Generative AI tools: experiences from the members of the Belgian Intranet & Digital Workplace Group

28 March 2024 - by Guy Van Leemput

A few weeks ago, the members of the Belgian Intranet & Digital Workplace Group gathered for their first meeting of 2024. Intranet managers, internal communicators and digital workplace owners from a variety of Belgian and international organisations came together to discuss intranet case studies, exchange best practices and learn from each other’s experience.


Hottest topic on the agenda – no surprise – was the usage of generative AI and in particular Microsoft Copilot within these organisations. Participants shared their approach and some initial feedback within the group. Here are the key points that I picked up from the lively discussion:

1.  Copilot for Microsoft 365: pilot projects ongoing

About half of all participating organisations had some form of a pilot project ongoing, managed by a small, dedicated team (more on the composition of these teams under point 2). Several organisations, especially the larger ones within the group, are focusing on Copilot for Microsoft 365. They have taken the step to buy the minimum 300 licenses – a limitation that Microsoft has dropped in the meantime – at the hefty price of $30 per user per month, and are gradually making these licenses available to pilot users.


In one organisation, initial testing by IT was followed by ‘playground testing’ for a hand-picked group of 60 early birds. Based on feedback, full roll-out of the 300 purchased seats is planned for the summer of 2024.


Other organisations are taking a similar step-by-step approach, trying to identify job roles for whom the technology will bring most benefits.

2.  IT owns the tools, but cross-divisional AI teams are in place

Who owns generative AI within the organisation? Often, the ICT team is the natural owner, but other departments such as Internal Communications, HR and Marketing are also involved. Together they form cross-functional teams that drive the pilot projects discussed earlier.


The most important role of ‘Team AI’ as it is called in one organisation, is to find the use cases where generative AI will bring significant added value. Areas that were mentioned in the group discussion include AI-enhanced search, chatbots, and content production – text as well as visuals – for internal comms purposes.

3.  Initial feedback is mixed

I was surprised to learn from the discussion that experiences are mixed, and vary significantly from one organisation to another. A promising feature of Microsoft Copilot, the possibility to produce meeting minutes and an action list from the transcript of a Teams meeting, works very well for some organisations, but not for others. Quality of chatbot output is also found to be inconsistent. One group member compared generative AI to an intern: They may be good at processing large amounts of data and summarise documents, but they don’t get the finer nuances. This may lead the AI to propose wrong conclusions – but formulated very convincingly! This organisation has put a project on hold for this reason, as AI output proved to be unreliable.

4.  Broader deployment of generative AI: on a case-by-case basis

The conclusion of most organisations is that generative AI will only be deployed at scale in those areas where there is a clear need and a proven, fully functional solution that delivers value. Given the steep investment needed to deploy tools such as Copilot to everyone in the organisation, ROI will be a major consideration.


So while it may still be a while before everyone in your organisation has access to payable versions of Copilot or ChatGPT, the good news is that many of the tools used by internal communicators have more and more AI built directly into them. One internal comms team is a heavy Canva user, and the advent of Canva’s Magic Studio has made the team significantly more productive. Similar integrations are also happening in commercial intranet and employee experience products, as the latest ClearBox report shows.

Conclusions

Needless to repeat that generative AI is here to stay, and will continue to improve – just like interns do!


I was happy to hear that so many organisations have set up pilot projects to test out the big platforms in the gen AI world – mainly ChatGPT, Google Gemini and of course Microsoft Copilot. The mixed feedback shows that these tools are not the instant answer for every need, and will have to be deployed with caution and with ROI in mind.


Interested in becoming a member of the Belgian Intranet & Digital Workplace Group and discuss issues like these with a group of peers? Contact us for a free trial meeting!

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