DAVID MARIO SMITH, FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL ANALYST
The digital workplace is being rebuilt around AI agents.
I have covered collaboration and the workplace for over two decades, sixteen of them as a Gartner analyst and then as Research Director at Aragon Research. InFlow Analysis is where I do that work independently, with no vendor scorecards to defend and no seat licenses to sell.
16 years
Gartner
Gartner
Research Director
Aragon Research
Aragon Research
Coverage
Digital Workplace, CX and EX
Digital Workplace, CX and EX
Focus
Agentic AI in knowledge work
Agentic AI in knowledge work
HOW I WORK
Two kinds of people call me.
The questions run in opposite directions. One side is trying to be understood, the other is trying to see clearly. Both need someone with no product to sell.
FOR TECHNOLOGY VENDORS
You need someone who knows your category well enough to tell you where you're wrong.
- Analyst briefings and ongoing advisory retainers
- Positioning and messaging pressure-tested before launch
- Commissioned research and third-party perspective
- Webinars, panels, and launch commentary
FOR ENTERPRISE TEAMS
You're being sold agentic AI. Someone should tell you which parts are real.
- Vendor landscape reviews and shortlist validation
- Collaboration and digital workplace strategy
- Adoption planning, the part most programs get wrong
- Workshops and executive briefings
COVERAGE
Where I spend my attention.
01
Digital workplace and EX
Employee experience, the tooling stack, and what actually changes how people work.
02
Customer experience
CX has become the rallying workflow across the industry. Contact center, journey orchestration and the zero-repeat standard.
03
Collaboration platforms
The Zoom, Teams and Slack ecosystems, and the consolidation pressure reshaping them.
04
Agentic AI and orchestration
Where autonomous agents genuinely change work, and where governance has to catch up with them.
05
Creative and design platforms
Adobe, Figma and Canva are each racing to own the layer that holds brand context, provenance and model choice. Same architecture problem, different market.
WHY INDEPENDENT
Wide enough to see the pattern, deep enough to be useful.
Large firm research is built to be sold at scale, and it is very good at that. What it is not built for is speed or flexibility.
Sixteen years at Gartner taught me what that model does well. Rigor, breadth, a position you can defend in a board pack. Those are real strengths and I still point people to them. What I add alongside them is speed and flexibility.
I am a T-shaped analyst. I cover the digital workplace as a whole discipline, spanning employee experience, customer experience, business operations, data and AI, and I go deep wherever your question actually sits. That range is what lets me spot a pattern forming in one market before it reaches yours, and it is why I can move with your category in days rather than quarters. You are buying judgment and a working relationship, not a subscription tier.
Two disciplines hold that range together. Systems thinking, which is what lets me look at an enterprise and see one system rather than a set of departments defending separate budgets. And design thinking, which is the thread that actually ties employee experience to customer experience, because both come down to whether someone built the thing around a person or around a process. That is why creative and design platforms sit in my coverage alongside the infrastructure, and why the methodology starts from experience rather than architecture.
The methodology
Every enterprise is paying a Friction Tax. Most of them cannot see it.
Continuous Flow Architecture is how I find it. A Universal Context Layer so an agent arrives already knowing the business it serves. A contextual handoff so no customer has to repeat themselves and no employee starts from scratch. A feedback loop so the system gets better instead of aging. Three pillars underneath, four maturity bands, and a number at the end of it.
It is the reason I can tell a vendor where their story breaks, and tell an enterprise buyer where their estate will break first.
Friction Tax = (Manual Handoffs + Context Loss) × Resolution Time
INSIGHTS
Recent analysis.
Start with a conversation, not a contract.
Tell me what you’re trying to decide. If I’m the right person for it, we’ll talk about how to work together. If I’m not, I’ll say so.