What is a Digital Workplace?
A digital workplace is a modern, integrated approach to work where technology enables employees to communicate, collaborate, and perform tasks efficiently. It includes an ecosystem of tools and platforms that facilitate seamless workflows and connections between team members.
Powell Intranet for Communication
Powell Intranet is a company intranet solution built on SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 that supports organizations in streamlining their internal communication, keeping employees informed, and fostering a sense of community.
Powell Teams for Advanced Collaboration
Powell Teams is a Microsoft Teams governance and lifecycle management solution that enhances collaboration and productivity, helping organizations maintain control over the creation and management of their Teams channels.
What We Learned So Far
As we embarked on our journey to integrate artificial intelligence into our digital workplace solutions, we conducted various tests and experiments to assess the capabilities of AI-driven content creation and analysis. Our experiences have provided valuable insights shaping our approach to incorporating AI in the digital workplace.
One of the most striking outcomes has been the AI’s ability to categorize content based on tags, topics, and other criteria. This capability opens numerous use cases for content managers, who can benefit from AI-assisted content organization, resulting in improved efficiency and discoverability.
We also discovered the importance of providing specific prompts when interacting with AI systems like Open AI. Crafting clear and precise prompts significantly enhances the quality of AI-generated content, making it more relevant and useful for the intended audience. Developing this knowledge will undoubtedly be a differentiator among independent software vendors (ISVs) looking to integrate Open AI technology into their offerings.
As we continue our journey to create an augmented digital workplace, we remain committed to learning and adapting based on our experiences. These insights will inform our product development and enable us to deliver AI-driven solutions that truly transform the way organizations communicate and collaborate.
What is an Augmented Digital Workplace?
An augmented digital workplace integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced automation capabilities to enhance the user experience, streamline workflows, and support decision-making. We are currently exploring various use cases to implement AI into our digital workplace solutions. While some of them are not disclosed here, as we want to keep the secret up to the release, here is an organization of the use cases based on different audiences:
Augmented Contributor Experience
- Assisted Contribution: By leveraging AI, content managers can improve their productivity with automated suggestions for catchy titles, descriptions, and metadata.
- Writing News Articles: AI-powered tools can help authors draft news articles more efficiently by offering suggestions, summarizing information, and even generating full drafts based on provided outlines.
- Increasing Relevance with Assisted Scoring: AI can analyze user interactions with content and provide insights to help content managers prioritize and optimize their efforts, ensuring they create content that resonates with their audience.
- Automatically Creating Fun Content: AI can generate engaging content such as “Fact of the Day” or “On This Day in History,” fostering a sense of community and adding an element of fun to the digital workplace.
Augmented Employee Engagement
- Social Media Spot Marketing Articles: AI can assist employees in identifying relevant content to share on social media platforms, promoting brand visibility and thought leadership within their networks. It can also propose the 3 sentences employees need to personalize their LinkedIn posts quickly.
- Ideation: AI-driven tools can support employees in brainstorming and idea generation, fostering innovation and creative problem-solving across the organization
Augmented Knowledge Management
- Bridging Teams and Intranet by Automatically Capturing Important Content in Teams: Integrating AI can help automatically identify and capture crucial conversations and documents from Teams, making them easily accessible and discoverable in the intranet.
Augmented UX/UI – The Virtual Building
The Virtual Building is a groundbreaking concept that transforms your Intranet or Digital Workplace into an immersive, interactive environment. By visualizing the digital space as one or several floors, the Virtual Building provides a more engaging and user-friendly experience.
Each floor consists of multiple rooms, representing different sections of your Intranet or Teams spaces. Within these rooms, users will find various furniture items that serve as interactive elements:
- A bookcase for accessing documents
- A TV set for watching videos
- A pad for enabling interactions
- A table and chairs for online meetings
The Virtual Building is designed to facilitate meetings and events, making it a versatile space for both communication and collaboration. Although it provides an immersive experience, it is not a metaverse, as users do not require any third-party devices like VR glasses to access it.
The Difficulties to Be Solved
Despite the exciting potential, several challenges must be addressed when incorporating AI into the digital workplace.
Enterprise Security Concerns
Ensuring sensitive information’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability is crucial when integrating AI into the digital workplace. AI solutions must be secure and compliant with industry standards and regulations to protect valuable corporate and personal data.
One of our primary objectives at Powell Software is to ensure that our AI integration is scalable and secure by leveraging Open AI services hosted on the Azure cloud platform. This approach offers the advantage of Azure’s robust security infrastructure, which adheres to strict compliance and data protection standards.
It is essential to understand the information and data flow when utilizing AI services to address privacy concerns and provide transparency to our customers. We are committed to mapping out the data flow and clearly communicating how data is transmitted, processed, and stored within the AI system. This will enable our customers to make informed decisions about the use of AI in their organizations while also ensuring that they remain compliant with data privacy regulations and industry best practices.
Contributor and employees’ Education
Training content creators to use AI-powered tools effectively is essential for realizing the full potential of an augmented digital workplace. At Powell Software, we understand the importance of providing a user experience that is both intuitive and efficient for content contributors. Our approach focuses on designing a contribution journey that seamlessly integrates AI capabilities, automating recurring prompt elements, and striking the right balance between precise prompts and user-friendly interfaces.
By carefully considering the user experience, we can ensure that contributors can easily access and utilize AI-powered features without being overwhelmed by cumbersome forms or complex processes. This approach empowers content creators to harness the power of AI effectively, enhancing their productivity and enabling them to create more engaging and relevant content for their audiences.
Employee Education
Employees must be trained to leverage AI-powered features and understand how to interact with AI-driven systems, ensuring a smooth transition and maximizing productivity gains.
What Are the Next Steps for Our Roadmap and Product Research and Delivery?
At Powell Software, we are committed to continuous innovation and development. Our roadmap includes ongoing research into AI applications, working closely with our partners, and delivering innovative solutions that empower our clients to harness the power of artificial intelligence in the workplace. To provide a clear timeline of our plans, we have outlined the following milestones:
- Q3 2023: Private Preview of our first Powell Intranet’s AI Capabilities with selected customers, enabling early access and testing of the new features.
- Q4 2023: General Availability of the AI Capabilities premium add-on and a new set of features, making them accessible to a broader audience. Additionally, we will introduce a dedicated app in Microsoft Teams to enhance integration and functionality.
- 2024 and beyond: We will continue to expand our AI offerings, delivering more capabilities for employees and content contributors, ensuring our solutions remain at the forefront of innovation and cater to the evolving needs of the modern workplace.
Conclusion
The digital workplace is evolving rapidly, and integrating artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize the way we communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. At Powell Software, we are excited about the possibilities and are dedicated to exploring and delivering AI-driven solutions that create a truly augmented digital workplace. By overcoming the challenges and ensuring effective implementation, we can unlock the full potential of AI, enhancing productivity, engagement, and innovation in organizations across industries.
