The AI-ready digital workplace – a Microsoft MVP’s playbook for success

“One of my favourite parts of all the AI pieces are those that will do the governance now, which is fantastic because it’s always been on people’s to-do lists. It’s difficult to get around to. If you’re an organization of any size, you’ve got thousands of sites that you need to look after – not tens, not hundreds – thousands. Within Copilot, there’s something called the ‘Knowledge Agent’ and it will do dead-link checking. It will tell you when your sites and the pages within it need a review and you can set up an automated action off the back of it. So, you might say, ‘Well, look, this is an HR site that needs to be reviewed every three months. It’s going to go from Bob to Peter in the team and then escalate up. If nobody does anything, we’re going to archive it.’ In another scenario, for a department, you might say, ‘Well it’s annual. And if you don’t review it, we’re going to delete it.’ So you can have different rules for different sites. You can set it up at the outset and you don’t have to do anything with it again.”
Suzy Dean
Microsoft MVP/CEO and Co-Founder, Addin365 

Nancy Goebel 
Suzy Dean is a highly regarded Microsoft MVP and a fellow industry CEO. Some of her recent LinkedIn posts prompted me to reconnect for a chat about her real-world insights and examples from the projects that she and her team are doing at Addin 365. 

The conversation that follows really serves as a playbook for success in designing AI-ready and AI-enabled digital workplaces. This amplifies some of the work that DWG is doing in the same orbit. 

This is Nancy Goebel, DWG’s Chief Executive and your host for this podcast. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Join me now in conversation with Suzy. Happy listening! 

Nancy Goebel
Suzy, I am just delighted to welcome you to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. We’ve had history. We reconnected recently based on one of your posts on LinkedIn. I certainly have continued to follow your work, your thought leadership in the years that have followed our early meeting, knowing that you are a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and a thought leader who works closely with a lot of different organizations in and around the Microsoft 365 arena and digital employee experience. How could we not come back together and have good conversations? So, thank you and welcome.  

Suzy Dean
Thank you very much for inviting me on. It’s, as you say, so great to reconnect after all these years. And likewise, I’ve been following your own trajectory through the digital workplace arena.  

Nancy
Suzy, of course you sit at an intersection of Microsoft 365, intranets, digital employee experience across a myriad of enterprises. At the moment, what are you seeing as the biggest shift and what it takes to actually run a successful digital workplace programme, either generally speaking or within the Microsoft 365 landscape in the here and now?  

Suzy
Pace. The pace is so much faster than it ever was. And I’m not even necessarily talking about the old SharePoint on-premises days. Even up until three, four years ago, the technology wasn’t moving that quickly. We had SharePoint, then we had Teams, then we had Viva, now we’ve got AI as well. And all these capabilities together mean that the technology is moving at such pace that I think the way digital workplace practitioners are working has had to really, really shift. And I don’t think there’s been too much choice about that.  

In the UK, because we’ve had a slowing down of the market for a couple of years now, that’s been matched with a huge amount of business change. Organizations are trying to work quickly, they’re consolidating, they’re losing headcount. And so there’s increased pace within organizations as well to do things.  

And where these roads have led is that, now more than ever, I think, a solid business-as-usual operating model has become really, really important that allows for that triangulation between what the business needs – that’s the strategy, the business is changing quickly; what the communications professionals need and want; and then what the technology is both offering and demanding of people and organizations. And I think the companies that have nailed that triangle are coping well. 

Companies that haven’t got a handle on it are really struggling at the moment in the digital workplace arena.  

Nancy
And I would add to that, that where we’re seeing the advanced players excel is where they’ve put the humans at the centre, the employees at the centre of all of this, so that there’s a focus around enablement yet reduction of friction in the system as well. I was reading just recently about ING, who have a real focus on managing what they’re terming ‘infobesity’ in this current age, because it’s not only the pace of change, but the amount of information and data that we’re putting in front of people and expecting them to consume at the same time as produce, and to make better informed decisions – data-driven decisions – in all of that as well. So, it’s a mixture of factors that are in play that are actually coming at people with velocity, both speed and direction. And so, it feels like a particularly interesting time for us as digital workplace leaders, digital workplace practitioners, to help organizations navigate their way through this.  

