Are you looking for a high-impact use case for AI investment? Or do you simply want to make things better for your employees at work? The next evolution of your company’s intranet is AI-powered personalization and assistance creating an opportunity for a big win.
3 Reasons to Consider AI-Powered Intranet
- Low intranet usage.
- Mistakes occur based on intranet resources.
- Employees build shadow intranets to circumvent the company intranet.
AI is advancing quickly and is becoming more mainstream. More companies are looking at their intranets as high-value targets for employee experience improvements. The upgrades that today’s AI can provide can address the widespread problem of employee burnout, which drives up costs including productivity loss and turnover. This is an expensive problem for employers. Earlier this year, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine published a study which found that the average 1,000-person company in the US is losing more than $5 million per year to burnout-related costs.
Here’s how an AI-enabled intranet can reduce friction and make life easier for your employees.
3 Ways AI Can Reduce Friction for Intranet Users
When employees log in to the company intranet, they get really frustrated if the experience isn’t intuitive and the information they do find is incomplete or outdated. This builds a sense of time pressure and overall stress levels. AI offers multiple use cases to eliminate those stressors for a better, more efficient experience.
1. Intelligent Intranet Automation and Assistance
Agents trained to handle specific routine tasks and processes can take new hires through onboarding, surface responses to common questions, and pull content from the company knowledge base to save employees time. AI agents trained on the intranet can also act as personalized assistants to each employee to answer questions, recommend next steps and complete tasks.
For example, an AI agent can walk new employees through onboarding and answer their questions with information tailored to their role and department, so they get only relevant information and avoid overwhelm.
2. Personalized Intranet Experiences
AI can use data on each employee’s preferences, role, search history, current projects, recent events and more to feature personalized content, search results and resource recommendations for each user. For example, AI can automatically tag documents and spreadsheets and other resources based on the content in them. It can then surface those same resources when they’re relevant to an employee’s request or task.
3. Intranet Systems Integration
AI agents can support user requests and complete tasks across different platforms within the organization without forcing employees to switch between systems. Toggling between applications requires employees to adjust their focus each time, adding to their sense of time pressure.
For example, rather than just checking the company PTO policy on the company intranet or scheduling PTO through a timekeeping system, employees can ask an intranet AI agent to request their vacation time when it makes sense in terms of project workload. When the request is approved, the agent can notify team members and update calendars and systems of record. If the company offers travel planning benefits, the agent might also make recommendations about where employees could go or stay during their break.
In the use cases above, agentic AI coordinates the company’s existing tools and data so employees don’t have to. That creates a faster, smoother experience that reduces costs by saving time and can create a significant impact. In a September 2024 survey of more than 1,000 senior leaders at companies with AI-enhanced intranets:
- 95 percent reported 50 percent increases in productivity.
- 94 percent reported higher revenue.
- 93 percent reported higher profitability.
Key Indicators for AI Intranet Transformation
Employee data and surveys can show you whether your company’s intranet is failing in critical ways. Look for:
1. Low Intranet Usage
If your employees avoid using the intranet, it’s a strong indicator that it’s not meeting their needs. It’s also a red flag for operational inefficiencies, because employees who don’t get their information from your intranet are probably emailing HR and other departments with questions the intranet should be able to answer.
2. Mistakes Based on Intranet Resources.
If your intranet delivers outdated information to employees, you run the risk of bad decisions made on the basis of that information. Depending on your industry and regulatory requirements, errors made based on bad intranet information could be minor hassles that add to employees’ mental load, or they could put your organization’s performance and compliance at risk.
3. “Shadow” Intranets
When teams build their own intranet-like resources, it’s usually a sign that the official company intranet isn’t providing them with the information they need in a usable way. Like shadow IT — tech tools and apps that employees implement without official IT approval -- shadow intranets can create information silos and conflicting guidance on processes and policies.
Making the Switch to an AI-Powered Intranet
A successful AI intranet transition starts with strategic planning that addresses current intranet pain points and reimagines the employee experience to reduce burnout and align with wider business goals. Change management, compliance, and data security and governance are also critical for an effective intranet makeover strategy.
Starting with a high-impact use case can accelerate ROI and encourage employees to engage with your upgraded intranet. For example, if search results are currently outdated, irrelevant, or incomplete and causing mistakes or mistrust, then AI-powered, personalized search capabilities with results that are “answers not just links” just might be the ideal initial use case. If onboarding is confusing and frustrating, an agentic guide to the process, plus automation of basic tasks, could dramatically improve new hires’ initial employee experience.
From there, you can scale AI to other areas of your intranet experience, such as coordinating processes across systems and recommending next best steps. At the heart of a successful AI-powered intranet is continuous optimization based on real-time usage data, business outcomes, and evolving employee expectations.
Reducing stress that leads to burnout, building employee confidence in your intranet resources, and improving efficiency are the primary outcomes of a well-designed AI intranet conversion. When done well, it makes employees’ lives better at work and becomes the “go to” place to find things to get work done. There are many use cases for AI that are ready today, and success here will encourage employees to engage with other AI initiatives as you roll them out. Your intranet is your foundation to realize ROI faster and accelerate progress toward your business goals.
