EditorialAI-Driven Intranets: The Future for the Digital Employee Experience

Enterprise tech vendors are increasingly embedding AI capabilities into their solutions, predominantly through agent-based architectures. The approach enables rapid deployment of AI features while allowing vendors to capitalize on the AI hype for marketing purposes, and, in many cases, upsell customers on the added functionality.

But just as we've seen an explosion of tools for the employee experience, we’re now witnessing a surge in AI agents. We have agents in every. Single. Tool.

These AI agents often operate in isolation from one another, and in some cases, within the platform itself.

Yes, they may be "embedded" in the experience, but the burden is still on the employee to find, learn and effectively use them. It’s no wonder adoption challenges and ROI are common complaints.

The real value of enterprise AI will be when AI is not a capability employees use, but a behind-the-scenes enabler, driving the experience.

Not a chatbot. Not another agent window. Just a smarter experience — personalized, contextual, anticipatory. Something that adapts to us without us needing a PhD in prompt engineering. The best enterprise AI solutions will be when employees are not even aware that it's there.

A Proactive Personal Assistant in Your Intranet

The intranet may just be the first step in bringing this AI approach to life to improve the digital employee experience. With the constant explosion of tools, channels and information, a digital front door acts as a starting point that cuts through the noise, surfaces what’s most relevant and guides employees down the right paths.

What if the intranet wasn’t just a portal with pushed communications, search and navigational links, but an AI-driven, hyper-personalized digital experience that's tailored to an individual employee's needs and behaviors? An employee’s personal assistant — their new best friend at work.

One place to go, surfacing exactly what you need … before you even ask. Knows your rhythms. Connects your tools. Takes action for you. And evolves and gets smarter over time.

A mock-up of what a personalized, contextual intranet front door could do, when AI works away in the background.  

Imagine an experience that adapts to you, no matter where you are: whether on a screen, in a conference room, or using a wearable or voice-enabled device. It adjusts in real time to your accessibility needs, privacy preferences, interaction habits and overall wellbeing. An environment where user research, metrics analysis and usability testing happen continuously, with the experience evolving almost instantly based on real-time insights. 

And one wild thought: What if your intranet followed you to your next job? I'll save that brainstorm for another time. 

A context-aware and adaptive intranet powered by AI would be the actual realization of personalization, not today's interpretation that is essentially a combination of targeted content, security controls and API calls.

Signs of the AI-Driven Experience

This isn’t just me speculating. There are already emerging examples of AI-driven experiences:

• PwC has integrated AI into its intranet to create a more personalized experience. The AI-driven system tailors content and tools to the individual user, improving the relevance of the information they receive, making the experience less about hunting for resources and more about having the right information at the right time.
• Zuora, a software company, introduced a conversational AI experience within Slack that provides employees with on-demand support and information. This AI experience handles requests across IT, Workplace Services, Finance and HR autonomously, adapting to individual user needs and making data-driven decisions. By seamlessly integrating with existing systems, the solution is able to prioritize requests, assign tickets based on severity, and optimize workspace usage, resulting in quicker resolutions and reduced operational costs.
• Simpplr's intranet solution incorporates AI to deliver personalized content based on an employee’s past interactions and role. By using machine learning algorithms, the platform predicts what content, tools and resources employees need, streamlining access to the information that matters most to them.
• The Moveworks employee service platform uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to automate workplace requests, such as IT support and HR requests. The AI assistant proactively resolves issues without requiring the employee to seek out a chatbot in a separate platform or fill out a ticket.

These examples illustrate how AI transcends fragmentation challenges to become a hidden enabler of seamless digital experiences. But there’s still a long way to go, especially when it comes to applying AI not just to specific tools but across the entire digital employee experience, anticipating needs, delivering hyper-personalized content and evolving in real-time.

Less AI Window Dressing, More AI Solutions

We need to continue cleaning up and better managing enterprise data, implement appropriate AI guardrails and oversight, and explore enterprise AI beyond agentic models to discover what's possible and ultimately build trust.

With an AI-driven experience that adapts to the individual, the need for traditional adoption and training programs might soon become obsolete.

We instead get to focus on solving what’s broken in digital work to drive higher value outcomes:

• Less noise and friction
• Meaningful collaboration
• More innovation
• Deeper connection and engagement
• Empowered employees, doing great work

Is this the near-future of the digital workplace? Will AI make intranets great again? I would love to hear your take.

Editor's Note: Catch up on more AI in the digital workplace trends and news:

• Salesforce's Slack API Restrictions Sparks Broader Questions on the Future of AI — The Slack API decision is more than a product tweak: it’s a signal. It reflects deep tensions playing out across the digital workplace.
• Is GenAI the Answer to Hyper-Personalization in EX? 4 Considerations — Generative AI has the potential to finally deliver on personalized employee experience. But before you jump in, review these four pointers.
• Is Your Intranet Ready for the AI Chatbot Era? — Our recent study found organizations with strong governance and clean content felt AI-ready; those with messy or outdated content did not.