In my two months at Citrix, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with customers, partners, and colleagues. Many of those were about AI’s impact on the workplace, which almost always led to the question, “What is Citrix’s AI strategy?”

This is an important question, and the focus of today’s blog post. I’ll walk you through both how we think about AI, and how I answer this question when asked.

AI is a broad concept that means many things

Before we dig into what AI means at Citrix, we need to look at what “AI” means in general. Obviously AI is trendy now and everyone’s trying to stake their claims and align their positions. It’s peak season for memes about “AI washing”, “AI pixie dust”, and “just sprinkle on some AI”.

That said, I’m perfectly fine not having a single clear definition of AI. (Really!)

Plenty of people are discussing and arguing about the definition of AI, or whether some product is “real” AI or not. To me these are all distractions which don’t address the main point: AI-powered technologies are here, they’re evolving quickly, and they will continue to shake things up. We don’t have the time to waste arguing over academic definitions—we just need to understand the impacts to our business and move decisively.

In other words, if AI is big and messy, that’s okay. We can lean into the mess! Personally, this is my key to unlocking and exploring how AI impacts an organization: think broadly about what AI could be (go nuts!), then think about all the different ways it might show up in your company.

This gets me back to the main topic of this blog, which is walking through what AI means for us at Citrix. When we talk about AI at Citrix right now, we’re probably talking about one of three things:

1. AI in our products
2. AI we use internally
3. AI shaping our customers’ workplaces

These categories are not permanent and will certainly evolve over time. Also they’re not the result of a formal committee or policy document, rather, it’s just that after talking to so many people about “AI at Citrix”, these are the buckets the conversations settle into.

Let’s take a tour of what each of these means at Citrix.

1. The AI we’re building into our products

When most people ask, “What’s Citrix doing with AI?,” I get the sense they’re asking about our product strategy and wanting to know what AI capabilities we’re building into our core products and services.

In many ways this is the obvious low-hanging fruit, as it’s clear that AI will become a core part of how many enterprise products deliver value. Citrix is doing quite a bit of work here which we’re excited to share with you. I won’t steal the thunder from my colleagues who are deeply involved in this and who will share more in the future, but I mention it here in the greater context of “Citrix and AI”, that yes, one way we’re embracing AI is by adding and integrating AI-powered capabilities into our core products.

2. The AI tools our employees are using

Another (completely different!) way AI is impacting Citrix is how we use AI internally to run our business. Like most companies, we have both formal initiatives and employee-led “bottom-up” experiments and learnings by individual workers.

Of course this was all going on long before I got here, but part of what attracted me to Citrix (and the larger Cloud Software Group) was the seriousness and scope of these many efforts. Cloud Software Group has clear, thoughtful policies for employee use of AI which encourage experimentation and allow for iteration of our internal policies around usage, privacy, and trust. As a new employee, I immediately felt that the majority of my Citrix colleagues “got it”, and were thinking about AI in ways that encouraged us to be curious and open to the future.

For us, this isn’t just an IT initiative—and in fact is larger than Citrix. Our Cloud Software Group leadership, including our COO, CIO, CISO, and CHRO, are all in this conversation. They understand that how we use AI directly shapes our culture, the future of our work, and our ability to move at speed.

In fact, these efforts within Citrix and Cloud Software Group are directly relevant to the larger topics I’m exploring and sharing with you. In the coming months I’ll be looping in these leaders to share their insights about AI and modern work, how we support our workers, and how we run our business.

3. The AI shaping our customers’ workplaces

The final category I’ll explore for how we think about AI at Citrix is the area I spend most of my time thinking about, what I’ve been calling “Workplace AI”.

We’re entering a world where workers are bringing AI into their workplaces—sometimes with permission, sometimes without. Our customers are experiencing this first-hand, as this bottom-up adoption of AI is already happening in their environments. They know it’s not going to slow down and that they need to enable and secure their workers and apps regardless of whether those are fully human, autonomous AI agents, or some combination of both. (There’s a lot more to this which I discussed in last week’s post.)

This is why Citrix has such an important role to play. We’ve spent decades helping customers secure their work, and we’ll continue to do so even as apps and workers are shaped by AI. It’s not about locking things down or pretending AI doesn’t exist. It’s about giving customers the platform they need to enable their workers to embrace AI without losing visibility or control. (There’s a lot more to this too, which I’ll discuss in future posts. Stay tuned!)

You need to do this same exercise for your company

While I hope it’s been valuable to walk you through the various ways Citrix thinks about AI, I also hope you can take something else away from this post: AI means many different things, so your “AI strategy” will need to be multi-pronged to address them all.

When someone at your company asks, “What are we doing about AI?,” ask them what they mean. Are they talking about building AI into your products? Building chatbots for customer support? Giving developers access to copilots? Dealing with shadow AI brought in by employees? Something else?

You’ll probably find that everyone you talk to has a different idea, which is great! Just start breaking it into categories like I did here, and then think about how you can address each one separately.

Your categories will probably be different, and you might have more than three. (In the past I’ve used models which broke AI into four or five categories.) Many industry analysts and strategists have their own frameworks too. The specific model or framework you pick doesn’t matter, rather, what matters is that you organize your efforts into defined buckets so everyone is speaking the same language in each context.

That’s the first step to having a real AI strategy.

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