From Hype to Enterprise Reality: Turning AI Potential into Operational Performance

Inside HERE’s grounded approach to bringing secure, contextual, agentic AI to the enterprise desktop

AI has moved from experimentation to expectation. Enterprises across sectors are racing to understand how AI can improve productivity and reduce friction. While intelligence models have advanced rapidly, the gap between what vendors promise and what organizations can responsibly deploy remains significant.

Many tools showcase ambitious capabilities but fall short of real-world requirements: predictable security, structured governance, contextual awareness, and the ability to integrate with existing systems at scale.

Extracting full enterprise value from AI requires a nuanced approach – one rooted in how work actually happens on the desktop.

The Problem with Overbuilt, Under-Controlled AI
As AI innovation has surged, a pattern has emerged: tools are becoming more ambitious, but not more usable. The challenges typically surface in the following ways:

1. AI without guardrails increases risk exposure.
Tools that route data through unmanaged endpoints or lack auditability cannot be deployed in environments handling sensitive or regulated data. Government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare organizations and contact centers responsible for personally identifiable information (PII) all require strict governance that many AI offerings simply don’t provide.

2. Tools that sit outside the workflow go unused.
Standalone chatbots and isolated AI portals force users to break focus, switch context and manually orchestrate how data is shared. In practice, these tools rarely integrate with enterprise workflows, and adoption drops quickly once the novelty fades.

3. Without structured context, AI is forced to guess.
Systems that cannot interpret what’s on a user’s screen – case files, policy documents, CRM records, customer histories – generate generic answers rather than meaningful assistance. Without contextual awareness, AI becomes superficial and less relevant to the task at hand.

4. Bespoke AI integrations recreate the very fragmentation enterprises want to eliminate.
When each workflow requires custom engineering and every system-to-system connection becomes a one-off project, organizations end up rebuilding the same brittle architectures they were trying to modernize. Instead of protecting technology investments, they become impossible to scale.

HERE’s Approach: AI That Works the Way Users Do
HERE has spent more than a decade addressing fragmentation across the enterprise desktop. We began by delivering structured interoperability through our Workspace product and playing a founding role in developing FDC3, the open standard for plug-and-play interoperability among desktop applications. Today, the same challenge extends into the AI layer. Enterprises need intelligent tools that can understand desktop context, act across applications, and scale without requiring a complete rebuild.

HERE’s approach meets these needs through three core principles:

1. Security first – governance before flashy capabilities
AI is only useful when organizations can trust it. HERE Enterprise Browser provides a controlled execution environment designed for security-sensitive workflows. It enforces robust permissioning, enterprise-grade data loss prevention, centralized governance over model access and full auditability of AI interactions. It enables organizations to use their trusted AI models (whether commercial, open-source or proprietary), enabling organizations with stringent security obligations – including government agencies, financial institutions and large contact centers – to deploy AI without increasing risk.

2. Context – the difference between information and intelligence
HERE’s AI Center is embedded directly into the desktop environment, giving AI a permissioned, accurate understanding of the user’s workspace. With this context, AI can summarize content, extract structured data, draft communications and validate information across tabs with minimal manual intervention. It can help government analysts compare policy documents and assist contact center agents with real-time case details. Instead of generating answers in isolation, AI works with the information the user is actually interacting with. Intelligence becomes grounded, precise and genuinely helpful.

3. Interoperability – making AI actionable
AI creates value not just by generating text, but by driving the right actions across systems. HERE’s longstanding leadership in desktop interoperability makes this possible. For years, FDC3 has enabled applications across the enterprise to share context and trigger standardized actions. With support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), those same capabilities will extend to AI agents. Using MCP HERE will provide a secure, standardized way for models to access tools and data sources. Combined with interoperability, AI can receive structured desktop context, reason about it and act using the same intents that power human workflows.

All this means a contact center agent can rely on AI to gather details from CRM tools and knowledge bases and draft an accurate follow-up. A government analyst can extract information from PDFs and system-of-record data to prepare a case summary. A financial professional can validate details across internal systems and generate a compliance note. None of these applications need to be rebuilt for AI to participate. Existing technology investments carry forward, and legacy systems gain new capabilities through standards rather than custom code.

AI Center: Where Security, Context and Interoperability Converge
HERE’s AI Center brings these pieces together, providing a browser-native environment where AI can understand context, access multiple models and interact with applications in a governed, predictable way. It adapts as workflows evolve, regenerating prompts as the user’s environment changes. And it maintains the same security and governance rules that protect every other component of the desktop. This creates a new kind of workspace: an AI-native browser where intelligence is embedded directly into the flow of work.

AI will reshape how work happens across industries, but meaningful transformation won’t come from oversized promises. It will come from secure foundations, contextual understanding and AI that operates within the governance frameworks enterprises already trust and the productivity frameworks they already benefit from. HERE is committed to building the pragmatic, dependable layer needed to scale AI responsibly and effectively – unlocking real value.

Want to learn more about AI Center? Book a demo with HERE.