Historically, enterprise communications platforms have been built around an assumption that simply isn’t true: The people who matter most are sitting at desks, logged into corporate systems, reachable by email, chat, and managed devices. But, that assumption ignores a large share of the workforce — much larger than most would imagine. According to The Josh Bersin Company, roughly 70% of the global workforce is deskless — the means warehouse staff, retail associates, field technicians, healthcare aides, utilities workers, and others who keep operations moving but often sit outside the communication infrastructure enterprises rely on most.
Of course, that gap becomes most dangerous when something goes wrong.
When a safety incident, outage, evacuation, or disruption hits, many organizations discover that their standard communication stack works far better for knowledge workers than for the frontline employees, even though those employees may actually feel the greatest and most immediate impact. Emails often go unread (or email may not even be configured on personal devices). Internal messaging platforms assume corporate credentials many hourly workers never use. Manual call trees break down under pressure. Informal workarounds like WhatsApp groups may help reach some people, but often without the auditability, control, or structured escalation that regulated environments require.
8x8 (News - Alert) is bridging that gap with its new 8x8 Resolve, a new mobile-first critical communications and incident management platform designed specifically for deskless and distributed workers. The key is that, rather than requiring users to adapt to traditional enterprise systems, Resolve is built to reach them over the channels they already use — whether that’s SMS, voice, WhatsApp, or the 8x8 Work mobile app. Alerts can be sent across those channels simultaneously and, if a worker does not acknowledge the message, the system is designed to escalate automatically until confirmation is received.
What it really does is eliminate an emergency communications weakness — confusing “message sent” with “message received.” For incident managers, crisis teams, HR, compliance leaders, and business continuity planners, that makes a difference because it’s one thing to issue an alert, but something entirely different to understand who actually got it, when they got it, and whether they read and acknowledged it in time to act. In that respect, Resolve’s communication log, which records who was notified, through which channel, and when they responded, is as much a governance feature as it is a messaging feature.
"Too many critical events still end with someone asking who got the message and who didn't,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8x8.
In reality, Resolve also reflects a practical understanding of how deskless organizations actually operate. Recipient lists are synchronized through native integrations with Microsoft (News - Alert) Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta, and Workday, reducing the risk that emergency notifications rely on stale or manually maintained contact data.
8x8 is also using conversational AI to let employees report incidents directly via SMS or WhatsApp, with the system capturing structured data from those messages without requiring a separate app, a form, or any special training. That’s particularly useful in situations where the first person to see a developing problem is not a manager sitting at a screen, reducing the time between when an incident occurs and when workers are notified.
“For businesses with distributed or deskless workforces, that's the difference between managing an incident and being managed by one."
Deskless workers are essential to operations, but they have been relatively poorly served by many of the tools companies use to coordinate, notify, and document critical events. That presents a growing challenge as climate disruptions, infrastructure failures, safety incidents, and broader resilience concerns put more pressure on business continuity plans. The ability to reliably reach every worker should be a baseline requirement.
Aside from the sheer number of deskless workers, there’s more to suggest this is a real issue. Gartner (News - Alert) says that 62% of heads of enterprise risk management acknowledge that their current business continuity management plans fail to adequately prepare their organizations for potential disruptions. One reason is that many of those plans assume everyone can be reached through traditional corporate channels.
While 8x8 has long focused on creating driving more effective communications, Resolve takes a new angle in correcting how enterprises think about resilience. When the next serious incident happens, can a business reach the people — all the peoples, including those who are actually on the floor, on the road, in the field, or on shift? Can they prove that they did when needed? For a surprising number of businesses, the answer is no. 8x8 is trying to give them that ability.
Edited by
Erik Linask
