Generative AI (Gen AI) is everywhere. It’s in ads, scripts, lyrics, and even images. You’ll have seen Tik Toker Miles Fisher’s viral videos of Deep Tom Cruise. Or more recently, images of the former US president Donald Trump fighting with the police, created by British journalist Eliot Higgins using the text-to-image generator MidJourney. Yet, for all the playful examples capturing our attention, how can we actually use this technology to help with employee communications?
Up until March 2023, before Microsoft announced its integration of GPT-4 into its office suite, our options for business and enterprise scenarios were pretty limited. Fast forward six months, and there’s now an array of tools available for us to try out.
Ways to use Gen AI tools external to your intranet
There are a couple of free Gen AI tools you can use to help with creating content for your intranet. But to get the best value from both, you’ll need to train yourself on prompt engineering.
ChatGPT
Available on any browser, GPT-3.5 is a great free tool for small comms teams on a tight budget, as it can help content editors create compelling copy in minutes, given the right prompts. Yet this has its drawbacks. Inaccurate data called ‘hallucinations’ and privacy being two of the biggest.
Bing Chat is now Copilot
Microsoft’s equivalent of ChatGPT is free to use for those with Microsoft Edge browsers and via copilot.microsoft.com. External to your tenant, it uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to search requests, providing contextual suggestions, further reading and sources, making it easy to navigate. But experienced ChatGPTers may find it tough to switch to as its default settings have tighter guiderails.
Gen AI tools to bring into your intranet
For more sophisticated use cases of Gen AI within your intranet, there are several alternative options available in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Bing Chat Enterprise rebranded as Copilot
Unlike the free version available to all users with an Edge browser or via copilot.microsoft.com, Bing Chat Enterprise/Copilot, with commercial data protection, is available as standard for most Microsoft 365 license holders. This version is like having a ChatGPT inside your tenant.
It provides your intranet users with Gen AI features like summarising long posts and answering follow up questions in the privacy of your tenant and the page in question with no data issues, making it a good, safe starting point for using Gen AI tools in the context of your intranet.
Copilot for Microsoft 365
Released in November 2023, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-based productive tool available to use in many Microsoft 365 apps, including SharePoint in a near future. Copilot for SharePoint is set to help you create sites and pages from presentations and existing documents.
Currently, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will work with Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Loop, and will support your end users in the context of their work. For example, Copilot in Word is designed to assist end users with creating, understanding, and editing documents.
For $30 per user per month, content editors can write, edit, and summarise text from their own data sources such as documents and PowerPoint presentations. It can improve writing skills with suggestions for better phrasing and grammar, titles for topics, and content structure.
Be warned, when Copilot is eventually released for SharePoint, it still won’t solve the same old set of intranet problems of information design, content management, governance, and permissions. And it will only be as good as the information it’s being fed.
Check out the recently launched SharePoint Premium, which readies your content in SharePoint and lays the groundwork for optimal Copilot integration.
Buying AI tools or infusions
An alternative to the suggestions above is to use a product vendor with Gen AI infused into their products and features. Look out for one that offers the following scenarios:
+ Chat-based conversation in the context of the intranet.
+ Chat-based conversation in the context of company data, but not only the intranet. For example, integrations to third-party applications such as Workday.
+ Chat-based conversation with a focus on data privacy similar to ChatGPT.
+ Gen AI applications that solve specific intranet use cases.
Here at Fresh, we’ve created our Gen AI tool, FreshMind, for our intranet solution built on Microsoft 365. Using Microsoft’s Azure Open AI and integrating into your line of business data, FreshMind offers you the opportunity to introduce ‘AI assistants’ into your intranet.
Let’s take a look a couple of scenarios how this will work in practice.
Scenario A: Intranet owner AI assistant
You’re an intranet owner and want to create a new page for your site. You need to come up with a title and an engaging description based on the content on that page.
All you’d have to do is preload the AI assistant with a taxonomy, paste in the contents of an article, and ask it to suggest tags, metadata, topics or even a target audience or departments that might find the content useful.
It can update pages and document metadata in bulk, fix tags, and shorten descriptions. It can even suggest personalised content to employees based on their user profile, Microsoft Graph signals, and/or other information.
Scenario B: Your own private ChatGPT inside your intranet
You want your employees to have access to a Gen AI service that works like ChatGPT, to help them create articles, reports, presentations, scripts, and talking points more efficiently. You know you don’t want them to use an insecure or public systems like ChatGPT for fear of risking your data integrity (see the Samsung data breach).
So, using Microsoft Azure Open AI technology and integrating with your line of business data, you can create your very own Gen AI tool so your colleagues can chat with it in the knowledge it’s keeping your data safe.
Take a look at Private ChatGPT from Advania. Hosted entirely in your Azure environment, tailored to your specific needs in a secure environment, it has a simple user interface your employees will understand immediately.
Whichever way you choose to use Gen AI in your intranet you’ll need to be careful to not lose yours or your company’s agreed tone of voice, aka your authenticity, while generating content using the tools. ChatGPT, for example, often uses very formal vocabulary and may introduce words to your content that you might not usually use. Remember to edit content to keep it sounding authentic.
How Fresh can become your strategic Gen AI partner
Fresh Intranet has recently launched FreshMind, an AI assistant for intranet scenarios in Microsoft 365. Built exclusively for SharePoint intranets, powered by Microsoft Azure Open AI, FreshMind is an enterprise-ready solution that makes generative AI work for you, while keeping your data safe.
The AI-infused application means you get a ready-to-go, plug-and-play AI solution right inside your intranet. And because FreshMind is built on the same underlying tech as Microsoft, you get all the data security and privacy that comes with being a Microsoft license holder, but with added enterprise ready customisations that meet the needs of intranet owners and content creators.
For more handy tips and tricks of how you can use Gen AI in your intranet download our e-book.
Or want to see how to see FreshMind for yourself? Book a demo and one of our friendly team will be happy to show you today!