There’s a lot of buzz around AI these days with many bold predictions and claims about the potential impact such technologies will have in the workplace. Many communicators are still trying to understand where its potential can match the real-world results, and which use cases might benefit most.
In this post, we share our suggestions for leveraging AI tools in your intranet, where we’ve found that it can support or even automate content management and improve search and findability.
Here are five options to explore:
1. Natural language search assistants
Searching conversationally by describing what you are looking for is not new; however, thanks to advancements in AI natural language models, it’s becoming more accurate and much easier to implement.
You can add a conversational search window powered by an AI model (sometimes referred to as a “chatbot”) to your SharePoint based intranet site(s) using tools like Copilot Studio and scope it to various content sources. A chatbot can query across intranet site content as well as the web to retrieve answers to user-based prompts while offering employees a more interactive experience than traditional search. More advanced conversational search experiences can also perform different tasks and actions on command.
We’ve noticed that searching via an AI assistant can sometimes be a slower experience than searching via traditional SharePoint search, especially if you're just searching for one specific search term. However, searching conversationally for more obscure subjects, such as "that document that was shared last week that said something about parental leave," will often be faster than doing your typical SharePoint search, which usually requires modifying the refiners to get to the right content. Similarly, prompts like “find me all documents related to onboarding” may yield more accurate results quickly, depending on your site’s information architecture.
Similar to traditional search, successful results also rely on the quality and governance of your site content. Duplicate or outdated content, for example, can impact the accuracy and usefulness of the results.
2. Embedded agents
No, this isn’t a spy novel, embedded agents are a real thing and relatively simple to implement on specific sites within your intranet. According to Microsoft, Embedded AI Agents are a software that can reason and perform specific business tasks using generative AI. Made possible by LLMs (large learning models), agents can understand the context of their environment and act within a defined set of actions. Ultimately, they are the same as the natural language search assistants described above, but they focus on querying only specific and predefined site(s) within your intranet that are considered the source of the truth. Microsoft has made it relatively simple for you to create AI Agents at a site level through the UI without a technical skillset.
For example, you could create an agent that focuses specifically on answering questions around operating procedures that draws information from a specific trusted content repository within your intranet related to that topic vs. the entire contents of the intranet. You can also populate agents with suggested starter prompts specifically related to the subject matter at hand to guide users on the intended purpose.
3. Content rewrite suggestions
One of Microsoft Copilot’s more useful features is the ability to provide on-demand content writing suggestions to existing SharePoint page copy when you need it – much like what exists in Microsoft Word. Intranet content authors can use this feature to refine their messaging with suggested rewrites as they author their page content within SharePoint. For example, they can change the tone of their writing to either something more casual or more professional, depending on the context.
Authors can select specific page copy, review different suggested alternatives, and accept or reject those changes before publishing the final page. Based on our experience thus far, we find Copilot does a pretty good job of presenting useful suggestions.
4. Auto tagging and content classification
Tagging pages and documents with metadata ensures that employees can effectively search and find relevant content on your intranet. It’s one of the more manual and time-consuming tasks you need to do when creating new content, and it’s an especially heavy lift when you have to migrate large volumes of content to your intranet from another source location.
AI tools such as Copilot Studio can be configured to mine content and automatically suggest meta data classification or keyword terms based on words mentioned within document or page. Then, you can use a tool like Power Automate to apply the changes to specific content libraries.
5. AI-assisted page creation
Copilot can also help you create new pages on your SharePoint intranet using content from identified source documents in apps such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. Your source content acts as what Microsoft calls “grounding data,” which is used to create suggested page content via prompts that is added it into a recommended page template with design options. You can further edit this draft page as needed before publishing it to the intranet.
At the time of writing, this functionality is only just starting to roll out to Microsoft 365 first-release tenants, so time will tell how accurate and reliable it is. It also remains to be seen if organizations can inject their own custom intranet templates and consistent brand standards. If restricted to generic out of the box SharePoint templates, adoption could be limited.
Discover more about AI and intranets
If you’d like to talk about other ways AI tools can support your intranet and internal communications, reach out.
