Is your intranet ready for AI?

In discussions on this topic, the first questions are often about tools and platforms. Should we go with Copilot? Can Claude do that? Which one is best for a manufacturing company?

These are reasonable questions, and it’s easy to see why they come first: the tools can be shown in impressive demos, and picking one can feel like progress. But until you’ve specified and prioritized the use cases AI should support, it’s too early to decide on a platform.

First, you need to know which outcomes you want AI to help you achieve, and what’s already in place: trusted content, consistent metadata, a governance model, permissions and personalization, and connections to your business systems.

That’s why a readiness assessment is the place to start. It puts the facts on the table, so you can make sound decisions on how to proceed. Learn more about how we conduct these assessments on our website.

How to assess AI readiness

When you review a traditional intranet, you probably look at content quality, findability and user experience. Is there governance in place, and can analytics help identify improvements? An AI readiness assessment keeps all of that, but adds a few new questions:

• Can AI understand which information is authoritative, and whether it applies to the person asking?
• Can AI connect that understanding to the services employees need to get their work done?
• Are permissions, guardrails and ownership in place for it to do so safely?

A Swedish facilities management company found out what the first question means in practice. They started with a common use case: an assistant in Copilot that could bring intranet content to employees. But the assistant couldn’t tell the difference between information that applied to the whole company and information that only applied in a certain country.

After some digging, they found the root cause: the information about employees, and the metadata describing the content, weren’t good enough. That’s not an unusual situation. The foundation had simply never been built with AI in mind. Last we heard, the work to straighten it out was still ongoing, and the assistant was still waiting to go to work.

Your intranet may be AI-ready – but for what?

So, is your intranet ready for AI? It’s a bit like asking whether you’re equipped for the outdoors. Equipped for what – a walk in the woods, or two weeks in the wilderness? Being “AI-ready” works the same way. An organization can be well prepared for one use case and have clear gaps for another.

Your HR policies may be well governed and ready for AI to draw on when it answers employees’ questions. At the same time, your product information might be scattered across systems and hard to interpret reliably. And you might be able to build an agent that helps employees complete tasks across systems, but without the permission models needed to let it do so safely.

So AI readiness isn’t some theoretical level of maturity. It’s about how well AI can help you achieve the outcomes you want, based on the capabilities you have today. The good news is that you don’t have to be ready for every possible use case to get started.

There will be low-hanging fruit you can pick straight away. You can start creating value with AI in some scenarios while you work on closing the gaps for others.

What an AI readiness assessment of your intranet should cover

To get an overall view of what your organization and intranet are ready for, plan for an assessment that covers three areas:

• Organizational understanding: Can AI make sense of your information, communication, people information and metadata, and work out which content applies in which context?
• The ability to act: Can AI connect to your business systems, help employees complete tasks across them, and offer services in the channels employees prefer?
• The enabling foundation: Are the tools, governance and security in place to support it, along with an operating model to keep it all running?

The aim is to find out which capabilities exist today, how well they work together, and which AI-enabled experiences they can support. That way, you learn which scenarios could work today, and which have gaps you’ll need to address first.

Test your intranet’s AI readiness in real scenarios

Ask people how things work in an organization, and you’ll usually hear how they’re meant to work. Ask about the knowledge base for troubleshooting IT problems, and you might hear about the governance model for managing that content. That’s valuable information, but it doesn’t tell you whether AI can actually support the scenarios that matter.

To find out, you need to walk through each scenario step by step, in practice. In the IT example, the AI’s answers might be good enough, while there’s a gap when an employee can’t solve the problem on their own and needs to submit a ticket to IT.

Things can look fine one by one and still fail when they have to work together around an employee’s need. That’s why the findings should show not just what’s missing, but what depends on what. The dependencies decide what has to happen first.

A good assessment combines both perspectives: interviews to understand what should be in place, and tests with real employee scenarios, followed from start to finish.

Track AI readiness with a baseline, not a score

When assessing AI readiness, ending with an overall score might feel tempting. We often get questions like “How do we compare with others in our industry?” A score like that might fit nicely on a slide, but it would also hide something important: the differences between use cases.

Setting your own baseline is more useful. It shows where you stand today and gives you a reference point to measure your progress against.

We help organizations evaluate the AI readiness of their intranet and digital workplace based on these ideas. The findings are based on evidence and tested with real employee scenarios, starting with the ones that matter most to you.

The result is a much clearer picture of your starting point – what already works, what depends on what, and where the strongest opportunities lie. It also gives your stakeholders the three things they need to decide how to proceed: what you can do today, what needs to be prepared or procured, and a realistic timeframe.

Want to learn more about your intranet’s AI readiness?

To get AI right, you need two things: a trusted blueprint for the foundation you build on, and a clear, guided path to get there.

An AI readiness assessment shows where your organization is today. The next step on the path is a strategy that defines where to go next: which needs matter most, which capabilities should become shared foundations, and where to invest first. With the facts in hand, those conversations get a lot easier.

For a deeper look, don’t miss our upcoming book, The AI-Ready Intranet: Why, What, and How? It launches in January 2027, and you can sign up for a reminder when it’s available.

Wondering how ready your organization is? Read more about our Readiness Assessment, or book a first conversation with us. We sell no AI or intranet products, so our only interest is your outcome.

We can help you get the information you need to make sound decisions on AI.