With IBM Watson integration, Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Assistant provides more intelligence than just a normal chatbot.

VMware announced a week before the holidays that the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub Assistant was live and published documentation on how to get started with it. The digital assistant was put forth as part of their employee experience focus, something Citrix is also focusing on.

The digital assistant was originally announced at VMworld U.S. 2019. Let’s see what’s needed to get it setup.

What was announced at VMworld 2019

First, let’s review what we originally knew about the virtual assistant.

As part of their focus toward what VMware is calling Workspace ONE concierge services, they announced that they would be adding a virtual assistant to the Intelligent Hub. Once incorporated into the workspace app, it would be appear to users as a floating button, which when clicked expands into a chatbot messaging screen.

VMware Hub AssistantSCREENSHOT OF VMWARE VIDEO

The virtual assistant, now officially known as the Hub Assistant, uses the well-known, pre-existing digital assistant, IBM Watson, and features natural language processing. VMware product manager Tony Kueh explained to me at VMworld that Watson was chosen because IBM specifically designed it for enterprise use, allowing it to better understand acronyms and technical terms.

While Hub Assistant will likely be used by all employees, VMware’s presentation video showed off how it can make the onboarding process, both before and after an employee joins a company, simpler. It can help answer common new questions employees may have as well help you order the devices you would like to use.

What’s new that we know and how do we get it working?
With the Hub Assistant live, we wanted to see what new information there was about it and also look at how easy it is to actually get it off the ground and ready for employees.

Hub Assistant demo:

How the Hub Assistant works is that the user provides their input (e.g., company info, etc.), either by typing it or speaking and the Watson “dialog” skill interprets the query. The dialog skill gathers the necessary relevant information to provide either an answer or an action. Should the dialog skill be unable to decipher the employee request, it will get routed to the Watson “search” skill.

One new wrinkle we didn’t know at VMworld is that Watson isn’t naturally included as part of Hub Assistant—as in that you just get it as part of enabling the virtual assistant. Rather, organizations must sign up for IBM Cloud to use Watson—luckily, there’s a free Lite account that includes Watson access. (Lite does limit the amount of internal documents that can be accessed.) Organizations also need Workspace ONE Enterprise licenses.

Hub Assistant connects with Workspace ONE Mobile Flows to handle microapp actions, with the digital assistant able to then send user requests to the apps, like ServiceNow for example, and then sends the result back to the user. Mobile Flows is there to help kick off the workflows.

Organizations interested in deploying Hub Assistant will need to enable it through the Hub Services console. Once set up, employees can access the digital assistant from either the Intelligent Hub app itself or a browser. VMware’s documentation around Hub Assistant make it look reasonably simple to get it up and running. It does take a few steps to make it as useful as designed, though.

To start off, in order for the Hub Assistant to effectively answer employee questions, admins will have to configure the Watson search and dialog skills. The search skill allows Hub Assistant to access internal company documents, while the dialog skill determines what the user wants.

To build a search skill, admins will have to go into Watson and go through a brief process (shown here in a four-minute YouTube video) where you connect your internal knowledge library (e.g., a data source can be Salesforce, SharePoint, Box, etc.) to the IBM Watson Discovery service. After, you configure the search skill by telling it how often you want it to sync to your data and other features.

Creating a dialog skill looks a little more involved than the search skill, but IBM has all the steps laid out here. Once built, admins will import the skill into Workspace ONE. VMware documentation does mention that admins can import a pre-configured Workspace ONE dialog skill, so admins don’t necessarily have to build their own, but know that you can. I asked VMware about the pre-configured skill and they said they had trained Watson already and provide the training file to import into the Watson admin file.

Final thoughts
Vendors continue to see the dollar signs around providing improved employee experiences and are working to release products with EX as its focus. The Workspace ONE Hub Assistant is one such example and just one part of what VMware dubbed “concierge services” back at VMworld, alongside other services as Hub Self-Service, Workspace ONE Assist, and the more IT-facing Digital Employee Experience Management.

One aspect of the Hub Assistant release has been how fairly clear VMware has been in what’s needed to get it going. Sometimes, we see interesting new features to products, but it’s a lot of work on the backend by admins to make it functional. Sure, it’ll still take time before you can deploy the Hub Assistant, but the time appears to be measurable in days than compared to weeks or months. Tony spoke about how it would take someone maybe two to three days to get it up and running—and they don’t need to be a developer.

I’d definitely be interested in hearing from anyone who’s helped set up Hub Assistant to learn whether it’s really as easy as it looks!

VMware released results of a global survey examining the digital employee experience — how much it matters, how well organizations are delivering it, and what can be done to improve it. The survey polled employees, HR professionals, and IT decision makers across multiple industries and regions. Its headline finding: enabling a positive digital employee experience — characterized by device choice, seamless app access, and remote work capability — correlates strongly with an organization’s competitive position, revenue growth, and employee sentiment.

