Intranet Management AI, innovation, and ThoughtFarmer: The future of work There’s no question that artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. AI has quickly become a reliable tool that is making complex tasks faster and easier, and reshaping how we live and work. 10 minute read Table of contents You might also like… Intranet use cases Learn about effective intranet use cases ThoughtFarmer examples See our LookBook intranet examples Navigate intranet vendors See how G2 ranks industry competitors The use of AI in software is quite nuanced. At ThoughtFarmer, we’ve taken a thoughtful and strategic approach to our product roadmap, ensuring that our AI solutions are designed with security and practicality at the forefront.We don’t want to use AI just for AI’s sake. AI-powered features added to our platform are intentionally designed to make our customer’s work lives easier without adding security risk or frustration. Our vision: Enhancing the customer experience through AI We understand that AI is not just a technological advancement, it’s a tool to enhance human capability, efficiency, and creativity. We believe AI is best used in cooperation with human oversight, not as a replacement for it. As design and technology experts, we have a responsibility to shape a future that’s guided by ethical practices, privacy protection, and practical applications. Our team has been following, researching, and experimenting within the AI space for some time. We are excited and optimistic about the impact it can make on our intranet platform, and its ability to help us better serve our customers and their communities of employees. ThoughtFarmer is known for having one of the easiest-to-use intranets with a best-in-class customer experience. We will never compromise on this. Our promise is to be intentional with how we use AI. We want to use it to make the user experience even better, and to empower intranet users to create, find, and interact with content more easily. Balancing innovation and growth with securitand data privacy Our core AI philosophy is to take a balanced approach that prioritizes security, real-world impact on customer value, and ethical considerations. We believe in harnessing the power of AI to enhance human potential, but never at the expense of security. How do we do this? Keeping our customers’ data completely segregated from each other Never performing training or persistent logging outside of our customer’s data, preventing data leakage Creating boundaries around what our feature, AI Assistant, has access to using the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) approach “We made the conscious choice to prioritize security, even though it means we’ve innovated at a slightly slower pace. We know this was the right choice. It’s critical that our customers have faith and trust in our systems. We have to make sure everything is secure and safe, and respect that as much as we can.” Darren Gibbons, President of ThoughtFarmer Using AI to help make work better The way we see it, there are generally two types of AI that businesses can opt to use. There’s ‘Big AI’ that is wide-spread across all your systems. It’s like the furnace in your office building’s basement – one machine powering everything. Then, there’s a more specialized approach to AI. ThoughtFarmer leans towards the latter approach. We chose to weave AI into our product where it can deliver real value, instead of trying to fit into an existing AI platform. We want to use AI in thoughtful, specialized applications to help our customers use their intranet more efficiently and improve engagement. “Looking at AI from a human-centered lens is important. We want to remove barriers between connection and collaboration. Our goal is to augment people in their jobs and help them do better work, so we look at AI as a way to give people the tools to do more of what they’re good at and spend less time on redundant tasks.” Wil Arndt, Creative Director at ThoughtFarmer Simplify your work with AI Redefine the employee experience. Make creating, sharing, and finding content easier than ever. Learn more about ThoughtFarmer AI How machine learning and generative AI enhance intranets By combining the power of machine learning and generative AI, we’re building intranets that are smarter, more intuitive, and helpful – so employees have more time to do meaningful work. Here’s how. The evolution from machine learning to generative AI Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI are two key pieces of the artificial intelligence puzzle. ML provides the foundation that Generative AI is built on. ML encompasses a broad range of algorithms and techniques that allow systems to learn and make predictions based on data. This has been used in everyday technologies and electronics for quite a while. The latest advancement that made ML accessible and useful to all consumers is the proliferation of generative AI. Gen AI became a media headline with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is now the fifth most visited website in the entire world, handling 2.5 billion prompts every day. Gen AI focuses on generating new content, including text and images, that mimics the characteristics of that data. ThoughtFarmer’s product innovation with generative AI Although AI has only become mainstream recently, we’ve been using advanced machine learning and algorithms to enhance productivity and collaboration for quite a while. For years, our editor has used ML to suggest relevant keyword tagging to make content easier to find, and our search engine has offered predictive search-as-you-type, and “Did you mean” functionality to help employees find the resources they need faster. From intuitive content management to sophisticated data analysis, our existing tools laid the groundwork for the next wave of AI-driven innovation. We now have a number of key features that bring great value