Around 40% of internal communicators say their top priority is to refresh and develop their internal communications strategy, according to a recent Gallagher report. This is a crucial step towards improving key success indicators, such as employee engagement and policy compliance.
However, this strategic work requires time. And with a third of all teams lacking capacity, time is a scarce resource.
As a result, many internal communications departments end up maintaining rather than strategizing. Over half of their time is spent on tasks such as creating content, editing copy, and attending meetings. All vital work, yes. But it does nothing to change the status quo.
In difficult situations like these, it’s important to boost efficiency wherever possible.
This is where AI can help.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll outline the key opportunities of AI for internal communications and help you create a roadmap for success.
How AI can ease the pressure for internal communicators
Artificial intelligence can take the brunt of your time-consuming “maintenance” tasks. This gives you more hours to spend on high-value projects and strategic work.
However, time savings and stress relief aren’t the only advantages of artificial intelligence. When implemented successfully, AI in communications can directly impact your key focus areas, too.
This includes:
- Policy compliance. Helpful AI chatbots can summarize complex policy documents for employees. This increases information retention and, more importantly, can go a long way to improving policy comprehension and bolstering your overall regulatory compliance.
- Strategic alignment. By feeding your latest strategic aims, KPIs, values and more into an AI tool, you can generate accurate and engaging resources for your employees and managers. With a consistent delivery of these materials across your channels, you’ll improve strategic alignment across your teams.
- Employee engagement. 60% of internal communicators rate their employee engagement levels as moderate, with only 3% admitting engagement is very high. AI can help communicators tackle problem areas through targeted and consistent communications. Some tools can also analyze employee sentiment and highlight problems before they snowball into larger issues.
7 steps to implementing AI in internal communications
The chances are, your team already uses AI.
Recent research indicates that 77% of internal communicators harness AI to support their workloads, with ChatGPT being the most commonly used tool. While this certainly shows initiative, this ad hoc approach may do more harm than good.
According to Gallagher, less than a third of internal communicators have guidance on when, how and where to use AI. And only one out of five have training in place.
Without proper guidance, your AI investments may result in a low ROI. More than this, improper use of unregulated tools could cause data security issues.
To ensure you reap the benefits of AI without compromising compliance, you need to follow a standardized approach. With that in mind, here are 7 steps to implementing AI in internal communications:
1. Determine your goal
Like any digital transformation project, your AI implementation must have an overarching purpose. This should go beyond simply following the latest tech trends.
What do you hope to accomplish with AI in internal communications? How will it support your efforts and drive results across your success indicators? What problems will it solve?
Perhaps your team is too finely spread to update your company news channels. Or maybe you lack the time to plan for upcoming company changes or employee feedback loops. Whatever your goal, make sure you explain how AI can help specifically — whether it’s slicing hours off your working week or reducing employee turnover.
2. Identify key use cases
Step 1 will give you a good idea of why you plan to implement AI in your internal comms department. Now it’s time to be specific about what you plan to implement.
Uses cases could include:
- AI-generated content for your news and blogs channels.
- Image and asset/resource generation.
- AI policy management chatbots to help your employees better understand company policies.
- Intranet AI agents.
- Sentiment analysis tools to gauge employee morale.
3. Select your AI tools
With over half of internal communicators facing budget cuts, selecting an AI tool that’s efficient and cost-effective may be necessary.
So before you hunt for a new platform, assess the capabilities of your current internal communications tools. The chances are, you may be ignoring or underutilizing AI functionality that already exists — or is soon to be implemented by the vendor.
Take Claromentis as an example. Version 10 of our digital workplace solution contains native generative AI features and an AI policy management chatbot, available in every package and at no additional cost. This allows you to generate engaging blog posts, news articles and cover images, as well as summarize complicated policy documents.
If your current intranet or tech stack doesn’t contain AI, be sure to choose a platform that:
- Integrates seamlessly with your internal comms channels.
- Is easy to use for everyone in your business — but particularly your internal comms teams and intranet users.
- Contains the functionality you need, as highlighted in step 1 and 2.
- Follows stringent data security best practices and doesn’t use your data for model training purposes.
You may also be able to integrate an AI platform with your existing digital workplace. For instance, our partnership with Zylon allows you to create a completely private AI platform on-premises. This is especially useful for organizations that face strict regulatory pressure.
4. Define ownership and governance
To spearhead your AI implementation and ensure employees follow best practice, you’ll need to assign project owners.
