Editorial
Over the past year, intranet and employee experience platform vendors have developed their AI capabilities in innovative ways, with many promising more AI functionality in the near future.
When considering an intranet or employee experience platform purchase, remember: just because a tool has an AI feature doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for you. As always, consider what’s appropriate for your organization now and in the near future, then speak with vendors about what can be switched off for a gradual introduction.
Below we explore these AI features, categorized across four broad themes.
Know Before You Buy
When you consider these AI features for your company, it can be useful to use the same four points our reviewers did when :
- Supportive – AI features should be supportive or helpful, with the goal of improving an end-user and / or admin’s experience. What task is it improving?
- Purposeful – Any feature should have a clear purpose, it shouldn’t exist just for the sake of having AI. What benefit is it bringing?
- Usable – As with all things, the AI features should be simple for end-users and admins to use. You shouldn’t need specific AI training to do something —it should behave logically. Could an infrequent user work with it?
- Governable – Concerns about hard-to-anticipate risks makes many organizations hesitant to adopt AI. AI features should therefore have appropriate controls in place, such as how data is accessed and gets used to generate content. Does the AI feature allow appropriate controls such as how data is accessed and by whom?
Generative AI for Content Creation
Around two-thirds of the products we reviewed included generative AI features for creating copy, which is an increase on last year. Some take a form-like approach, where publishers enter prompts and settings to generate content they can then edit. Others include in-context editing for tone or length when text is highlighted.
A few of the features stood out as being particularly innovative. The first example is a built-in policy template from Oak Engage, which is applied when a publisher wants to create a new policy page. The AI then completes the template, generating a draft policy for review and editing. This is a helpful approach, although the template might feel too restrictive (and overly comprehensive) for some.
Interact’s ‘inclusivity’ language checker and page sentiment / tone assessment also stood out. The feature allows publishers to consider how employees might perceive their piece before it’s published. This small yet supportive feature will help publishers finesse their pages.
Sociabble offers some of the most sophisticated AI features we’ve seen for creating content. Particularly noteworthy are the settings for organizations and individuals to write context statements that any generated content is passed through. The ‘tone’ that’s typically defined by vendors is also configurable, so admins can define exactly what “warm” or “humorous” means within their organization.
The effectiveness of these generative AI approaches is largely down to personal preference, but the accuracy is worth exploring. We’ve observed cases where generated content looked inaccurate, unclear or badly written, so speak to your vendors about how the content is generated.
Additionally, ask what the AI will do when it “doesn’t know what it’s talking about.” Is there a risk of hallucinations when there’s no material for it to draw on, or when materials contradict each other?
Roughly half of the platforms with AI included generative AI for image creation, which is again an increase over last year. AI here can take the form of image suggestions or full creation using tools like Dall-E. As with text, AI generated images should be checked closely — and for those with tight brand controls these features can usually be switched off.
Given how common generative AI features have become in these tools, it’s a good idea to decide whether you want to use generative AI features and how before exploring what’s available. We’d also advise you to focus on the accuracy of outputs and whether they meet your organizational standards during any demos.
Search and Information Finding
Vendors devoted a good amount of energy into developing generative AI search capabilities this year. Only a handful of platforms had search or digital assistant type functionality previously, but this year around half include some variation.
A common new feature is AI-generated ‘likely answers’ in search results. This Google-like experience presents the answer to a question rather than lists of results, which leaves individuals having to continue their information hunt. Make sure links to verifiable sources are included with this approach.
A handful of products have also introduced search assistants via a chat interface. Whereas chatbots of old needed to be manually “programmed” by admins, AI will now draw on data from across repositories to generate answers (aka Retrieval Augmented Generation).
Lightspeed365 Premium includes a chat-based interface for asking questions about content in a defined scope: for example, when connected to a policy library an employee can ask questions such as ‘what is our remote work policy?’ and receive an answer, along with the source document. This can be particularly helpful on mobile devices, where reading through a long policy document to find information is unwieldy.
Some vendors include the option to have multiple chatbots across the intranet. For example, the HR section could have a dedicated chatbot with health and safety having a second, separate instance. Such an approach could cause confusion and potentially impact adoption if employees don’t understand there are distinct interfaces for specific tasks. If you’re considering this approach, use caution and consider the user experience.
Other notable information-finding capabilities include automatic or recommended content summaries, which help people understand whether the correct item is present in search results. We wish this helpful feature was more common.
Akumina gives the option to link to an AI prompt / query rather than embedding a simple link in a page. For example, embedding the query ‘what is the latest information about product X’ points to dynamically created and contextually relevant results, based on the latest available information about product X. This feature could be great for frequently changing content, particularly where publishers want to encourage discovery and employees want to keep up to date in fast-moving situations.
