Digital Transformation Tools for the Modern Workplace

Digital transformation tools are software and technology platforms that modernize business operations, automate repetitive tasks, and improve both employee and customer experiences. They include cloud infrastructure, CRM, ERP, business communications, project management, and AI, with each category supporting a different part of your business.

The right technology stack depends on your business goals, existing workflows, and the operational challenges you need to solve, not on chasing every new platform that enters the market. Use this guide to understand the different types of digital transformation tools and build a tech stack that fits your business needs.

What Are Digital Transformation Tools?

Digital transformation tools help companies augment technology to improve processes and deliver increased value. A digital tool is an essential component of digital transformation, enhancing communication, collaboration, data security, and productivity within organizations. These tools guide you through a journey of evolving with technology, transforming your workflows, and achieving higher efficiency across the business.

When your environment keeps changing, you need to adapt and evolve consistently. A variety of digital transformation resources, such as software, consulting services, and educational materials, are available to support organizations in their transformation efforts. For enterprises, digital transformation aims to enhance the end-user experience and employee productivity.

This transformation can include migrating data to a cloud service, adopting new AI technologies for process automation, and other changes that improve the current setup and processes. Ongoing transformation efforts are necessary to ensure a successful digital transformation and sustained business growth.

Types of Digital Transformation Tools

Multiple business aspects, both directly and indirectly, affect revenue. Digital transformation tools streamline these aspects using new approaches and initiatives. The most effective digital transformation tools are those that support business goals and drive measurable improvements.

The table below compares the main categories of digital transformation tools to help you identify the solutions that best fit your business.

Category	Top tools	Key features	Pricing tier
Communication and collaboration	Nextiva, Microsoft Teams, Slack	Team messaging, voice calling, video meetings, file sharing, integrations	Entry to enterprise
Video conferencing	Nextiva Video, Zoom, Google Meet	HD meetings, screen sharing, breakout rooms, recordings	Entry to enterprise
Project management	Asana, Jira, Notion	Task management, timelines, collaboration, reporting	Entry to enterprise
Collaborative workspaces	Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Notion	Document collaboration, cloud storage, productivity apps	Entry to enterprise
Internal wikis	Confluence, Guru, Notion	Knowledge management, documentation, employee onboarding	Entry to enterprise
Unified communications (UCaaS)	Nextiva, RingCentral, Zoom Workplace	Business phone, messaging, video, SMS, unified communications	Business to enterprise
Live chat	Nextiva Live Chat, Intercom, Zendesk Messaging	Live chat, AI chatbots, omnichannel support, lead capture	Business to enterprise
Cloud infrastructure	AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud	Cloud computing, storage, networking, scalability	Pay-as-you-go
Customer relationship management (CRM)	Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM	Sales, marketing, customer service, automation	Free to enterprise
Enterprise resource planning (ERP)	SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365	Finance, HR, supply chain, inventory management	Enterprise
Business intelligence and analytics	Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker	Dashboards, reporting, data visualization, analytics	Professional to enterprise
AI and machine learning	Nextiva AI, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise	AI-powered customer communications, meeting summaries, workflow automation, content generation	Business to enterprise

Let’s look at various types of digital transformation tools that work to streamline various business aspects. These tools play a key role in supporting digital transformation initiatives within organizations, enabling them to adopt new strategies and technologies for better outcomes.

By using these solutions, organizations can streamline business processes across the organization for greater efficiency and effectiveness. The sections below explore each category in more detail.

Communication and collaboration software

Communication is the core of any business, directly impacting productivity, performance, and social capital. Social capital represents the shared values and resources that enable individuals to collaborate toward a common goal.

Traditional communication tools, like emails, present some challenges to businesses. For example, they’re uneditable. For better communication, you need a transparent solution (like customer relationship management software like Salesforce or HubSpot) to help employees understand the context of communications and avoid miscommunication.

