The Future of Intranet 2025

By Toby Ward

Remember when social media became a hot ticket around 2007 and the so-called experts claimed this was the death of the intranet and email? Well, email continues to flourish, and the intranet is very much alive and, in some cases, thriving as it sits at the heart of the digital workplace in some of the best organizations.

Sadly though, the intranet is not thriving in all workplaces, and it certainly is not the darling of the digital workplace. However, it excels, ironically enough, at the heart of the digital workplace, acting as the gateway to all your digital tools. The best digital workplaces, have a great intranet – and vice versa. As such, the future of the intranet is somewhat tempered. Don’t expect immersive virtual reality, robots and flying vehicles. AI has not taken over intranets or supplanted the digital workplace (not yet, and not with the current tools, anytime soon). No, the future of the intranet is a lot less sexy, but it is slowly, if not doggedly, advancing forward.

People

An intranet is not just a technology project, it’s a digital and living ecosystem, powered by people, process and technology. In fact, it’s more about people and process; the technology just acts as a support and delivers the product. Technology is the easy part: you can buy and deploy it in minutes. Intranets still require careful management, structure and feeding (particularly content).

People still write the content, program the apps, and populate the data. Think about content management: people create and edit the content, and use technology to post it, but even the tags and expiry date are controlled by people and process. So naturally, your people deserve the most attention and energy –as they can make or break not just your intranet, but your organization. Anyone creating and managing intranet content must be trained in writing, editing, formatting and using a content management system. Rules for content must be established and adhered to – and baked into the system. People create and populate these rules that ensure consistency across the intranet. For example, every page needs an expiry date and should be tagged with keywords from a central taxonomy or managed term store.

In short, people will continue to be at the heart of any intranet or digital workplace for years to come, regardless of any technological leaps forward.

Cloud Intranets

Building a custom employee intranet can be a significant drain on both time and resources. You need a skilled team to design, develop, install and manage an intranet platform. And the capital investment is significant, commonly running into the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in a large organization, and at times, millions of dollars.

Intranets shifted towards hosted, cloud-based enterprise solutions a decade or so ago. As a result, more than 100 different cloud-based intranets are now available. These solutions range from instantly available (plug and play) to customized with specialized development or third-party applications. Some intranet solutions are generic in nature (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint), some cater to a specific industry (e.g. law firms), others to a certain language or geographic location.

Opting for a cloud-based or SaaS (service as a software) intranet over building one from scratch can significantly reduce the time required for adoption and implementation. The core product is already developed, tested and refined by the provider. After thorough research and testing, you can quickly deploy the chosen intranet. These providers also offer customization options and handle software updates, leaving you to focus on your internal communications strategy. And increasingly, these solutions are more robust than their client-side or on-premises solutions and certainly patched and updated more frequently and easily.

AI

Artificial intelligence promises to change the world, the universe and the intranet. Has it changed your world? Your life? Your work, yet? Almost certainly not.

AI is changing certain elements and enhancing others but also detracting from key components, like content creation. The intranet as you know it, just like email and the pre-AI explosion internet, will remain largely the same.

On the upside, AI is helping people find information more quickly and readily. Digital assistants, chatbots and suggestion bots all aid the overall digital employee experience. AI refines search results, suggests related content and tools, and even helps write content.

AI chatbots are gaining noticeable traction with HR and IT departments, who are looking to offload some of their menial support calls to bots that can easily handle FAQs. Communications departments are using AI to not only generate content (albeit with mixed results), but also serve up recommended or related content to individual users, based on their reading history.

AI is even being used to generate new websites and intranet sites based on minimal input. Are these sites completely from scratch or based on templates with a pre-determined selection of variables? Most of the time, the latter is true, but we are still in the early days.

