How AI-Powered Intranet Platforms Enhance Employee Collaboration and Productivity

AI-powered intranet platforms are making noise in the world of internal comms lately, and we reckon it’s for a good reason. Integrating AI within intranets unfolds unmatched ease of collaboration and boosts productivity. Research suggests that using AI in business has improved performance by 66%. Isn’t this what you’d love for your organization, too? 

In this blog, we’ll share ways to leverage AI in your intranets to help your teams work smarter. Tune in for ways to improve collaboration and productivity using AI-powered intranets.

The Role of AI in Modern Intranet Platforms

Integrating AI in modern intranets has tremendous benefits for improving functionality and user experiences. Specifically, Natural Language Processing (NLP), cognitive computing, and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are excellent contributors.

  • NLP enhances intranets with capabilities to automate interpreting and replying to natural language queries.
  • Cognitive computing abilities instill the ability to understand and respond to complex queries in a human-like manner.
  • ML equips intranets to automate tasks like examining data and learning from user interactions. Using it, you can make accurate predictions and judgments without getting into explicit programming. 

With AI, you can upgrade your static intranets into dynamic powerhouses, fostering improved productivity and user engagement. AI can equip you to deliver streamlined communication, automate low-value repetitive tasks, and improve collaboration. Let’s explore this in more detail.

Streamlining Communication with AI

As someone in internal comms, you’ll agree that challenges like handling massive amounts of information, disseminating relevant updates on time, and getting people to engage with it are common. You’ll also agree that employees often cite an inability to get the right message at the right time. Studies have shown that the average employee spends almost 2.5 hours per day searching for information

Embedding intranets with AI can introduce efficiency in your comms, facilitating faster, more effective, and more intuitive employee interactions. Using it, you can introduce more refined search capabilities. AI-equipped search algorithms can understand context and user intent more minutely and furnish relevant results. Your users can also use its capabilities to filter search results based on different criteria. This can make search more efficient and seamless, boosting productivity and employee satisfaction. 

AI can also enable you to extend personalized news feeds in your intranets. ML capabilities can make it effortless to analyze patterns in employee interests. You can use that intel to share relevant information with different groups. ( AI can also help you generate content for these segments and share personalized notifications!)  With that, you reduce much noise, ensuring content is consumed and users engage with it.  

Automating Routine Tasks

With hourly worker wages rising, leaders are echoing the importance of boosting employee productivity. AI-powered intranets can help you do just that while reducing errors and boosting employee experience.

Research shows that a quarter of the UK and US workforce spends half their working day on non-productive, manual tasks. You can automate many of these time-consuming and less-value-creating tasks using AI within your intranets. For instance, you can set predefined rules and let AI route information to the right people without requiring team leaders’ extensive involvement. This can save them effort and time focusing on activities requiring their expertise. You can deploy AI chatbots within your intranet to answer common employee queries, say about HR-related concerns. This can free up the time of HR managers, allowing them to focus on more strategic aspects.

Basic Fit used chatbots to auto-address repetitive inquiries for Customer Service and is seeing a fantastic response! Similarly, leveraging AI within your intranet can help you auto-generate reports from text-based conversations or video meetings on your employee app. It can share transcripts and summaries with everyone attending the conference, saving teams time on manually sharing post-meeting summaries.

Enhancing Collaboration Through Intelligent Tools

Collaboration is another major challenge, especially with distributed work across geolocations and time zones. If teams struggle to connect and share knowledge and best practices, delays and are common. Mistakes also get repeated across teams. Integrating AI-driven tools into intranet platforms can simplify this by fostering improved collaboration. 

For example, finding an ideal meeting time for ten employees across different time zones with their respective calendars booked can be tricky. Intelligent scheduling assistants built into your intranet can make this easy. You can leverage them to auto-analyze the participants’ time zone-based schedules and share potential timings. With this, setting up meetings can become super easy. Intranets with voting features can enable people to submit, vote, and discuss ideas. AI can then categorize and prioritize these based on impact. Another example: If a distributed team is to collaborate on a document, cooperating can be challenging and time-consuming, involving an endless thread of emails. Real-time document editing can enable multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously, saving time and effort. The bottom line is that there are many ways in which AI can help maintain a seamless flow of ideas and projects among distributed teams. 75% of leaders using AI claim their teams are collaborating better. 

As De Waal Auto Group grew, it also struggled with collaboration. For example, reaching 30 employees from different departments was difficult. To overcome this, it leveraged AI in its employee app to share relevant information in a user-friendly way both at the team and company levels. This helped it increase productivity and engage its people.

Follow these Best Practices when implementing AI-Powered Intranets.

  • To overcome staff reluctance to initial adoption, ensure that any AI-based features you introduce are easy to use. 
  • Conduct adequate training so employees know how to leverage the features best.
  • Recognize employees who use them to encourage wider adoption. Let your leaders acknowledge them in group chats. 
  • Ensure you use secure tools that don’t compromise data integrity, as this could backfire. Simultaneously, ensure you don’t violate compliances like privacy. 
  • Monitor and track usage data regularly to identify gaps you need to address. Conduct surveys from time to time to get direct employee feedback.
  • Choose scalable intranets. When your organization grows, you should be able to handle the increased data and user load. Also, look for intranets that allow quick updates and integrations with new features.
  • While you leverage AI-based intranets, don’t overdo it. Don’t forget, there’s no substitute for human touch and personal ties.

Want to boost your collaboration and productivity with AI?

AI has excellent applications in enhancing collaboration and productivity through intranet platforms. Integrating it into your workflows is your best bet now to fuel growth.

Speakap offers an easy-to-use social intranet solution designed to end all information overload. It can help you enhance employee engagement while seamlessly integrating with your essential AI-based digital tools.

Find out how to make it work for your organization.