Communication and collaboration tools provide real-time messaging features to facilitate the exchange of information for swift decision-making. These tools feature file sharing, mentions, and platform integrations, making it easier for teams to sync across various platforms. Improved collaboration is a key benefit, as these tools support better teamwork and communication.

These platforms help teams streamline communications while collaborating on tasks and projects, creating a digital workplace that enhances productivity and efficiency. Marketing teams, for example, use cloud-based communication and collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to discuss campaign ideas asynchronously. These cloud-based solutions are essential for supporting remote and hybrid work environments.

Related: How to Approach Enterprise Digital Transformation in the Age of AI

Digital employee experience tools

Employee experience tools enhance how employees interact with technology and their work environment. These tools focus on improving productivity, engagement, and satisfaction by providing easy access to applications, resources, and support.

Digital employee experience tools enable IT teams to support a distributed workforce and their digital transformation strategy, including device management, performance monitoring, and automated issue resolution.

They often include features like personalized dashboards, feedback mechanisms, and integrated communication channels, helping organizations create a more connected and efficient digital workplace. Companies can accelerate digital transformation efforts and foster a positive work culture that supports employee well-being and performance.

Video conferencing tools

Video conferencing software gained mainstream adoption in 2020, as it enabled face-to-face interactions, including remote meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions. This software increased in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic, when many teams began working remotely. Before the pandemic, sales teams utilized these tools extensively to connect with clients who were globally distributed.

Internal and client-facing teams currently utilize these tools to communicate with one another, partners, or clients.

Video conferencing apps, such as Zoom or Google Meet, offer numerous features that cater to the needs of these teams. 

• Screen sharing: You can share your screen with all meeting participants, keeping everyone on the same page.
• Recording capabilities: Video conferencing software has recording features that make it easier to revisit a discussion after a meeting. Many AI tools have made using these recordings easier by generating meeting minutes that you can share with participants.
• Breakout rooms: You can easily divide meeting participants into smaller groups using breakout rooms, where they can collaborate as focused teams and return to the meeting whenever they’re ready.

These tools are ideal for businesses with remote or hybrid work settings, as well as for clients

Project management tools

When working on a project with multiple variables, timelines, people, deliverables, and processes, effectively keeping track of everything can be tricky. Your spreadsheet software will only help you to a certain extent when the number of variables increases.

Project management tools are invaluable in such situations. These apps make it easy to organize tasks and deadlines, fostering effective communication with project teams. They also simplify task delegation, progress tracking, file sharing, and milestone management, while keeping people and workflows aligned toward project completion. A key feature of these platforms is resource allocation, which ensures that tasks are assigned efficiently and project oversight is maintained.

Project management tools facilitate collaboration across the organization and within specific working groups. Transparency, security controls, and documentation all help close the loop. Additionally, these tools offer valuable insights that support informed decision-making and improved project outcomes.

Below are some notable project management tools on the market.

• Asana: Good for creative and marketing teams
• Notion: Best for founders and startups
• Jira: Good for software engineers
• Rocketlane: Best for customer success managers
• Basecamp: Good for marketing managers
• Hive: Best for graphic designers

Using these project management tools, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency through streamlined workflows and improved collaboration.

This classification is based on the job titles of reviewers of specific products on G2.

Collaborative workspaces

Collaborative workspaces let users work together on the same document, sheet, or board. This software enables efficient and effective collaboration with others while preventing version control issues.

You can share a Google Docs link with your team, and they can work on the same document simultaneously. Collaborative workspace features often overlap with those of video conferencing software, such as whiteboards. In video conferencing meetings, participants can collaborate to share and illustrate their ideas.

A collaborative workspace is a good fit for your business if you rely heavily on document-based collaboration and work in a remote or hybrid setting. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 offer numerous collaborative workspace solutions that you can explore to find the one that best fits your needs.

Social intranet platforms or internal wikis

Social intranet platforms, also known as internal wikis, utilize social feeds and employee forums to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees. These tools are designed to enhance employee engagement by facilitating easier connections, communication, and participation in the company culture. They serve as an organization’s internal knowledge repository and assist with employee onboarding.

