The AI landscape doesn't move in one direction — it lurches. Some techniques leap from experiment to table stakes in a single quarter; others stall against regulatory walls, technical ceilings, or organisational inertia that no amount of hype can dislodge. Knowing which is which is the hard part. The State of Play cuts through the noise with a rigorously maintained index of AI techniques across every major business domain — classified by maturity, evidenced by real-world adoption, and updated daily so you always know where you stand relative to the field. Stop guessing. Start knowing.
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AI that maps informal organisational networks from communication patterns to identify influencers, silos, and collaboration gaps. Includes collaboration graph analysis and information flow mapping; distinct from contact mapping in sales which maps external rather than internal relationships.
Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) makes invisible workplace structures legible — mapping informal networks from communication metadata to surface influencers, silos, and collaboration bottlenecks. The tooling is technically mature and the use cases are proven. What has stalled is adoption.
Forward-leaning enterprises deploy ONA for onboarding optimisation, change management, and attrition prediction, with Microsoft Viva Insights anchoring the platform market and specialist vendors like Polinode and Worklytics serving targeted methodologies. ONA is now a competitive standard feature across people analytics platforms, with pricing models spanning $2.99–$10 per user. Yet most organisations have not started. The practice sits at a leading-edge tier defined by a stubborn tension: platform capability has outpaced organisational readiness. Privacy regulation (GDPR, NLRB surveillance presumptions), employee trust erosion from passive monitoring, and limited demonstrated ROI outside large enterprises with dedicated governance functions all constrain broader diffusion. ONA's challenge is no longer technical — it is cultural and regulatory.
The ONA tools market achieved independent analyst recognition as a discrete category, with recent analyst reports valuing it at USD 0.70B (2026) growing to USD 1.55B (2031) at 17.23% CAGR (Mordor) and USD 597.5M at 16.9% CAGR (Technavio 2025-2030) — hybrid and remote work proliferation identified as the primary driver. Microsoft Viva Insights remains dominant, but May 2026 revealed strategic platform contraction: Viva shrank from 10 modules to 7, with Viva Goals discontinued (Dec 2025) and Viva Topics discontinued (Feb 2025) as Microsoft shifts focus toward Copilot branding — a consolidation signal that may shift ONA market share toward specialist vendors. Independent vendor ecosystem contains 10+ mature platforms (Polinode, Kondct, Humanyze, Visier, GraphAware, SWOOP) offering feature scores of 7.0-8.9/10, indicating product-market fit and methodological diversity; SWOOP operates at scale across 28+ named organizations (238K+ analyzed users) with documented case studies; organizations are increasingly selecting standalone ONA platforms (Worklytics, Culture Amp, Lattice) over bundled tools for flexibility and multi-platform support. ONA has become a competitive standard feature across people analytics platforms: market comparisons show Communication Network Mapping as table-stakes capability, with pricing models spanning $2.99–$10 per user, indicating market expansion into mid-market tiers. Vendor ecosystem expansion shows ONA maturity crossing functional boundaries — platforms like Prodoscore now position ONA capabilities to people analytics leaders, operations, and sales teams, demonstrating organizational breadth beyond HR-specific use cases. Specialist vendors continue real-world deployments: Polinode executed structured KCS coach identification at a multinational enterprise; Worklytics published onboarding analytics frameworks using Microsoft Research datasets of 10,000-plus employees. Interest is spreading beyond English-speaking markets — Japanese HR publications and Italian consulting practices now apply ONA to attrition prediction and innovation bottleneck resolution.
Real-world deployment evidence continues to accumulate at scale. Microsoft's internal restructuring in early 2026 deployed Viva Insights ONA across 228,000 employees for burnout and engagement analysis, achieving 70% HR automation, 40% headcount reduction, and 28% bias reduction in performance calibration — the largest documented enterprise ONA deployment for HR transformation. A Second Talent 2026 adoption survey reported 19% of organizations now explicitly use network analysis for collaboration and influence mapping, positioning ONA as an emerging advanced capability. Practitioners report specific methodologies in production: privacy-preserving manager effectiveness measurement using collaboration metadata with K-Anonymity protections; culture-audit frameworks diagnosing how informal networks govern information flow (one global firm identified 8% of employees as key brokers for 60% of collaboration, with European bank case achieving 18% response-time reduction via ONA-guided restructuring); formal change-management leveraging the "3% rule" (3% of employees influence 90% of peers); and structured onboarding optimization. Methodological rigor is advancing with peer-reviewed research on causal inference for network formation (Harvard, Stanford, UC Irvine) and validation of ONA principles across non-corporate contexts (university sports associations). Vendors are integrating AI adoption tracking into ONA analytics, recognizing that network patterns—density, centrality, cross-team connectivity—reveal how AI tools propagate through informal influence channels rather than formal rollout. The foundational tension between informal and formal organizational structures is now widely recognized: innovation flows through informal networks that org charts do not reveal, creating opportunities for strategic network intervention.
