We have all heard that artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionise the digital workplace. At EDISONDA, we agree with this statement, but what’s more important to us is ‘How?’
The rise of AI in the workplace
How can the companies we work with implement AI features to make employees’ lives easier and increase their satisfaction with workplace tools? The reality is that employees are already using AI at work, whether or not it’s officially sanctioned by the company. The emergence of such transformative technology has not gone unnoticed.
A study conducted by Microsoft found that the most common approach to using AI in the workplace is “BYOAI” (Bring Your Own AI), meaning that most employees use their personal accounts on AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot to carry out their work tasks.
This highlights a notable gap between what employees need and what organisations provide.
What’s more, it exposes significant compliance and data policy risks. In fact, a number of major companies have already experienced serious data leaks caused by exactly this issue.
This shows that there is not only a growing need for company-provided AI tools in everyday work, but also an increasing urgency to implement them effectively.
For organisations using Microsoft products, the situation is relatively straightforward. Microsoft has positioned itself as a leader in workplace AI, investing in AI-powered features that integrate seamlessly into its existing suite of products. However, in a typical Microsoft fashion, many of the new features are poorly advertised and hidden within the vast MS Office Suite.
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft’s flagship AI product, MS Copilot, stands as a strong alternative to ChatGPT, offering much better data protection policies. According to Microsoft, using Copilot is as secure as using Outlook.
With an MS Copilot Enterprise licence, companies can integrate AI into their digital workplace with minimal effort.
However, you must be willing to pay a pretty penny for that. The cost of a Copilot license is 30$ per user. For a company with 100 employees, this translates to $3,000 per month. Not many companies have the budget for such an investment.
The most interesting AI features included with a Copilot license:
- AI-powered writing assistance in MS Word.
- Automated file summaries in OneDrive.
- AI chatbots that leverage company knowledge, deployable with a single click.
Those are actual game-changing features that improve employees’ daily work. But can you achieve similar results without paying for the MS Copilot license? You can, although it will require a clever approach.
Microsoft Edge browser
Surprisingly, the Microsoft Edge browser holds the key to enhancing the digital workplace experience. It lets us completely change the intranet experience, making it more personal and seamlessly integrated.
The first puzzle piece is the MS Start, recently renamed to MSN. By default, MSN provides users with a curated feed of news from across the internet each time they open a new tab.
With a quick configuration, the feed can be limited to company channels. If your organisation uses Teams, Viva Engage, or SharePoint for news distribution, all publications will already be there.
What’s more, the feed on MSN is AI-powered. It automatically picks up on the specific user’s interest and what news they have already seen to push the most relevant information to the top. In the context of internal communication, this is a valuable tool that can support personalised user experiences. However, its effectiveness depends on the quality of the content sources and how well they are prepared – ensuring that the most relevant and meaningful information is promoted.
Search functionality
Another significant challenge for intranets is poor search functionality. Configuring an effective search engine requires resources and effort, yet search remains one of the most essential features of any digital workplace. Despite its importance, it is often overlooked due to its complexity.
To help with this issue, Microsoft released ‘Bing for Work‘, an enterprise version of its search engine that enhances standard web search results with knowledge from your company.
It works adequately right out of the box. Still, it can be modified by a SharePoint developer to better suit your company’s needs, for example, by decreasing or increasing the rating of specific resources or content types.
Bing for Work is already a part of your Microsoft license, so it doesn’t produce additional costs. Furthermore, it’s accessible from the MSN starting page, it will be the first thing employees see when opening a new tab in the Edge browser, giving them easy access to self-help resources.
However, the most significant benefit the Edge browser offers your digital workplace is that it provides employees with constant access to Microsoft Copliot in all their online tools, not just the Microsoft ones. This is achieved by implementing MS Copilot in the browser’s sidebar and with little configuration enabling it to read the context of the current webpage the user is on.
This way, employees can ask context-based prompts like:
- “Help me respond to this e-mail,”
- “Rewrite it to sound more professional,” or
- “Summarise this page for me”
and receive context-based answers. Foremost, it eliminates the hassle of copying relevant information into external tools like ChatGPT or the Copilot website, creating a seamless user experience.
It also encourages employees to use their work accounts exclusively for AI assistance, ensuring company data remains within secure environments. However, enabling Copilot to access data on the user’s current page may raise cybersecurity concerns. To mitigate risks, this feature should only be activated after consulting the IT department to confirm it aligns with the security requirements.
That said, if your company already uses the Microsoft ecosystem for data storage, Copilot will operate under enterprise data protection, ensuring that all prompts and responses are de-identified and not retained, safeguarding your company’s data, making the acceptance process straightforward.
Of course, AI offers even greater opportunities to enhance the Digital Employee Experience (DEX), such as custom language models trained on company data or AI agents that support content creation.
However, while these features have the potential to transform the way we work, their success depends on clever implementation, change management, and clear communication. Simply enabling them will not yield the expected results without a coherent plan.
For more information on how to integrate AI into your workplace or to get support with change management and communication, visit our website and schedule a meeting with one of Edisonda’s AI experts.
We can turn the vision of an AI-powered digital workplace into reality with a practical, step-by-step plan tailored to your organisation’s needs.