You can use these platforms to share company news, updates, and internal documentation to guide your people in following set processes. Human resources teams often manage these processes, ensuring smooth onboarding and efficient access to important information. Using this software, you can share employee awards and recognize people for their achievements, improving your team’s morale.

Confluence is an excellent example of this type of software. It helps you keep internal documentation, updates, and news accessible to authorized people.

Unified communications software

Unified communication consolidates conversations from various internal channels, including VoIP phone calls, video conferencing, messaging, and email, into a single interface. This simplifies communication management and empowers your team to be more attentive and focused on internal discussions.

Bringing channels together prevents critical communications or expected actions from slipping through the cracks. It also streamlines internal communication for teams.

Nextiva’s Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) is a reliable platform with an uptime of 99.999%. It maintains a trust page that shows the availability of all systems. 

Live chat software

Live chat software enables businesses to provide real-time support to website visitors. People who land on your website can communicate their needs via chat to get the support and assistance they need.

This accelerates the resolution of visitors’ queries, improving customer experience on your website. By providing timely support, live chat solutions also contribute to customer retention by encouraging repeat business and building loyalty.

Nextiva’s live chat solution plugs AI into the chat feature, reducing the response time for visitor queries. Chat responses take an average of four minutes to solve and cost $20. With AI, you can respond instantaneously and lower your business costs.

Many live chat solutions encourage visitors to submit their details, resulting in lead capture and the collection of valuable customer data. This customer data helps improve support and sales by centralizing information for better relationship management.

Website chat solutions ask questions to encourage visitors to share what they need and to provide more context with additional information. It gives your inbound teams the necessary details to qualify leads and prioritize sales efforts for more effective customer acquisition.

Related: How to Add Live Chat to Your Website (Plus Best Practices)

Cloud infrastructure platforms

Cloud infrastructure platforms provide the foundation for digital transformation by replacing on-premises servers with scalable, cloud-based computing resources. They allow organizations to store data, host applications, and access business systems from anywhere without investing in additional physical infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud also makes it easier to scale operations as business needs change, strengthen disaster recovery, and support remote and hybrid work environments. As more business applications move online, cloud infrastructure becomes the foundation that allows other digital transformation tools to work together smoothly. Popular cloud providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software

Customer relationship management (CRM) software brings customer information, sales activities, marketing campaigns, and support interactions into a single platform. Instead of storing customer data across multiple spreadsheets or disconnected applications, teams work from one shared source of information.

As part of a digital transformation strategy, CRM software helps organizations improve collaboration between departments, automate routine sales and service processes, and deliver more personalized customer experiences. Having a complete view of the customer also enables businesses to make faster decisions and build stronger long-term relationships.

Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, and Zoho CRM are among the most widely used CRM platforms.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software

ERP software connects core business functions such as finance, procurement, inventory, supply chain management, and human resources within a single system. By centralizing operational data, ERP platforms eliminate duplicate processes and improve visibility across the organization.

Instead of each department working with separate software and disconnected data, ERP systems create standardized workflows that support better planning, reporting, and resource management. This allows businesses to operate more efficiently as they expand into new markets, locations, or product lines. Leading ERP solutions include SAP, Oracle NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Business intelligence and analytics tools

Digital transformation generates large volumes of business data, but that information only becomes valuable when organizations can turn it into meaningful insights. Business intelligence (BI) tools collect data from multiple systems and present it through dashboards, reports, and visualizations that are easy to understand.

Popular business intelligence platforms include Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Looker. These platforms help decision-makers monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), identify trends, measure business performance, and uncover opportunities for improvement. Instead of relying on manual reporting, teams can access real-time insights that support faster and more informed business decisions.