Yet adoption barriers intensified in March 2026 and remain structural. Trust itself has become the gating factor: empirical research (N=438) shows that people analytics adoption significantly erodes organizational trust and increases turnover intentions, with effects driven by privacy concerns rather than system sophistication — employees exposed to full managerial dashboards report substantially worse trust than those seeing only employee-facing interfaces. Regulatory constraints are now explicit: California SB 7 (effective January 2026) mandates "human in the loop" for all algorithmic employment decisions; the EU AI Act classifies workplace surveillance as high-risk, requiring rigorous logging and oversight by August 2026; algorithmic discrimination litigation is forecast to surge 40% in Q3 2026. Accenture's deployment of Viva Insights without employee notification triggered GDPR compliance concerns and union pushback — a pattern repeating across organisations lacking governance infrastructure. Platform limitations persist: Viva Insights lacks an official migration path for analytics continuity during M&A integrations, disrupting HR analytics continuity on engagement trends during critical organizational change; Microsoft's platform contraction signals deprioritization of ONA as a standalone offering, creating vendor risk. Data quality remains problematic; Microsoft's Viva Insights has reported inaccurate Copilot adoption metrics since late 2025. Technical constraints limit email-only network analysis: approximately 30% of employees may not send email for months, requiring multi-source network collection (Slack, Teams, CRM, documents) — a complexity barrier for organizations with dispersed collaboration tools. Organizational barriers compound technical ones: employees express discomfort with granular individual tracking even at aggregate reporting levels; 54% of US employees report they would quit if monitoring increased; 75% of Australian workers oppose surveillance without clear communication and necessity. The market remains concentrated in large enterprises with dedicated compliance functions. Mid-market penetration is blocked by regulatory uncertainty, platform limitations in complex organizational scenarios, ecosystem lock-in (Viva Insights favors Microsoft-native organizations), and the persistent difficulty of demonstrating ROI — even as deployment capability advances, organizational readiness and trust remain the limiting factors.
— Practitioner methodology guide positioning ONA as revealing how collaboration actually happens; emphasizes ethical guardrails (surveys/interviews, not email scraping), validation with people involved, and strict prohibition on using network centrality for promotion/dismissal decisions.
— Critical analysis of invasive surveillance risks and compliance requirements (EU AI Act, GDPR, proposed German Employee Data Act); documents psychosocial harms from intrusive algorithmic monitoring and establishes regulatory barriers constraining ONA adoption.
— Live ONA product analyzing collaboration across 28+ named organizations (238K+ intranet users); case studies show 53% info-finding improvement, demonstrating scaled deployment and real-world organizational outcomes.
— Microsoft feature announcement enabling customizable Power BI reports in Viva Insights (GA early-late September 2026); signals continued platform investment and ecosystem maturity for organizational analytics tooling.
— Medical device manufacturer reduced R&D cycles by 12% and increased patents 18%; tech services company reduced voluntary turnover 23% using ONA early-warning systems; deployments achieving 8-15% productivity, 15-30% attrition reduction.
— Step-by-step ONA dashboard implementation combining Viva Insights and Worklytics; demonstrates practical deployment for identifying productivity bottlenecks via meeting density, response-time pressure, and network centrality metrics.
— Platform comparison documenting ONA ecosystem maturity; Worklytics privacy-first passive collection vs Viva M365-native; shows 72% corporate AI adoption (up from 55% in 2023) with department-level variance (80% Engineering vs 20% Finance).
— Organizations implementing robust collaboration measurement report ROI ranging from 122% to 408%; teams maintaining 3-5 quarterly cross-functional connections achieve 40% faster problem resolution; deployment stage: enterprise implementations with quantified outcomes.