Suzy 
Yeah. And I think lots of organizations have held back, normally through resource constraints, in resolving some of the underlying governance issues for a long time. Typically, digital workplace teams are very busy. They’re made up of comms people – and, as you say, they’re producing loads of content. But what happens when that content is now five years old, six years old? What about all the other sites that other parts of the business have spanned up, that nobody’s really caretaking? And, of course, the big discussion around AI is: How reliable is your content? How current is your content? How contradictory is your content? 

And so this problem that everybody has been aware of but has not necessarily had the time to solve for a long time, is also now on people’s plate as a must-do. Probably again for the first time, because the information – you can’t hide from it, it’s there, it’s coming at you in answers back from Copilot – you’ve got to address it. So, I think it’s pace plus you’ve got to deal with governance now. It’s not an option to ignore it.  

Nancy
Certainly not. And what we’re seeing is that boards are taking particular interest in governance and measurement and risk management, to the point that I actually put a prediction out that really raised the profile of that as an important priority for digital workplace leaders and to ensure that the right information is flowing upstream to allow for risk-smart decisions to be made, and for digital workplace leaders to continue to have a seat at the table in steering the direction of the digital headquarters of the enterprise versus having outside parties step in to provide that governance, that oversight. And so, it’s both an opportunity and a challenge.  

But if we roll it back a little bit, I know that you’ve been writing and talking quite a bit about the fact that employees are not necessarily using the digital workplace or the intranet as intended. And from what you’re seeing now, what do you think is underlying that? Is it this governance problem? Is it a combination of other factors that are at play, whether Microsoft related or otherwise?  

Suzy
I think there can be a number of reasons, but I’ll outline across the different organizations I work with and have worked with what we tend to see. And it’s often when we first meet them, because everybody has a digital workplace. But when we turn up and it’s not working for them, the most common things we hear or see (more to the point), is that the navigation, the experience, the content, is not reflective of the tasks that people are trying to complete to do their work. So quite often, you’re there on the homepage, the navigation, you’ve got some news – and then it’s a strange concoction of regional pages and descriptive pages. And you’ve got the owners within the business scratching their heads going ‘Nobody’s using it. I can’t understand why people aren’t using it.’  And you think, well, what are they meant to be using? There’s not a great deal there for them. I think often digital workplaces are not well enough supporting the tasks that people are actually trying to complete. 

And secondly, and it’s connected to the first point really, the experience itself is not aligning to the strategic direction of the business. So, if you’ve got a leadership team saying the most important things we can do are enable cross-selling and then there’s nothing in the navigation or in any of the entryways about our offering, how we work, how we cross-sell… again, people are listening to their bosses about what the priorities are and none of those priorities are going to be met through the digital workplace. So, I think really common challenges are lack of strategic alignment to business priorities, lack of alignment to the tasks that people are trying to do.  

And I think if you look within those digital workplace teams, you can then see different challenges. We’ve talked to organizations where it seems to be very technology-led. They’re talking about features, bits of tech, and they’re not really asking why. They’re just saying, ‘Well, Microsoft has launched this feature; we’re going to roll it out.’ What does that mean? It means you’re going to chuck some tech at people. And of course, some people don’t use it. There’s no reason for them to use it. And if there is, it hasn’t been explained. So that can be a challenge. Sometimes it’s on the communication side in as far as Communications have put themselves in a black box where they want to talk about news and events, and they don’t really want to talk to the business and they don’t really want to do the business enablement piece, so they suffer the lack of engagement for that reason.  

I think failure can be for a number of reasons, but they are individually, or as a mix, are normally the reasons that we see that lack of use, that lack of engagement. Fundamentally, nothing to do with work is ever going to be a destination unless it’s helping people to do their work. That’s what they’re there for.  

Nancy
It’s one of those things – there are two sides to every proverbial coin, right? There’s crisis or challenge, but then you flip it to opportunity. And so if you had to boil things down to a simple playbook, what would you say are the critical success factors that you now build into every project that you undertake or even in your MVP role in the conversations that you have, regardless of industry or organization size, etc.?  

