“It’s ‘the real thing,'” he says emphatically.

Vishal Ganeriwala is well versed in a lot of technology areas, most notably digital workspaces. That’s why he’s so sure.

In 1969, Coca Cola launched the “It’s the Real Thing” marketing campaign, which brought together a diverse cast of thousands. The goal was to bridge the “divisions between young and old, counterculture and mainstream, black and white, poor and rich, liberal and conservative.” After all, everyone has a great experience drinking Coke, and the soft drink and the company set the world on fire with their universal appeal. What’s more, the real thing also became a generic term for something valuable, universal, and genuine.

And so, we come back to Citrix Workspace, the power of a genuine solution, and the great experience you have using it. I sat down with Vishal, who’s the leader of Citrix Workspace product marketing efforts, to talk about his vision for digital workspaces. Here’s what he said:

We’ll talk about powerful employee experiences in a moment, but first, I’m curious about what brought the term the real thing to mind for you?

Our digital workspace solution is all about enabling employees to find better ways of working. For the first time in history, there are five generations of workers in the workplace now — traditionalists, baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen-Z. They’re all collaborating and engaging on the same projects, yet each generation has a different kind of lifestyle and a different way of working. We want to provide a great employee experience that is familiar and consistent on many different kinds of devices, in any location, and under a variety of network conditions. Also, we want to accommodate the needs of each group within this multigenerational workforce. While we designed our solution for the different ways in which diverse teams of people all over the world work today, we also built a solution that could be flexible enough to accommodate the changes that will certainly occur in the future. Because it organizes, guides and automates work, Citrix Workspace helps people in all five generations determine how they want to work; they can concentrate on the work that delivers real business value.

Let’s talk about this concept of delivering great employee experiences and how it relates to customer experience. Tell me about it.

At Citrix, how employees best interact with technology is a major consideration in the strategy and design of every product innovation. In corporations, our focus often has been elsewhere.

Historically, we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the customer experience. In doing so, we’ve neglected one thing that significantly impacts customer experience — the employee experience. The customer experience often is a one-time transaction, but employee experience happens every single day. That’s why we have to be more careful in crafting it.

As a company, Citrix articulates an uncomplicated view of employee experience. Our organization’s guiding premise is a simple equation:

employee experience = productivity + engagement

The reason why such a short equation tells the story so well is because it clearly positions employee experience at the top of the priority list — and the immediate effects of a great employee experience (more productivity and engagement) are the results in the progression.

We’ve determined that a great employee experience increases productivity and engagement. When workers become more productive and engaged, they, in turn, positively impact an organization’s bottom line. This is how the value we bring to our respective companies is influenced by our employee experiences.

Delivering a great employee experience isn’t easy and it requires strategic planning. In an Economist Intelligence Unit briefing paper, The Experience of Work, Arthur Mazor, HR strategy partner at Deloitte, sums it up succinctly: “A positive employee experience requires removing friction from work.” A 451 Research paper, The CIO’s guide for measuring ROI and securing budget for Employee Experience, dives deeper into the more active role that CIOs and IT leaders now play in improving the employee experience, and thus in increasing employee engagement and productivity through technology.

Do you think that Citrix Workspace really will impact the way we work in the future?

Absolutely. In our consumer lives, we’re already familiar with intelligent bots and intelligent augmentation. We’ve come to rely on Siri and Alexa, for example, to help us manage tasks. These well-known bots answer questions relevant to our personal lives such as, “How long will it take me to drive to work?” or “Will my package be delivered today?”

Citrix Workspace will offer a similar kind of intelligence augmentation. Recommended Content is a new feature of Citrix Workspace that will serve up personalized content based on our work histories — content that will augment our ability to work better or function in a smarter way. The content delivered to us might be based on the kind of work that we’ve done in the last week, for example.

Another way in which Citrix Workspace augments our ability to work more efficiently is with microapps. Microapps are built with easy-to-use tools, provide streamlined access, and simple one-click actions to all types of applications — from legacy desktop apps to new mobile and SaaS apps. Citrix Workspace provides a single experience for employees to get work done quickly and efficiently — how, when and where they want. By infusing this experience with machine learning, Citrix empowers employees with assistance and guidance enabling intelligent automation for work. Citrix Workspace brings together everything users need in a unified experience. They get personalized feeds and automation of the kinds of routine tasks that contribute to worker fatigue.

Can you give us a personal example of how you think the intelligence in Citrix Workspace is going to make your employee experience better?

My job is to make sure that if someone has a roadblock, I can remove it as quickly as possible. The employee might be asking a question, or looking for project files, or trying to cut through the clutter.

With Citrix Workspace, I can help team members make decisions more quickly and get on with the work at hand. With its new features, Citrix Workspace will enable me to have a much more robust search capability, so finding information will be easier. I’ll be able to save time on approvals and administrative work, as will other members of the team.

What’s ahead for Citrix Worksace?

The new features that we’re announcing in Citrix Workspace are just a start — we will continue to listen to customers and improve the platform. In addition, many customers have pilots in progress right now. We’ll gain a great deal of insight from these that will spark more innovation.

Learn more about Citrix Workspace.