How can I integrate AI into my intranet experience?

Generative AI is already transforming the digital workplace and its constituent tools and channels. This includes the intranet where there are multiple opportunities to integrate and embed AI into the intranet experience, supporting everything from improved search to content optimization.

But what’s the best way to integrate AI into the intranet to have most impact? What are the associated challenges? And, looking more broadly, how will AI impact the future of intranets? In this post we’re going to do a deep dive into the world of AI and intranets, as well as current options for AI integration.

Why AI belongs in the intranet

Intranets have been around for 30 years, so they are an extremely mature technology, but over the years their demise has been predicted many times. Some observers view them as an outdated and not particularly exciting technology, an anachronism in the age of the AI digital workplace and intelligent automation.

But actually, AI very much belongs within the intranet experience. Successful, modern intranets are centred around users. They reflect the technology experiences employees have outside work – and that includes using generative AI. Arguably, there’s already an expectation among employees that they should be able to access AI through the digital workplace.

Recent DWG research, Intranet futures: What will happen to the intranet from 2025 to 2030?, explores some of the reasons intranets are still around today, as well as what this tells us about the future of intranets for the next few years.

The report concludes that a key reason why intranets are one of the great digital workplace ‘survivors’ is that they have always been able to evolve and to absorb new waves of technology, such as enterprise social networks.

And this is now happening with generative AI. AI features are currently being rolled out across multiple intranet products, such as Unily, LumApps and Interact, and AI dominates many individual product roadmaps going forwards. Microsoft Copilot is being integrated more deeply into the SharePoint experience too. Some solutions are starting to bring AI agents into the mix and are even proposing the intranet as a natural channel for users to organize and orchestrate their agents to improve the employee experience.

There are very solid use cases for employing generative AI within intranets not just for end users but for the teams that manage intranets as well as content contributors too. Generative AI can supercharge search, and it has the potential to transform different aspects of intranet management and content management, such as generating and summarizing content, as well as automatically tagging it to maximize findability.

Taken together, the combination of the previous track record of intranets, the current introduction of AI in intranet products, the AI-focused future product roadmap, and a range of use cases that make sense, means that AI absolutely belongs in the intranet experience!

Ways to integrate AI into the intranet experience

AI is being integrated into intranets in a number of different ways, including:

• native AI features within intranet products
• integrations with LLMs via APIs or AI services embedded in platforms such as Azure
• custom builds – some organizations are even building custom AI-powered intranets or similar employee portals.

These integrations are then appearing within intranets via, for example:

Chatbots and digital assistants: AI-powered chatbots that aim to answer employee questions on particular topics such as HR, IT, Legal and more, and to help employees complete transactions. For example, DBS Bank has an award-winning generative AI assistant that is available through the intranet.

Search: Powering a more intelligent search experience using natural language and delivering more relevant answers, as well as providing personalized suggestions for content.

Content generation: Generating and translating intranet content, sometimes at scale.

Content optimization: Using AI to automatically generate summaries, add tags for findability and more.

Analytics: Smarter analytics and more intelligent insights for intranet teams and internal communicators.

User experience: Identifying and making improvements to user experience, for example optimizing content to ensure it is more accessible.

Task completion: AI agents may start to help employees complete more complex tasks via the intranet interface.

AI agent orchestration: New capabilities are even being introduced to enable orchestrating different AI agents through the intranet.

Business benefits of AI intranets

There are clear business benefits to introducing AI into the intranet experience for users, publishers and intranet administrators.

Driving productivity

Ultimately AI should support productivity, usually by saving time and improving specific processes. When deployed successfully, AI can help employees to find answers and information more quickly; support publishers by doing the heavy lifting around content generation and optimization; and automate repetitive tasks for intranet managers. However, sometimes the productivity gains are blunted by the time involved in setting up the foundations needed to make AI work.

Underpinning AI literacy and readiness

AI readiness and digital literacy are proving to be critical factors in getting the best out of AI and for achieving some sort of return on investment (ROI). Intranets can play a role here by normalizing the experience of using AI via chatbots and prompting that is embedded into the intranet experience. Intranets are also a key channel for change management and learning that upskills employees around AI.

Improving search and findability

A successful intranet helps employees to find the information they need in order to carry out their role and get things done. However, this is traditionally an area where intranet teams can struggle. AI can help improve findability by creating a more intuitive search experience through the use of natural language and in driving a more intelligent and powerful search. It can also help automate content optimization at scale, meaning that items are more findable, for example by adding the right tags and helping admins to identify content that is out of date.