Suzy
We insist on talking to the senior leadership team, not about the digital workplace, not about technology, but what has the CEO asked you to do? Because as soon as we capture that information, as practitioners, we can come back and say ‘Great, and this is how the digital workplace can help you, leader, to meet your goals.’ And at that point, they say, ‘Brilliant, I had no idea it could do this. What do you need from me?’. And you can say, ‘I need someone that’s got operational knowledge of your division to support with the content creation and to make decisions around governance. You know, how often should this content be reviewed? At what point should this content be retired?’ And in doing that and working across the leadership team to make sure, where possible, their goals are being met.  

Obviously, they can’t always be met. If somebody has… in my field, I don’t go near a CRM ever – so if you’re talking to a leader who says, ‘One of my key objectives is to sort the CRM’, then fine, we’re not going to do anything about that. So I’m not suggesting you try and deliver everything through the digital workplace. Simply, from what you’ve heard, where can the digital workplace help? And then hooking the experience and the projects around those things means you’re delivering a business enablement platform and suddenly you’re helping the company to meet its strategic objectives. And suddenly there’s a reason for people to go there. And it’s not just seen either as a comms or an IT project. So there’s loads and loads of benefit to doing that. It’s an absolute must.  

And I’ve got to be honest, probably about six or seven years ago, I don’t know what was going on – I was probably pregnant or something – we did a couple of projects and, for whatever reason… in fact, I remember the reason… one customer was about to afford from an internet and a box solution. It was very late in the day. They had not left a lot of time. And they said, ‘Look, we can’t do these leader sessions. You can talk to, it was the Head of Marketing, the Head of IT. We can’t get anyone else.’ And we let them get away with that. And I really regretted it. It was fine. We met the objective. We delivered the project. It was torturous for them to try and get content produced from the other business areas. For three years after that, it was very much a comms platform. They struggled with all the usual things of ‘People aren’t coming here.’ And it was actually only when we got to the renewal point that we said, ‘Look, you never went through that process. Come on, do it. It will transform the experience and how people perceive it.’ We went through it and it was like the game-changer – overnight things changed. They felt a lot less pressure as well because they suddenly weren’t doing everything and trying to keep this thing alive. There was lots going on with lots of different owners, all very tidy, all very well organized and delivered and uniform. But, it wasn’t just their thing anymore. The wider business was getting value from it.  

That was a positive outcome; a much less positive outcome happened pretty much around the same time. This was not a time issue. We had a very stubborn stakeholder at the point of engagement who insisted, ‘You do not need to talk to my leadership team. They are not going to talk to you.’ So we progressed. And actually, that implementation died a death. They could not get anyone to produce content anywhere. I think by the time the renewal came around, they still hadn’t produced all the base content that they had wanted to. It was always something that we would have said you should do, you have to do. But I don’t want to come on here and say, ‘And I’m a saint and therefore I’ve never messed up or done any different.’ I think it’s worth sharing that the two occasions we didn’t do it, it was not a good outcome. So, talking to the senior leadership team is just brilliant for everything, from establishing that shared ownership, getting good quality content created, taking the pressure away from the core team to write everything and edit everything. And yeah, I just think it’s a good story.  

And then I think really what I said at the outset: make sure your global navigation reflects the priorities of the business. It is not a reflection of your org chart. Make sure your inter-site navigation and pages are task-based so that they’re helping people to do work. I always just wince when I see a department experience, which is just describing what the department does. Nobody’s coming here because they don’t know what an HR function does. They’re coming here because they’re trying to do something. What are they trying to do? They’re trying to book a holiday, or maybe you’re an engineering team… Why are people coming here? Maybe they want to raise a ticket or they want to understand what one of our product specs are? You’ve got to think why people are coming to you, not just describe what you or another function does. 

So I think those are, I would say, my three key playbooks or things I would suggest for success. A fourth nowadays is for sure around at that point of content creation, ask the questions about governance and actually be a bit ruthless and say, ‘We’re not going to let you put your site live until you come back to us with the information of how often this should be reviewed, who’s your primary and who’s your secondary owner? And what’s the escalation path if you don’t do the review or someone else doesn’t do the review in the timeframe that’s agreed? Does it go to someone else in the team or does it go up to your line manager?’ Get that put to bed at the same time the content is created. It’s always a pain to come back and try and deal with that. And as we’ve said at the outset of the podcast, you don’t have a choice about it anymore because Copilot’s reading everything and picking everything up. You can’t just revisit that later. 

