Monitoring AI Tools
See how AI tools are adopted, used, and perceived across your organization. AI Tools dashboards combine operational data with employee sentiment to help you optimize and scale AI adoption.
To start using AI Tools:
Review Monitoring AI Tools concepts below.
See guides on how to monitor AI adoption and analyze employee experience:
See guides on how to assign governance policies for detected AI tools.
Nexthink administrators should first meet all technical requirements to ensure the correct configuration and monitoring of AI tools, and facilitate a smooth onboarding. Refer to Before you begin.
Key AI-tool monitoring concepts
Data collection for AI Tools
AI Tools collects data from multiple Nexthink components to monitor usage of AI tools and provide actionable insights:
Nexthink browser extension: Tracks web-based usage of tools like ChatGPT. Required for capturing adoption trends.
Collector: Gathers endpoint telemetry, including
focus_timeand Nexthink campaign responses. Collector version25.5.1or later is required to support built-in feedback campaigns for AI tools.Inbound connector for Microsoft Copilot: Monitors usage patterns for Microsoft Copilot across applications like Outlook, Powerpoint, Teams, etc.
Together, these sources power the AI Tools dashboards with visibility into usage, sentiment, and productivity impact.
Refer to F.A.Q about Microsoft Copilot data retrieval for more information on data collection specific to Microsoft Copilot.
Detection of AI tool activity in your environment
The system automatically monitors the adoption of preconfigured AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc., through traffic pattern recognition and endpoint activity.
However, the system also discovers all AI tools used by employees based on connection.events data. Nexthink maps observed domains and automatically displays discovered AI tools under the AI governance tab.
Behind a transparent proxy (for example, Cisco Secure Web Gateway)—where HTTPS traffic terminates on a handful of proxy IPs—the Collector merges connections into a single multiple domain names event instead of reporting the real domain. This behavior may impact AI tool detection and usage reporting.
Refer to Troubleshooting application connectivity documentation for more details on domain name reporting.
Nexthink detects AI tool usage over VPN, as long as the original tool domain (e.g., chatgpt.com) is visible. The system does not detect usage routed through Zscaler Browser Isolation, which masks the real domain.
Estimation of AI-engaged time per employee
The system estimates the AI-engaged time per employee using 15-minute intervals or buckets.
Any use or interaction with an AI tool within a 15-minute bucket counts as 15 minutes of AI-engaged time.
Multiple interactions with AI in the same interval still count as one 15-minute bucket.
Therefore, brief or occasional use of AI tools could add up to a significant weekly total—see the example below.
The 15-minute intervals are designed to capture employees' adoption and integration of AI into their daily work, rather than a precise minute-by-minute usage of AI tools.
The system registers one interaction per user prompt entered into the user-tool conversation.
AI tool visualizations and insights
AI Tools provides structured visibility into AI adoption and governance through different dashboard types:
The AI adoption dashboard, designed for IT leaders, AI-adoption teams, and cross-functional stakeholders, presents organization-wide AI adoption and sentiment, including usage trends, benchmarks, time savings, employee perceptions, and AI-powered insights.
Dashboards specific to an AI tool, aimed at product owners or enablement teams, focus on an individual AI tool to provide detailed engagement per application, employee experience and interaction trends to support tool-level adoption—including AI-powered recomendations and employee feedback analysis.
The AI governance dashboard displays both approved and shadow AI tools in your environment, along with the governance policy assigned to each AI-based application—or its current status if governance is still pending.
Together, these views help you drive both strategic oversight and operational enablement for AI transformation—including the enhancement of employee experience with AI tools.
The system displays the ✦ sparkles icon to indicate AI-generated content or Insights. AI is evolving rapidly and delivering great insights, but it can still make mistakes.
Built-in campaign content for sentiment tracking
To display the Employee experience with AI tools in all AI adoption dashboards, Nexthink uses built-in campaigns that you should enable and activate from the specific AI tool configuration.
The system sends these AI tools campaigns with uneditable content adhering to the following standard:
Questions included in each campaign
Each campaign includes these three questions:
How much time has
[AI tool]saved you over the past 7 days?Options: Time ranges (None, Less than 1h, 1-5h, 6-10h, 11-15h, 15-20h, More than 20h)
How could
[AI tool]be more useful to you, and what could we do to help? (Free text input).What is the last thing you did, or tried to do, with
[AI tool]? (Free text input).
Criteria for sending campaigns
Campaigns are sent under the following conditions:
Only employees actively using at least one monitored AI tool receive campaigns.
Each employee receives a campaign at most once every 90 days, and only for one of the tools they use.
A maximum of 5% of the employees receive a campaign on any given day.
If needed, you can modify campaign settings for AI tools to exclude specific users from campaigns, or disable campaigns for a specific AI tool.
If you disable a campaign from the specific AI tool configuration, no new employees are targeted. However, employees who had already been targeted continue to receive the campaign until they respond, cancel, or the campaign expires.
If no data appears under the Employee experience with AI tools, the built-in Nexthink campaigns may not be active or fully deployed. After activation, allow up to seven days for data to appear.
If the issue persists, contact your Nexthink administrator to verify all AI Tools requirements
AI adoption outcomes
After analyzing AI Tools dashboards, you should report adoption results of AI solutions to stakeholders and leadership:
Track employee-AI interaction trends to optimize the allocation of licenses/resources.
Measure employee response shifts after conducting suggestions from AI Tools Insights and Recommended actions.
Validate the effectiveness of targeted communication or training for specific AI tools.
Track whether walkthroughs or Adopt guides drive measurable improvements.
Ultimately, you should observe tangible value increments as a result of AI tool adoption.
To maintain objectivity in reporting, follow Nexthink dashboards and insights to identify correlations and isolate variables. This way, you avoid over-attributing outcomes to AI tool adoption efforts without sufficient validation.
In addition, support observations with evidence-based frameworks such as statistical correlation measures, e.g., Pearson’s R or controlled comparisons (A/B testing).
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