another GAO report in January 2024 said the VA should track licenses in use within its inventories and compare them with purchase records.

The VA agreed with the recommendations and – as the latest report states – had taken “preliminary actions” to track software license usage and was due to implement initial functionality for a centralised software license inventory in late March 2026.

“If successful, this could be a critical first step in improving the department’s ability to track and analyse licenses across the department. Implementation of these recommendations would allow VA to identify opportunities to reduce costs on duplicate or unnecessary licenses,” it said.

Before that system went live, the GAO remained concerned that “VA was not tracking the appropriate number of licenses for each item of software currently in use.”

The GAO notes the VA “did not compare inventories of software licenses that were currently in use to purchase records on a regular basis.”

The GAO was also concerned with “restrictive software licensing practices” from vendors, which it defined as “any software licensing agreements or vendor processes that limit, impede, or prevent agency efforts to use software in cloud computing.”

The GAO has tracked progress on this issue since an earlier report in November 2024. It found restrictive software licensing practices affected federal agencies’ cloud computing efforts, including those of VA.

“These practices either increased costs of cloud software or services or limited the department’s options when selecting cloud service providers. VA had not established guidance for effectively managing impacts from restrictive practices for cloud computing or determined who is responsible for managing these impacts,” it said.

The GAO said that “fully assessing software licenses and effectively managing impacts from restrictive licensing practices at VA is an issue of vital importance.”

However, it said that the VA had not fully implemented recommendations from earlier reports.

“If the department continues to experience the challenges we have previously identified and does not take further actions to address our recommendations, it may jeopardise its ability to effectively manage its software licenses that provide critical services to veterans,” said the report.

VA told the GAO it expected to implement additional actions to address the recommendations by September 30, 2026. As of March 2026, VA had not provided an update on the status of the working group, the report said.