Nancy
It creates a microscope effect. Suddenly there’s clarity around the content capabilities and shortfalls by virtue of AI blanketing the universe of institutional knowledge and even social and collaboration content as well in the unstructured realm. And so this need to focus on the fundamentals – I often like to align it to the Galbraith change model of old – you need to be sure of your purpose and the leadership and, you know, a whole host of things process and policy and rewards. And when you have all of those things aligned, it allows for change to flow more fluidly, more quickly. But also, on the other side, it’s easier to show the value for cost that’s been achieved because you end where you began, i.e. if you knew why you were undertaking what you were from the start, then you measure against that on the other side and it’s much easier to prove the value paradigm.  

Suzy
Absolutely. And I think on the basis that you’ve talked to the leadership, it’s just generally better understood anyway. You know, leaders are busy and unless they’re talked to about it, why would they think on it or champion it? Nobody champions anything unless they understand the value of it. So ,getting that stuff in early, I think is really important. 

Nancy
And so, add to this the fact that teams across the digital workplace landscape, be they internal comms or employee experience teams, they’re all under pressure to do more with less. At the same time, they also have to figure out new ways of working in the age of AI, Copilot or otherwise. And how are the best teams that you’re seeing in action rethinking their approaches, whether it’s to content or to channels or to measurement to keep this new form of hybrid in check, human-centred yet AI enabled?  

Suzy
I mean, as you said, at the outset, I’m a Microsoft 365 MVP, so I can only really speak on Copilot and what’s going on in the Microsoft stack. But one of my favourite parts of all the AI pieces are those that will do the governance now, which is fantastic because it’s always been on people’s to-do lists. It’s difficult to get around to. If you’re an organization of any size, you’ve got thousands of sites that you need to look after – not tens, not hundreds – thousands. Within Copilot, there’s something called the ‘Knowledge Agent’ and it will do dead-link checking. It will tell you when your sites and the pages within it need a review and you can set up an automated action off the back of it. So, you might say, ‘Well, look, this is an HR site that needs to be reviewed every three months. It’s going to go from Bob to Peter in the team and then escalate up. If nobody does anything, we’re going to archive it.’ In another scenario, for a department, you might say, ‘Well it’s annual. And if you don’t review it, we’re going to delete it.’ So you can have different rules for different sites. You can set it up at the outset and you don’t have to do anything with it again. 

Now, I would say anyone, at this point in time, would need to do the painful work of a full… you know, at tenant level, you can pull off a report of every site, see when it was created, see when it was last accessed, see how much data is in it. I think everyone at this stage needs to clean up, clean house, use something like the Knowledge Agent to set up that governance going forward, and then let AI take care of it, which is just great.  

And another use for AI that I’m really big on is Copilot has something called ‘Researcher’ in it and you can ask it really quite difficult questions. Last summer we were doing a project with a customer called Robert Walters – they’re now about 3500 people, a global recruitment company – and they had a comms team of one, one lady, and this thing had to be done in 12 weeks because it coincided with Meta, you know the social channel, being shut off and we showed her how to use Researcher and it was writing the refreshed digital workplace content for her. It’s great because you can point it at specific sources. So you can say, ‘Ignore anything in Viva Engage, ignore anything from the web, but yes, use my Teams recordings, use what’s in my Outlook, use what’s in my file, my OneDrive and SharePoint.’  

And so she was sitting with different teams and giving them the prompts and they were coming back with that content. Because, of course, it’s not that people don’t know the answer but  it takes time to write or you might have a really great report and think, ‘Oh my god, where is that? Which file is that in? Which team is that in? I haven’t got time to find it or I have, but it’s going to take me two weeks elapsed time to get you something instead of putting this prompt in.’ So, I absolutely get what you’re saying that AI is almost like another thing on the plate to manage, but I see it slightly differently, I think use AI to do the management, use AI to manage the content. And actually you can get a lot of that work off your plate. And it’s all the boring work as well that you don’t really want to do. You don’t want to chase people, do you? You don’t want to be doing governance stuff. It’s boring.  