“Too often, the conversation about digital transformation focuses on the technology and leaves out a key ingredient to a winning strategy – attracting and retaining the best talent. To compete for the best talent, companies are prioritizing employee experience; which encompasses technology, workstyle and culture. Leaders committed to improving employee experience are adopting the digital workspace, a concept VMware pioneered three years ago. A digital workspace platform fuels modern digital experiences, which our survey revealed as being critically important to current and prospective employees as well as improving other key business outcomes.”

— Shankar Iyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, VMware

Digital Employee Experience Favors Business Growth

Employees’ ability to access the applications and information they need — from any device or location — directly affects their capacity to plan, collaborate, and execute. The VMware survey found that providing a seamless digital experience positively impacts business outcomes including revenue growth, employee morale, and talent acquisition.

Organizations that rank as competitive leaders are significantly more likely to have employees who report a good digital experience at work, compared to those at companies identified as industry “followers.”

A particularly striking data point: 80% of employees at companies experiencing more than 15% revenue growth report they can easily find and install the right app for any new task or process at work. By contrast, only 42% of employees at underperforming or flat-growth companies say the same. This gap suggests that frictionless access to tools is not merely a convenience — it is a measurable business differentiator.

Digital Experience Retains and Attracts Top Talent

Beyond revenue metrics, the survey found that digital employee experience has a significant impact on workforce sentiment and an organization’s ability to recruit.

Respondents whose organizations give them the ability to work from anywhere were considerably more likely to express pride in their employer. Compared to those without location flexibility, they were also more likely to report that their organization:

• Has a progressive culture (71% vs. 28%)
• Is recognized as a top place to work (70% vs. 29%)
• Provides good work-life balance (69% vs. 30%)

On the recruitment side, digital tooling is increasingly a factor candidates weigh before accepting an offer. 73% of survey respondents agreed that the flexibility of tools — including technology choices, apps, and devices — would influence their decision to apply for or accept a position at a company. For organizations competing for skilled technical talent, this finding carries direct hiring strategy implications.

The Gap Between What IT Thinks It Delivers and What Employees Experience

One of the more revealing findings involves the perception gap between IT departments and the employees they serve. The numbers highlight a substantial disconnect:

• 95% of IT decision makers claim they provide employees with the digital tools needed for their jobs.
• Yet 42% of employees (nearly half) say they do not have the digital tools they need.

A similar gap exists around employee voice in technology decisions:

• 83% of IT decision makers say employees have a say in which digital technologies they use.
• But 64% of employees feel they have no voice in those decisions.

Despite these divergent perceptions of delivery quality, both groups agree that improving digital employee experience should be a top organizational priority. 87% of IT respondents and 78% of employee respondents share this view — a rare area of consensus that points to an actionable mandate for leadership.

Digital Employee Experience Is a Cross-Functional Responsibility

The VMware study surfaced an additional organizational challenge: confusion over who ultimately owns the digital employee experience. Depending on whom you ask, a different executive is identified as the accountable party:

• IT decision makers most often pointed to the Chief Information Officer (CIO).
• HR decision makers most often identified the Chief HR Officer (CHRO).
• Employees most often cited the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

This fragmented ownership model can lead to siloed initiatives and inconsistent experiences. Notably, 89% of all respondents — regardless of role — believe that HR and IT could collaborate more effectively to improve the digital experience for employees. The data suggests that ownership ambiguity, not lack of intent, is the primary barrier to progress.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and IT Leaders

For DevOps, platform engineering, and IT operations teams, the VMware survey results translate into several practical considerations:

• Measure employee-facing tool experience, not just uptime. System availability metrics do not capture whether employees can actually find and use the tools they need. Consider internal satisfaction surveys or tooling friction audits.
• Close the perception gap with feedback loops. The 95% vs. 42% split on tool satisfaction points to a lack of structured feedback mechanisms between IT and end users. Regular surveys, shadowing sessions, or embedded support models can surface hidden friction.
• Make device and app flexibility a first-class engineering concern. Supporting BYOD, cross-platform app delivery, and remote access is no longer a nice-to-have — it correlates with recruiting outcomes and revenue performance according to this survey.
• Establish cross-functional ownership. Digital workspace initiatives that sit entirely within IT or entirely within HR tend to miss important dimensions. A joint IT-HR product team with clear executive sponsorship is more likely to succeed.
• Frame digital experience improvements as business investments. The link between seamless tooling and revenue growth provides a compelling narrative for budget requests and leadership buy-in.

The full VMware Digital Employee Experience survey report and methodology were originally covered by e3zine.com. VMware’s Workspace ONE platform is positioned as the vendor’s primary product for delivering the digital workspace capabilities described in the survey.