By Shishank Gupta, SVP & Head of the Digital Workplace Ecosystem and Microsoft Practice, Infosys
Traditional intranets, once central hubs for employee resources, have often become corporate billboards focused on management-driven content, neglecting essential employee needs.
These intranets often struggle with limited reach among frontline workers, language barriers, and ensuring content relevance. Optimising for mobile devices and meeting accessibility requirements for users with disabilities is also problematic, hindering full engagement and timely task completion while contributing to overlooked corporate communications and updates.
Companies modernising their intranets should reimagine them as employee experience platforms that simplify information access, enable seamless collaboration, foster community, and enhance engagement. GenAI can power these platforms, revolutionising workplace efficiency and information access.
The impact of GenAI on transforming the workplace
Modern intranets enhanced with GenAI are reshaping communication dynamics and fostering an environment conducive to innovation and productivity as follows:
Personalising and streamlining access to information
GenAI-enhanced intranets are revolutionising information access by fostering transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration in large organisations where knowledge is often scattered across departments. Traditional sharing methods can create isolated pockets of information but integrating GenAI transforms intranets into dynamic hubs for personalised content delivery, collaborative knowledge-building, and instant Q&A support via chatbots.
Leveraging AI to analyze user behavior, preferences, and context delivers relevant content and recommendations. Developing reusable components can help users identify tasks and actions through analysis of emails and communications. These components also promote user wellness by suggesting breaks or rescheduling meetings outside regular business hours, ensuring seamless information flow and enhanced employee wellbeing across all organisational levels and locations.
Empowering employees with dynamic self-learning
GenAI equips intranets with dynamic, self-adjusting models that evolve based on real-time interactions, eliminating the need for constant manual updates. These AI-driven platforms keep content current and relevant by learning from user engagement. In large corporations, where staying updated on industry trends and internal processes is challenging, GenAI-enabled intranets provide self-updating learning modules that enhance knowledge management and collaboration. They curate content, tailor learning experiences, foster collaborative creation, and refine themselves through continuous feedback.
Boosting employee productivity and collaboration through AI-enabled knowledge discovery
Traditional intranets served as information repositories, but GenAI is revolutionising knowledge discovery. GenAI-powered intranets enable effortless knowledge sharing, idea exchange, and adoption of best practices. Modern intranets support semantic search, natural language processing, and speech recognition across various business functions, helping employees enjoy better collaboration and productivity.
Facilitating transformative content capabilities
The intranet struggled to engage employees due to stale information and the high effort needed to create new content. AI simplifies generating high-quality, multilingual content tailored to employee needs. Incorporating GenAI-enabled tools into intranets allows employees to create, summarise, or extract information from any device or location, giving them more time to focus on customers or innovation. It also automates tagging, categorisation, and organisation, keeping content up-to-date and easily discoverable.
These AI models, trained in multiple languages, ensure inclusivity and better communication within global teams by generating content in various languages. Additionally, AI automates content management tasks such as tagging, categorisation, and organisation, keeping intranet content up-to-date, accurate, and easily discoverable.
AI-powered tools can automatically audit intranet pages, applications, and content for compliance with accessibility standards, ensuring a more inclusive digital environment.
Future work empowered by GenAI-enhanced intranets
GenAI-powered intranets offer a transformative opportunity for the modern workplace by making information more discoverable, relevant, and personalised. This empowers the workforce, boosts productivity, and fosters collaboration. However, challenges include ensuring data privacy and security, maintaining unbiased data for reliable insights, and overcoming employee resistance due to privacy concerns or job displacement fears. Building trust through transparency, education, and open communication is crucial. Additionally, integrating GenAI with existing infrastructures requires compatibility, scalability, and seamless integration, especially in organisations with outdated systems. As younger generations increasingly value technological innovation from employers, enterprises that adopt GenAI intranets gain a competitive edge in attracting and retaining top talent.