AI and machine learning tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools have become an important part of digital transformation by helping organizations automate repetitive work, analyze large datasets, and improve decision-making. Traditional software follows predefined rules while machine learning models continuously learn from data to recognize patterns and improve their performance over time.

Businesses use AI to summarize meetings, generate content, assist customer service teams, analyze customer behavior, forecast demand, and automate routine workflows. By reducing manual effort and surfacing actionable insights, AI allows employees to focus on higher-value work while improving operational efficiency.

Platforms such as ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Claude are being integrated into modern business workflows. For customer-facing teams, Nextiva XBert helps customer-facing teams automate conversations with AI-powered call routing, conversation summaries, customer sentiment analysis, and CRM insights.

Where Does AI Fit into Digital Transformation?

Businesses are eager to explore how AI can enhance their processes and systems, ultimately leading to improved efficiency. Intelligent automation, powered by AI and machine learning, is a key driver of digital transformation, streamlining operations and enabling smarter workflows.

The data suggest that almost half of companies today already use AI in at least one business function.

Source: Exploding Topics

Below are some ways AI tools accelerate digital transformation, including their ability to automate repetitive tasks and improve overall productivity.

Improve collaboration

AI makes conversations more efficient and contextually accurate. Based on the data it acquires, AI helps write messages (or emails), thereby saving time for internal or external communication.

In video conferencing, AI summarizes meeting minutes, helping participants absorb the essence of a discussion while keeping them accountable for their actions. Here’s an example of how Reelay summarizes meeting minutes for enterprises using AI.

Source: Reelay

Personalize communications

AI uses employees’ interests and roles to help curate news and updates on their social intranet platforms. The algorithms track employees’ activity and adapt in real-time to deliver relevant content, thereby improving their work experience.

Intelligent algorithms track individual activity and preferences to curate a tailored hub for every employee. Personalized intranets adapt in real-time to map relevant content to each user, providing a smarter work experience.

Some businesses also use AI chatbots on their intranet to streamline internal communication and processes. In addition to chatbots, digital adoption platforms offer interactive in-app guidance and tutorials, enabling employees to adapt to new software.

Digitalization tools further automate internal processes, enhancing efficiency and productivity. These bots manage the high volume of IT questions people ask daily, reducing the number of tickets the IT or HR department needs to respond to and keeping them focused on more critical support queries.

For example, payroll management tools automate employee payment processes, reducing HR workload and ensuring compliance.

Expedite customer service

On the customer side, live chat solutions powered by AI provide relevant suggestions for troubleshooting steps, offering real-time insights that enable support teams to respond quickly and accurately.

They guide visitors to helpful knowledge base articles and promote self-service, while also enabling businesses to derive insights from customer interactions to improve their support strategies.

Customer experience improves with faster solutions. These AI chatbots can often hand a communication over to a live agent when the query becomes too complex or when the customer urgently wishes to speak to a human. This transfer is smooth and doesn’t cause friction in the interaction. With these solutions, businesses can enhance customer experiences through faster, more personalized support.

Related: 5 Incredible Examples of Successful Digital Transformation

Achieve Digital Transformation Success With Nextiva

The tools above can improve your processes and systems, but technology alone won’t drive successful digital transformation. Every new tool changes the way people work, making change management a critical part of your overall digital transformation strategy.

While many businesses use separate tools for communication, collaboration, and customer support, unified platforms combine these functions into a single solution. For example, Nextiva brings together UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) on one platform:

• UCaaS: Connects internal communication through voice calling, video meetings, team chat, and SMS from a single interface.
• CCaaS: Brings customer interactions across voice, live chat, SMS, and AI-powered routing into one platform while connecting each conversation to customer records and CRM data.

By combining UCaaS and CCaaS, businesses can reduce app switching, simplify technology management, and give employees the context they need to deliver faster, more consistent customer service.

If business communications are part of your digital transformation strategy, a unified platform like Nextiva can replace multiple standalone communication tools with a single solution that scales as your business grows.

Related: Best Digital Transformation Companies & Their Key to Success