These are people who are responsible for mapping the implementation of the AI, setting milestones, and organizing feedback sessions. They will also work closely with stakeholders to communicate risks, bottlenecks and successes.
We would also advise involving your IT department as soon as possible. With their data security expertise and regulatory knowledge, they can provide essential governance support. This is crucial for maintaining compliance and mitigating the risk of a breach.
5. Set some AI rules
While we’re on the topic of governance, the next step of your implementation journey is to set boundaries for AI usage.
Consider the following:
- What tools are employees permitted to use? To avoid the security issues associated with shadow IT, explicitly list the tools your employees can use.
- Does AI-generated content require approval? Although AI tools are growing more sophisticated by the day, errors may still present themselves. Content approval offers an added layer of reassurance; internal communicators can check over blog and news articles before publication to ensure the content is accurate in context and tone.
- Do AI-generated images need to align with brand guidelines? Although it can be fun to prompt a tool to create a highly-specific or quirky image, these images may clash with your brand guidelines. If this is an issue for you, we’d recommend creating a list of prompting tips for your employees. This will help them create imagery that fits.
- Do certain AI features need a health warning? For instance, let’s assume you adopt a policy management AI chatbot. This bot can conveniently turn a lengthy policy into a pithy summary. Great for a quick overview, perhaps, but not so great for communicating nuances. With this in mind, it may be necessary to remind employees that AI does have limitations. For a comprehensive understanding of important policies, they will need to read through the document themselves in full.
- What content shouldn’t be created with AI? Some content is better suited to AI generation than others. For instance, a blog post about upcoming regulatory changes in your industry is a great contender for AI — especially if you’re not an expert in the area. However, you may want to avoid using AI in HR. AI-generated sensitive announcements or 1:1 employee communications may come across as inauthentic or cold, which could contradict your engagement and wellbeing initiatives.
- Are there any restrictions as to what an employee can feed an AI tool? Naturally, you don’t want to cause an HR or data security problem. If you plan to use external open AI software, be clear about what employees can and cannot reveal. Feeding PPI data and other sensitive information into these solutions could cost you dearly down the line.
6. Implement AI for internal communications training
Based on the rules outlined above, create policy guidance and an AI rulebook for your internal communications. Publish this guidance on your key comms channels via pinned news posts, policy documents, or even a dedicated intranet page.
To support AI usage, we’d also recommend hosting workshops and creating compulsory e-learning courses. These should encompass a variety of topics, including:
- AI security. Educate your employees on the dangers of shadow IT and feeding sensitive data into open AI platforms.
- Tips and tricks. Help your teams get to grips with your AI tools quickly with prompt advice, chatbot best practices, and more.
- Platform training. Your AI software vendor may already provide e-learning materials and courses centered around their platform. If not, try to record some live demos of how to navigate the software and make the most of its AI functionality.
7. Monitor and improve continuously
Like most digital transformations, AI isn’t a quick fix. To make the most out of your new capabilities, you should roll out your project gradually and monitor as you go.
Use intranet analytics to assess the impact of your AI-generated internal communications. Does your generative content receive more clicks and comments? If not, why? You may need to improve your AI prompts or pre-publication editorial processes.
To measure the success of other AI efforts, such as policy chatbots, we’d recommend conducting employee surveys. Find out if their policy and strategic knowledge is better or worse after AI implementation. If it’s worse, you may need to adjust your chatbot settings or provide more intensive employee training.
Reimagine your internal communications with Claromentis 10
The pressure on your internal communications team isn’t about to ease any time soon. From stagnant employee engagement levels to regulatory upheavals and economic challenges, there are a lot of obstacles to overcome and strategies to set into motion.
So the last thing you want to be doing is spending most of your time on content creation. (A grueling reality for 51% of communicators.)
An AI-driven intranet and digital workplace platform like Claromentis can take these time-consuming tasks off your plate.
Our solution provides:
- Content generation. Create engaging news articles, blog posts, and images at speed with our slick generative AI capabilities.
- Policy management chatbot. Available exclusively in our policy manager application, this “question and answer” assistant ingests your policy information, loads relevant questions, and can summarize complex information for your employees.
- Private AI platform. If you’re looking for a contained AI integration for security or regulatory concerns, our partner Zylon can build you a bespoke private AI. This platform ingests your Claromentis data and allows users to ask questions, generate materials, and find important nuggets of information.
To see how our AI-driven digital workplace solution can boost efficiency and ROI across your internal comms department, book a discussion call with one of our experts. We’d be more than happy to give you a tour and discuss any pricing concerns you may have.