Products vary in how they provide AI search support however, typically only offering some of the following, rather than the full scope of features, which we think would be beneficial:
- The ability to ‘teach’ the AI when it has provided an inaccurate answer.
- Integrations with third-party tools, such as Salesforce or Workday.
- The inclusion of additional resources, such as an associated file, within the answer or via a link.
- Feedback mechanisms, such as thumbs up / down or simple forms to gauge user satisfaction.
- Analytics to help admins see what is or isn’t working within search.
- A chatbot-style interface and / or making this part of the standard search experience.
- Contact information for subject experts if someone wants more information.
A handful of products have also been exploring ‘digital assistant' functionality, which expands search capabilities beyond the intranet into the broader digital workplace. Digital assistants will interrogate any connected system or database, presenting information and subsequent activities to employees so they don’t have to worry about accessing multiple locations. Workgrid is an excellent example, as it’s purely a digital assistant tool that is positioned on top of other solutions. The partnership announced between Unily and Workgrid in 2024 is one to watch, as it’s likely to bring positive developments to both products.
AI in search could dramatically improve the employee experience of products if effectively applied. For years, we’ve debated if intranets and associated tools could be ‘front doors’ into organizations’ digital workplaces, particularly as other digital workplace solutions have added more functionality. AI-driven search and digital assistants are in a very good position to offer that way in – potentially more so than other digital workplace tools as intranets are so flexible.
AI Support for Admins
Over the past year vendors have introduced new features that support admins, but the range and number of products is still much smaller than the generative AI and search capabilities. We think further development here would bring huge benefits to intranet management teams, both for frequent and infrequent admins, which would in turn likely have a positive impact on the overall employee experience.
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Effective governance is essential to the success of an intranet,which gives vendors a huge opportunity to develop useful AI features here. For example, SharePoint Advanced Management (“SAM”) offers tools, such as inactive site detection and content oversharing reports, when combined with Copilot licenses. Another example, Akumina’s ‘MAX AI,’ can create metadata such as keywords and descriptions as part of content creation and will maintain these whenever changes are made.
We like the concept of AI-driven analysis to give greater depth to analytics. For example, with Viva Engage storylines, leaders can see a summary of popular and trending themes in employees’ posts. In mid-2024 Oak released the first AI-assisted analytics report that we’ve seen among products, which you can read more about in the report. MangoApps’ new AI Studio analytics shows trends from results generated from AI searches and the content generated, helping admins see the effectiveness of their AI search.
Given the rich potential for development in this scenario (which is historically the worst performing area), we feel more vendors should be considering AI for analytics.
Finally, while generative AI supports admins, there is more to forming content than just creating words and images. We like Poppulo’s AI chatbot — accessible via a persistent question mark icon — which provides information from the ‘Resource Center.’ The chatbot answers natural language questions when someone needs help or would like some guidance (for example “how to structure a CEO’s email update”), using the organization’s own reference material to generate answers.
General UX Enhancements
This final area is a catch-all for other AI features, all smaller tools that contribute towards improving the overall user experience. Auto-translation is the most common of these features yet is still not as common as we’d like to see. Some vendors are taking steps in the right directions here, however.
Sociabble stands out. It uses its own powerful video platform and includes AI-driven functionality that is among the most advanced in this report. Options to create transcripts, manage subtitles, generate text summaries and dub videos in different languages with AI-generated lip sync are all included. While it can feel strange to see yourself speak a language you don’t know, it can make a real difference for employees' engagement with leaders.
Similarly, Appspace, MangoApps and others have an exciting AI audio generation tool that renders an audio version of a page without the need for publishers to record anything. This is a great accessibility feature and it gives a pseudo-podcast feel that will allow people to keep up to date with news without having to read something. We hope audio translations are the next step.
Overall, the AI additions provide a lot of opportunities to enhance experiences. With the initial rush to add generative AI features largely over and search addressed, we hope vendors will add even more beneficial AI capabilities to other suitable areas.
Editor's Note: Dig into other digital workplace trends below:
- How to Move Your Intranet From Good to Great — There are plenty of bad intranets and a fair number of good ones. But great ones remain few and far between. Here's what it takes to achieve greatness.
- Intelligent Automation Promises to Shake Up Legacy Tech, Provided Your Data's in Order — Intelligent automation pushes beyond the boundaries of robotic process automation to adapt and evolve with business changes.
- What's Next for Enterprise Search? AI Knows — People don't want to search, they want to find information. A new breed of solutions are changing the boundaries of enterprise search.
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