During my tenure in employee communications, I’ve always been driven to get information in front of people. For a long time, an intranet was non-negotiable; I actually built the first intranet for a few companies. Intranets constituted a fresh, even rebellious, approach to employee communications by comparison to stodgy memoranda and print mailers but I digress.
Intranets were so popular during the internet revolution because they enabled everyone to get information at the same time. It was the single source of truth. Communicators could put everything in one place — literally getting everyone on one (web) page. And we believed people would come for the HR information and stay for the stories.
I believed that. I built on that. For decades.
But here’s what I’m sitting with lately: employees are consumers first. And consumers in 2026 don’t go looking for information, information finds them. It knows them. It anticipates them.
That’s how people expect to get the information they need to make decisions today. Know me. Understand me. Give me what I need quickly, with relevance and without noise. And that’s what employees want from their workplace, too.
When an organization and its leaders find and serves up what they need, that organization and those leaders also build trust. That feels like, ‘you know me.’ And when the mission reaches people as individuals, connecting to what they actually care about, well – they don’t just understand it, they believe it. Trust and belief are the irreproducible, non-delegable, un-automatable foundations for effective organizations built to grow (and to weather hard times.)
But I think you know that too.
So, as we look to find THE way to reach employees, here’s the question: what if we abandoned the fantasy that employees think of the intranet as a destination, if they think of it at all?
We built intranets as the distribution point of information. Let’s take that literally and use it as the engine it was always meant to be, but rethink the delivery entirely. What if there was a system that employees built passively, or even one that learned and configured distribution based on habits and behaviors? A system that assembles the right content, connections, and functionality around a person and stops asking them to come to us.
The content and the context already exist, and so does the technology. To say it out loud, AI.
And yes there are platforms that already do some of this, using AI to personalize feeds and surface relevant content. I’m looking to go further, beyond bringing personalization that still asks employees to enter one door. Let’s remove the destination and enable multiple routes to provide consistent information. Are you with me?
It will start with letting go of visits to content and a homepage as a measure of success. I say, heck yes!
I don’t have the answers, this is food for thought. I hope it’s the start of a more fulsome conversation. Bottom line, the organizations that figure this out first will have employees who trust their employers and believe in the mission, and because they’ll see themselves in it, they’ll move it forward.
Let’s talk.