The 7-stage roadmap for human-AI collaboration in the workplace

Seven stages take workers from simple prompt-and-paste to fully autonomous AI agents, a framework for figuring out where your organization actually is.

NOTE: This 7-stage roadmap was updated in June 2026. See the latest version here.

I spend the majority of my time at Citrix exploring, discussing, and planning for AI’s impact on knowledge work. But lately I’ve noticed there’s no shared understanding of what this means, which makes conversations around this type of AI evolution difficult.

So in this post, I’m sharing a practical framework I’ve started using recently: seven stages of progression for how human workers will use and collaborate with AI in the workspace. These stages take us from the simple LLM use we started seeing a few years ago to a future with fully autonomous AI agents orchestrating complex tasks across the enterprise.