Nancy
Well, it’s one of those things that, back to the example you were sharing, you have this team of one, suddenly it’s almost a team of me, myself and I, right? So it’s me plus a factor, with the use of agentic AI, with the use of these resources that are now at one’s fingertips, such that the hard work, the heavy lifting, can be done while you’re asleep. The answers are waiting for you, if not the work, you know, has already been taken care of. And the focus shifts to other high-value tasks at that point, where the impact factor can be a multiple of what someone was accomplishing previously. And so there’s a whole new leadership paradigm that will emerge in this age of what I call the ‘new hybrid’ – the human intelligence combined with the artificial. 

Suzy
Yeah, I think something I’m really excited about – it’s on its way; it’s not quite here yet. And you know, I know about this and I’m working on this because of my MVP status and also because of Addin 365 as a product company, right? So, we’ve got our own analytics tool. It looks all the way across Microsoft 365. It tracks the journeys people are going on. And I’m really excited about the connectors that Microsoft are working on because the excitement for me is that you’d be able to look at patterns of behaviour and the use of content based on the analytics and automatically update the navigation and the content hierarchy in the digital workplace. And, for me, that is like Nirvana because it’s another job that people often don’t get around to doing; it’s like they’re looking at the analytics in isolation; they’re looking at the site in isolation. They’re possibly making some point decisions about ‘I’ll move that link here or I’ll change the navigation there’ – but wouldn’t it be awesome if that was completely automated? That’s what I’m working towards at the moment. And it’s just really exciting to think that the space can go in that direction, also using AI, but leveraging some of the tools we’ve had for many years. You know, an analytics tool is an analytics tool, they’re as old as time! 

Nancy
Well, I can only imagine that, in the next couple of years, there will be roles inside of digital workplace teams that haven’t even been conceived of yet, by virtue of the fact that some of these core activities will be taken care of by various AI agents. And then, the real leapfrog moment for digital workplace teams can come to fruition.  

And so, you’ve shared some of the features that are exciting to you, that are on the horizon. I also think by virtue of the fact that we know change is the constant, just to bring us full circle – and it’s coming with velocity – if you could give one piece of advice to digital workplace leaders and one to executive sponsor types about making their next Microsoft 365-powered digital employee experience initiative genuinely impactful, what would you say to each of them?  

Suzy
It’s always difficult when you work within an organization, or with an organization, where you’ve got somebody saying, ‘No, no, I want that there on that page’, because ultimately I think they do their business really well but they don’t necessarily know how to work and get the best out of the technology. So, I think for any leadership team that’s about to embark on it, I would always say, ‘Be clear on the outcomes you want and ask either your internal team if you’re doing internally, or the partners that you’re talking to or the partner that you’re working with, how they would best meet those goals.’ And actually, that’s it. I’ve got a lot of confidence in the practitioners in the digital workplace space. Look at all the brilliant material, the podcasts, the blogs, the projects that go on day to day. There’s a ton of knowledge and expertise. And in the end, I would also say, ‘The digital workplace community and technology capabilities couldn’t and wouldn’t move as fast as it does unless there were some serious brains and people with ability to manage this stuff and to take it on and to incorporate it and to think about innovative ways of using it.’ And I just think sometimes that gets lost in those exec conversations.  

Nancy 
Well, I have to say ‘Yes and’ – sage advice! At the same time to be in a position where we can harvest and share those success stories and learning moments is so important. In just a matter of some weeks, we’ll be kicking off the start of our Awards programme -–and it’s that opportunity to start to take in those great stories, to shine a light on them and to allow those stories to help create a buoyancy effect where the level of all the boats rise by virtue of drawing out the learnings. And sometimes you get into the good, the bad and the ugly, right? In how those stories manifest themselves to get to the other side and share those action points, those learning points, the impact achieved. And I get excited about conversations like this because it’s an opportunity for us to help crystalize the vantage view across these vignettes, across these client impact stories. So, I want to thank you for stepping out of your day to come and have a chat and to share some of your reflections and help instigate some of the next-stage ambition for our wider industry circle. 

Suzy
Thank you so much for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed the chat. Yeah, I think final thought is, ‘Deliver it, measure it, refine it and go again’ – all the time incorporating new things. It’s been brilliant. Thank you very much for your time.  

Nancy
Thank you, Suzy.  

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