Feature
Research Report
The ROI of Employee Experience
The average enterprise uses anywhere from 255 to 664 applications, depending on its size. Employees ping-pong between Slack, Salesforce, SharePoint, Workday and Jira, wasting time and disrupting context with every click. Traditional intranets were supposed to fix this. Instead, they became digital dead ends — static portals while the real work happened everywhere else.
However, intelligent central hubs offer an alternative by unifying access, automating workflows and finding the right information at the right moment.
Recent research from Interact suggests that little has changed, showing that 71% of communicators collect data, but only 11% use it to guide decisions. Just 1% say they're effectively reaching deskless or frontline workers. Meanwhile, 67% cite information overload as their top frustration — the problem intranets were supposed to solve.
Elsewhere, LumApps' inaugural Future of Work Index tells the same story. Nearly eight in 10 leaders call technological advancement one of their workplace's most disruptive forces. Despite 75% reporting serious investment in productivity tech, 56% admit workplace tools are worse than the apps on their phones. More than a third of senior leaders wrestle with six to 10 platforms daily.
Whether intelligent hubs are the answer or just the next expensive mistake depends on whether they've learned from what stymied their predecessors.
Why Intranets Failed
Traditional intranets were built for a world of file cabinets and bulletin boards. They assumed work happened in one place, information lived in documents and employees navigated to a portal when they needed something.
This has been a historical problem, said Simon Dance, CEO of Interact Software. Traditional intranets were built for static information sharing, not for orchestrating work across hundreds of applications. As employees switch between tools, intranets can't keep up.
But the failure goes deeper. Most intranets were built assuming the problem was navigation—better search, clearer menus and more organized folders. The problem is that decision-making becomes fragmented, scattered across loads of apps, explained Jason Tassie, business growth expert and founder of Know Your Business. One task touches HR, IT, finance and three SaaS platforms. Today’s work doesn't need a homepage.
Traditional intranets assume people will stop what they're doing and manually find information, according to Vittesh Sahni, senior director of AI engineering at Coherent Solutions. They miss the point of workflows entirely— a hub pulls information from everywhere and pushes relevant output back into workflows.
These systems were designed for document storage and internal communication, not for connecting sprawling, cloud-native ecosystems, said Bakul Banthia, co-founder of Tessell. Users ended up toggling between dozens of tools anyway.
While 80% of organizations run a company-wide intranet, only 43% of senior leaders are satisfied with it, according to LumApps research.
What Makes a Hub Different
The difference between a dashboard and a hub isn't about features or integrations. It's about whether people do their work without leaving.
A hub brings work and information to the employee instead of asking them to navigate a maze of systems, Dance explained. It unifies apps, permissions and workflows so people find what they need and act in the moment. If it doesn't simplify the experience and reduce switching, it's just another dashboard.
Tassie has a simpler test: If it's a place where people actually do things, it's a central hub. If it shows you everything but you still have to go somewhere else to do something, it's not.
A hub becomes the place where work happens. It unifies access, understands context across sources and delivers what users need without app-hopping. Contextual AI helps interpret intent and generate meaningful output, Sahni explained.
Unlike dashboards that only display data, an intelligent hub integrates systems, enforces policies and learns from user behavior. The goal is operational coherence, according to Banthia. Information flows across applications, reducing friction.
The market is ready. The Interact report found 54% of organizations lack a single go-to platform for internal communications. More than half of communicators want greater control over their tech stack, but only 15% are satisfied with what they have.
Hubs’ Intelligence Layer
Previous attempts at unified platforms failed because they were fundamentally dumb. They could aggregate, but they couldn't think.
AI gives the hub context, Dance explained. It predicts what information an employee needs, highlights what's important and turns large amounts of data into actions. This is how organizations move from publishing content to delivering personalized, high-impact communication.
AI provides context-aware recommendations, automated workflow orchestration and predictive insights. Instead of showing data from multiple apps, an intelligent hub alerts employees to tasks requiring attention, suggests next steps and pre-fills information, reducing cognitive load, Banthia said.