to our customers. How ThoughtFarmer AI supports human connections Our main focus for leveraging generative AI centers around content. Making it easier for staff across your organization to write and create new content Making it easier to improve and enhance existing content Streamlining how staff search for, find, and interact with content on your intranet By weaving AI into our software, we’ve added a new layer of usability, helping you unlock better adoption and engagement. “When AI is applied well, it can provide moments of delight. AI tools can sometimes be frustrating to use, but we want to make our customers feel our use of AI is genuinely helpful and makes their job easier.” Darren Gibbons, President of ThoughtFarmer AI Create: Make content creation easier We’ve heard our customers loud and clear. Encouraging content creation across an organization, outside of communications teams, can be difficult. Writers block is real, and not everyone feels confident in their writing abilities. AI Create doesn’t just assist, it transforms the entire content process, so anyone can ideate, create, edit, and refine content. AI Create integrates seamlessly into the ThoughtFarmer editor in the same space you already work to create content. A tool that sits quietly within your workspace, ready to spring into action with a simple click on the toolbar. We built AI Create to Help you create more content creators by making the writing process less intimidating Streamline that pesky first draft, so you can deliver high-quality content faster Empower you to generate good ideas faster. We are acutely aware of the ethical implications and potential concerns surrounding AI. ThoughtFarmer is dedicated to advancing AI responsibly, incorporating measures to prevent bias and ensure moral integrity in all our innovations. AI Enhance: Give existing content a boost AI is not about replacing people, it’s all about making your life easier and your work more impactful. Regeneration capabilities mean that your content can evolve and improve, offering fresh perspectives and ideas in real time. AI Enhance takes your own work and helps elevate your writing prowess. With a simple click on the same easily accessible toolbar, AI Enhance acts as your personal writing assistant to help refine and polish your content. Improve your writing, make it shorter or longer, simplify your language or change tone, all with one simple click. We built AI Enhance to Help you streamline your company brand voice and tone across all internal communications Make it easy to format content in just a few clicks Transform your content quality by making it more concise, adding brevity, or even simplifying language. “The other day, I pasted the text from a questionnaire that a customer had filled out into our own intranet. With multiple collaborators, the formatting got a bit messed up. I started to clean it up manually, but realized I could use AI Enhance to do this tedious work. This is a perfect example of how AI won’t replace jobs, but it’ll allow you to achieve your goals quicker.” Darren Gibbons, President of ThoughtFarmer AI Assistant: Access and interact with key content faster Our AI Assistant is set to simplify how your staff find and interact with content. Through the magic (okay, not magic, but it feels like it sometimes) of natural language processing, our AI Assistant elevates how you search. It produces results that are relevant and tailored to each query and user. AI Assistant is designed to be human-centric. It goes beyond just retrieving data and documents. It understands user intent and delivers actual usable answers based on company artifacts. The impact on daily tasks is transformative. With more precise, context-aware results, your team will spend less time sifting through information and more time leveraging the right content to drive decision-making and customer success. We built AI Assistant to Make work faster and easier by helping employees spend less time finding information and more time using it Empower your intranet users to find content in a more natural, intuitive way Allow you to easily surface key company information, like policies and SOPs. “An important aspect of our AI Assistant is that it responds according to a user’s security settings, providing the appropriate level of information for the level of security. We want to make sure that it’s useful and not just a novelty. We constantly ask ourselves, is this going to be helpful and not end up being a problem that needs to be rolled back in the future?” Wil Arndt, Creative Director at ThoughtFarmer Looking forward: What’s next for ThoughtFamer and AI It’s our goal to actively shape the future of AI in workplace software, including intranets. Our commitment to continuous innovation means that we are always looking ahead, developing new features and enhancing existing ones based on customer feedback and technological advancements. Customer feedback: Our guiding force We deeply value our partnership with each and every one of our customers. The voice of our customers is crucial in guiding the development of our AI features and we remain committed to seeking feedback. Through active engagement, we will continue to refine and tailor our product to meet the evolving needs of the modern workplace. “When deciding how we want to apply AI in our product, we consider the true business value even in the very early stages. For example, rather than focusing on minor product improvements that would only serve a small sub-section of our customers, we’d rather focus on wider-scale enhancements within ThoughtFarmer that benefit all our customers.” Darren Gibbons, President of ThoughtFarmer Learn more about ThoughtFarmer AI intranet features. Watch our product demo video to see more of what ThoughtFarmer has to offer, and see how we can make work better by enhancing your organization’s communication, collaboration, and culture.