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Understanding the Microsoft Employee Experience in the Age of AI
By Andy Peacock
WM Reply recently co-hosted a Viva Engage and AI event with Microsoft in our London office where our customers could hear from employee experience experts and get the chance to ask questions about some of the challenges they are currently facing.
Attendees raised some challenging but interesting questions - "is SharePoint still the key place to host and share information and communications?" This is an especially pertinent question, given the AI features, prominence and engagement our clients are experiencing within Viva Engage and other M365 apps.
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Additionally, some of our enterprise clients discussed the slight downwards trend occurring in terms of intranet reach but acknowledged that overall engagement with employees seemed to be increasing (primarily with Viva Engage and Outlook). As organisations look to the future, what is the impact of AI on traditional employee experience platforms such as the intranet?
I’ll come back to some of these questions shortly, but to understand the impact and scale of transformation that AI is bringing to the Microsoft Employee Experience (EE), let’s look at what is and has changed.
AI is Transforming Employee Behaviour
AI isn’t just enabling employees to engage with platforms more efficiently, surfacing content quickly, automating routine tasks and processes, and proactively guiding users.
It’s actually starting to remove high volume low value and repetitive tasks, helping employees focus on more valuable and rewarding work. To understand its true impact, it helps to consider the key challenges AI is starting to solve:
Challenges AI is helping employees overcome:
- Navigating an overwhelming digital workplace filled with disparate platforms, apps and information, not all of which are pertinent to them and their role.
- Struggling to identify a “single source of truth” in a fragmented environment.
- Keeping pace with constantly evolving technology.
Challenges AI is helping organisations overcome
Determining where and how to host critical information and communications.
Reaching diverse employee groups, including frontline workers.
Maintaining governance and best practices across channels.
Whilst our intranets play a crucial role in helping organisations consolidate apps, platforms and content into a more intuitive experience, AI offers the opportunity to achieve this ‘simplification’ on a level we’ve not seen before.
For example, organisations are using SharePoint Agents – which can also be hosted on the intranet homepage - to surface critical health and safety policies specific to frontline workers based on their role, location and other key information available from their profile data. This saves time and is a more accurate way of surfacing the correct information.
Likewise comms teams are using built-in AI Insights to make quicker and more educated decisions on how to engage with their audiences.
This does, however, create some challenges of its own. For example, traditional tools we’re using to measure ‘reach’ (e.g. SharePoint Analytics and Viva Amplify), may not be painting an accurate picture of the true value content is providing employees. Employees are finding new ways to ‘engage’ with content, without leaving a ‘footprint’.
Staying Ahead of the AI Curve
So back to our earlier questions of whether SharePoint and our intranets should still be the central source of truth? Is continuing to invest in the intranet and Employee Experience space savvy? Why are there some signs intranet article reach is slowly falling?
Copilot presents an answer to a user based on intranet content, without the user visiting the site directly. Similarly to how website owners have seen a decrease in visits due to AI summaries in search engines, internal communicators and content owners, looking at reach metrics, may see something similar.
On one hand, your content is still reaching the employee (the summary is based on your intranet article, after all). On the other hand, the intranet analytics may not fully show that impact and value through ‘views’. Perhaps in future, Microsoft should look to include ‘views’ by AI as well as humans?
While AI streamlines access to information and bypasses some of the traditional journeys through intranets, carefully considered content, intranet structure, design, governance and enterprise social content should remain critical. In my view, the intranet remains the core repository of comms and information for employees, and it is savvy for organisations to continue to invest in this area. It should also support the shift towards agentic AI, where organisations should be configuring and customising agents adding huge amounts of value for employees. It may be natural for intranet engagement to be a bit lower in the age of AI and multiple channels - The role of the intranet may be evolving slightly from being the primary broadcast channel to being the authoritative content repository.
Consider the following to stay in-line with your competitors and industry peers:
Conclusion
The themes and topics I’ve discussed today illustrate the shift Internal Communication teams need to make to enable AI within their workplace. It’s also not too early to start thinking about Agentic AI and how agents will further impact the employee experience and drive engagement on the intranet. For end users, comms and content owners, now is the time to investigate the use of the Knowledge Agent, to quickly surface content, enhance content and ensure it's ready for AI-driven tools like Copilot.