AI turns the hub from a storage portal into a reasoning engine. Sahni's hub uses AI to synthesize information across systems, generate structured assets such as timelines, case studies or pitch decks and recommend content relevant to ongoing tasks.
AI helps keep things less busy, arguing that it's the difference between showing you everything and showing you what matters, Tassie said. A system might dump 42 alerts on your screen. An intelligent system shows the three that need your attention now.
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This addresses a critical barrier: 62% of leaders say digital friction makes employee alignment harder, particularly when introducing AI-powered changes, according to LumApps research. Around 32% recommend only platforms that personalize each employee's experience, while 61% require flexibility to accommodate diverse needs.
The Real Barrier to Intelligent Hubs
Connecting hundreds of applications sounds like the hard part. It's not. Building a central hub doesn't require massive transformation, Dance said. The real value comes from a phased approach: Start by connecting the systems that have the greatest effect on employees, then expand from there.
Implementation depends on complexity. Connecting key applications takes weeks, Banthia noted. Enterprise-wide deployment might take months. Challenges include API compatibility, data normalization and change management, but integration platforms make the process faster.
Security follows established patterns. The foundation is a governance model that sits on the organization's existing security framework, using SSO and directory integration. Intelligent hubs use single sign-on, role-based access control and AI-driven policy enforcement.
But trying to connect every app isn't the real challenge, Tassie said.The tech is pretty easy. It's the people. Every time you link systems, you uncover messy processes, duplicate data and different teams doing things their own way. You can easily plug 10 apps into a system in a month, but getting five departments to agree on a consistent way of working could take a year or two.
The hardest part isn't the technology, Sahni agreed. It's cleaning and mapping data, reducing duplication in legacy systems and driving adoption across teams.
Technical problems have technical solutions. Organizational dysfunction doesn't.
What Intelligent Hub Success Looks Like
Employees will ignore the hub unless it makes their lives better from day one.
Adoption comes from making work faster, not adding another step. A hub succeeds when employees get what they need and only what they need, without digging or switching tools, Dance explained. When the hub becomes the fastest path to information, tasks and decisions, it becomes a natural part of how people work.
The hub must deliver value immediately, according to Banthia. It should streamline daily workflows, reduce clicks and provide actionable insights. Personalization, context-aware notifications and integration are essential.
Sahni reduces it to three requirements: it must save time on day one, it must generate output without slop and it must integrate where people already work.
Success is when people stop thinking about systems and get things done. Organizations see faster task completion, fewer support tickets, better reach into frontline teams and engagement improvements, Dance noted.
Banthia defined success through metrics: productivity gains, reduced application switching, faster task completion, improved compliance and data accuracy. A well-implemented hub becomes invisible—it makes work faster and simpler.
The Bottom Line of Intelligent Hubs
The technology finally works. AI provides contextual intelligence that static portals never could. Today’s integration platforms make connecting disparate systems feasible. The pieces exist.
But only 15% of communicators are satisfied with current tools. Most frontline workers remain unreached.
Technical problems are solved. What remains is whether organizations can align their people and processes around a unified way of working—whether they're willing to clean up their data, standardize their processes and change how they operate.
Every failed intranet, every ignored portal, every abandoned platform happened because organizations bought software to avoid doing hard work. Intelligent hubs solve application chaos, but only for organizations willing to solve their own chaos first.
The technology is ready. Most organizations aren't.
Editor's Note: How else are leaders taming digital workplace chaos?
- How Comcast Transformed Digital Chaos Into an Award-Winning Employee Experience — Chris Harrer, formerly of Comcast, discusses how he and his former team consolidated multiple intranets to deliver a modern digital employee experience.
- Why More Workplace Technology Causes More Friction — Employees lose nearly a full workday every week battling fragmented software. Here’s how complexity is crushing productivity, morale and revenue.
- Navigate Digital Workplace Complexity With These DEX Principles — Our digital workplaces have become bloated with apps. It's time we all do what Lotus's Colin Chapman recommended: simplify, then add lightness.