AI and HR: Transforming the employee experience through the intranet

Integrating AI into the intranet experience provides exciting opportunities for HR teams both to support engagement and drive efficiency:

• Employee self-service: AI-powered HR chatbots on the intranet have the potential to support employee self-service by answering key HR-related questions, relieving pressure on busy HR helpdesks, and therefore driving productivity.
• Learning and enablement: AI intranets have the potential to make intelligent suggestions for content and actions based on a person’s profile, role, preferences, digital behaviour and context of what they are trying to achieve. This ‘digital assistant’ style capability is particularly relevant for learning and enablement, providing real-time suggestions for learning and related nudges in context.
• Employee engagement: AI-powered sentiment analysis across social intranet conversations can identify trending topics and concerns of employees, which can help HR teams, internal communicators and senior management to make decisions and interventions to better support employee engagement.

Challenges and considerations for AI intranets

There are a number of challenges for teams looking to integrate AI into the intranet. Most of these are common to implementing AI anywhere across the digital workplace:

• This is an extremely fast-evolving space, where new developments and features can outpace the ability for digital workplace teams to roll them out and users to adopt them.
• LLMs are still prone to hallucinations and errors.
• AI can involve unpredictable costs that are hard to anticipate.
• As already noted, AI needs the right foundations and governance to drive value; when these aren’t in place, it can be harder to implement AI.
• AI implementation requires change management, training and support to underpin successful adoption and usage.

Will generative AI mean the end of the humble intranet?

Perhaps the biggest challenge from generative AI though is the existential one that it could completely remove the need for intranets. For example, will employees just use a combination of AI-powered chatbots and intelligent agents to find information and complete tasks? Does AI potentially signal the end of the intranet?

This is a topic we explore more deeply in our members-only Intranet futures research report. While at a high level we conclude that although the longer-term view of use is uncertain – something that applies to other areas of enterprise software too – in the short to medium term intranets are very much here to stay. This is due to a variety of reasons, including:

• Intranets continue to add value to organizations and their employees, and there is no evidence they are being phased out.
• Having accurate content is critical for obtaining value from AI and for minimizing risks – and when content governance processes are in place, leading intranets provide this.
• AI is already being incorporated into intranet products and dominates future product roadmaps.
• Over three decades, intranets have continually adapted and evolved, incorporating the latest waves of features experienced in consumer solutions, such as social media. So far, they are repeating this trick with generative AI.

Getting started with an AI intranet: six practical tips

1. Always establish the foundations for AI
AI is not plug and play, and requires the right foundations for success. Digital workplace teams are already at the coal face in terms of establishing these foundations – ethical frameworks, terms of use, accurate and verified content, enterprise taxonomies, data governance, support mechanisms – and more. Make sure you have the basics in place before attempting AI at scale within your intranet.

2. Understand your product and its roadmap
Most large intranets rely on a product or two. That might be SharePoint, or an in-a-box solution such as Unily or LumApps. You may have an intranet product that sits alongside SharePoint. Virtually all vendors are incorporating AI into their product somehow and deploying a feature is usually the easiest way to get started. Ensure you understand your product and what it can do when it comes to AI. You also need to consider the upcoming roadmap as AI features are coming thick and fast.

3. Avoid AI for the sake of AI
There can be a scramble to introduce AI into everything, particularly if it is flavour of the month with senior management. Whatever you do, it is critical to consider whether AI will actually drive value, improve the user experience or increase efficiency. Sometimes introducing AI may even have a negative impact – for example, arguably, AI-generated intranet content might not meet required publishing standards. Avoid implementing AI just because it’s AI.

4. Align plans with other digital workplace teams
AI is exciting and everywhere, but there is the potential for different business functions to ‘do their own thing’, which can lead to wasted opportunities, a fragmented employee experience and higher risks. Intranets sit at the interaction of IT, HR, internal communications, knowledge management, frontline support and more. Ensure that plans for the intranet are informed by and align with those of your colleagues.

5. Start small, then drive continuous improvement
Intranets are quite modular in terms of both features and content, so they lend themselves well to continuous improvement. It’s best to start small with AI in the intranet, particularly as the space is moving so rapidly and new product capabilities are regularly added. By introducing an AI feature or two – perhaps one for users and another one for admins – you can learn what works and what doesn’t, as well as how to support it. From this you can start to define a flexible roadmap that considers user needs, your intranet product roadmap, plans from other teams and more.

6. Use your AI intranet and digital workplace super-powers
Successful introduction of AI into the intranet and wider digital workplace requires intranet teams to draw on practices at which they already excel – driving change management, establishing governance, supporting findability, working with different stakeholders right across the whole business, and more. So it’s once again time for intranet teams to draw on the super-powers they already possess!

The AI intranet is here

AI is having an impact on every part of the digital workplace – and that includes the intranet. AI has the potential to make a difference in improving findability, content management, employee self-service, content generation, and more. And we’re already seeing AI embedded within intranet products and being deployed within organizations. The age of the AI intranet is already well underway.

Categorised in: Artificial intelligence and automation