AI generated content is still in its infancy. The content passes basic acceptability standards at times, but more often it errs towards flattery, and it rarely impresses. Have you asked an AI engine like Copilot or ChatGPT to write an article or story? Or create a photo?  Be prepared to be underwhelmed. AI generated content is usually sterile, bland and full of holes. And you can drive a truck through the gaps of missing and sometimes crucial information. AI generated photos are often crazy mashes of unfinished sketches with mangled faces and objects, and misspelled labels.

The more AI you use, the more privacy and confidentiality you sacrifice. Microsoft and other vendors are using AI to track and record everything you do, ostensibly to ascertain what you want help with and to serve up recommendations. Microsoft Copilot is an apt label – it’s there with you constantly – always watching, always wanting to help, always taking notes… Unlike a human, it remembers EVERYTHING. Where does this information go? How will it be used in the future? How might it be used against you? It’s still too early to know for certain, but legal challenges and lawsuits will abound.

OCBC intranet with chatbot, Buddy. Source: Nielsen Norman Group, 2024

More Personalization

Personalization is the delivery of content and tools to a user, based on that employee’s profile and historical use of content and tools. Not unlike how browser cookies serve up ads for products related to your search and browsing history, personalization aims to provide and adapt content to the needs and interests of an individual employee.

On the intranet, personalization has many forms:

• · Documents – highlighted documents related to you and your work. The Microsoft 365 home page doesn’t just show you any document, it highlights the most “recommended” documents that you’ve been working on (often the most frequently used in the past week or two).

• · News - the most relevant news based on your tags in your profile, served in a portlet or webpart on the intranet home page (or with AI, based on reading history).

• · HR notifications – information relating to your job and/or training that is relevant to you specifically. A notification, for example, of a training workshop that relates specifically to skills you use in your day-to-day work.

• · Colleagues – recommendations of colleagues to connect with based on similarities in profile, expertise and work experience.

The Infosys intranet home page above recommends “People to connect with” (determined by its knowledge graph, analyzing the profiles of similar or like-minded employees) in a home page portlet halfway down the right-hand side of the page. “Stories picked just for you” is AI-driven news organization (though the news is usually created by individuals in communications) that is based on employees’ interests, reading history and AI generated inferences.

The promise of personalized intranets is now decades old, but few organizations have had the impetus to implement personalization. There just isn’t the interest and commitment of resources. However, with more boomers and gray-haired executives and managers retiring, a younger generation of leaders more versed in technology and the digital workplace will look to personalization on the intranet as a highly effective means to improve organization communications, employee engagement and productivity.

User-generated content

Social media has been inside the digital workplace in some shape or form for about 20 years. And yet, very few organizations are using wikis, blogs or even allow unmanaged user comments on news stories or intranet pages. The knee jerk reaction of executives who instinctively condemn social media as frivolous and time-wasting, is still present … but slowly receding. Slack and Microsoft Teams have started to breakdown adoption barriers and move the needle towards the tipping point where social media will be commonplace, not the exception.

Despite the mistaken proclamations that social media would take over, or alternatively, disappear, user-generated content (UGC) is here to stay, and will have a growing presence on the intranet and across the entire digital workplace. Executive blogs never really took off, notwithstanding the odd early adopter. In its place, casual, executive-driven content appears in other forms: on Twitter (X) and Viva Engage (Yammer), on podcasts and even Instagram (or the intranet equivalent).

More and more employees are using messaging and meeting platforms such as Microsoft Teams to comment and share posts and documents, and interactive collaborative workspace tools like Microsoft Loop that offers a variety of cocreation features to help users create, share and organize files, spreadsheets, ideas and projects.

Additional advancement and trends will continue with mobile apps and access, application integration and the use and deployment of interactive and interchangeable portlets and webparts. It’s not sexy, but it’s a start. People will continue to be at the heart of future intranets, supported by technology and AI. This may not wow you, but life and work in the digital workplace will continue to improve (slowly).

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Toby Ward, a former journalist and a regular intranet and digital workplace columnist and speaker, is the President and Founder of intranet consulting firm Prescient Digital Media and has been writing and speaking about intranets for 25 years.

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