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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:13]:
There we go, David. New episode, new year. Yes, everything is new.
David Bowman [00:00:18]:
New year, new episodes, new stuff.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:21]:
New stuff. The badge. Where's the badge, David?
David Bowman [00:00:23]:
It's. It's in there.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:25]:
It's in there.
David Bowman [00:00:26]:
Yeah, that's good. We just managed to get our outfits not so synchronized today.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:32]:
Yeah, there is a bit of a difference, but we aligned. It's about alignment. This episode is about predictions. So let's see if we're also aligned with our opinion there.
David Bowman [00:00:41]:
Yes, I'm sure we will be. I'm sure we will be, I think. So we're going to talk about 2025 trends, themes, predictions today.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:48]:
I think at the end of the year, we should then see how correct we are with our predictions. So it's worth another episode. So let's see if we did a good job predicting things and then maybe we can start applying kind of this prediction skill into other areas of our life. Like if you're really good at that.
David Bowman [00:01:03]:
Yeah, yeah. Like the lottery, maybe.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:05]:
Wait, let's keep that in memory for the upcoming recording then, at the end of the year.
David Bowman [00:01:10]:
All right, so you're still Jarbas.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:12]:
I'm still Jarbas. Jarbas Horst. Working here as a senior product manager for Fresh as part of Advania UK. And you, who are you?
David Bowman [00:01:22]:
I'm still David Bowman, Product Director for Fresh Intranet at Advania UK.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:28]:
That's good. Good that. So not that much has changed in 2025.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:36]:
Cool. Hey, but let's say hi to Jussi Sivonen from Advania Finland, who has been like a great promoter of the podcast in Finland at Advania Finland. That's really nice. Thank you for the support.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:52]:
Cool guy. Definitely knowledgeable.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:56]:
That's it. So what are the kind of those? We have five topics, isn't it, that we want to talk about. So one of them is Viva Engage.
David Bowman [00:02:04]:
Yes, let's start there.
Jarbas Horst [00:02:05]:
Let's start there.
David Bowman [00:02:06]:
So I think the prediction here is that we are expecting the momentum behind Viva Engage to continue to build in 2025. I think we both have seen an increase in interest about this product in conversations with customers, particularly over the last 12 months. But, you know, a kind of gradual increase of interest. And, you know, I think it's probably. It's easy to kind of attribute that increasing interest to things like Workplace from Meta getting shut down and people being diverted away from that product, maybe to the kind of nearest equivalent, which, you know, in our view is probably Viva Engage. But that's not the only reason I think that Viva Engage has been building momentum. Is it?
Jarbas Horst [00:02:48]:
No. So I think if we look everything start with Yammer. Since Yammer became Engage, Microsoft has continued to improve Engage with really good and valuable features. And it's a tool that's quite easy to use in your organization. It's easy to start with and have people create the communities and collaborating and publishing content. There's. So I think this of course helps also. This easy adoption helps also with having more and more people using it.
David Bowman [00:03:20]:
Yeah, well I think it's a technology that's easy to turn on and make available to people. I think the challenge that has maybe contributed to a less than perfect perception for Viva Engage or Yammer as was is that it is easy to turn on and just turn on. You know actually the most successful implementations of Viva Engage that we've seen are where there is a direction, a purpose, some ownership, some governance, that it's a product, a platform. You know the idea of enterprise social is something that needs leadership and direction in order to get the maximum amount of value out of it. So you know, I think it's simplicity is probably both its biggest strength but probably biggest weakness as well.
Jarbas Horst [00:04:03]:
Then it needs like this administration also not happening like the governance in place, like defining admins like for those communities in the plan.
David Bowman [00:04:10]:
Yeah, you need a plan. Yeah.
Jarbas Horst [00:04:12]:
So definitely I think like what we see a lot kind of is this combination of amongst some of our clients. Right. So they have kind of the intranet in SharePoint, they are using Teams for collaboration and then like the intranet also comes into teams via Viva Connections, sometimes like there are different ways how this setup can work and then we also see then like this third option coming into place like the enterprise network, social network with Viva Engage. So and that's I think a strength of Microsoft 365. So you have really good tools there already and you can combine them. And what we do like with a solution like that Fresh in SharePoint is like we can take this content from Engage, bring that like vibration dynamically into the intranet. And of course what we also see our clients doing and taking the news that get published on the intranet and display, displaying that in Engage across kind of those company communities, increasing the visibility of that content like and how people can engage with that content.
David Bowman [00:05:11]:
Yeah, because you know, at kind of mass or critical adoption, Viva Engage is a pretty fast moving product. What's shown on the kind of users feed moves pretty quickly. Right. And you know that's good, you know, because you've got a lot of content, got a lot of usage. It's a platform and a product that should be moving quite quickly. I think the value that SharePoint adds in those fast moving Viva Engage implementations is to be able to curate some of those conversations right as the person that's responsible for internal comms or management of the SharePoint intranet of being able to pull out kind of key interesting threads by topic, by person, by community and be able to publish those things in SharePoint because it's all happening in the same platform and being able to say promote specific conversations through the intranet of here is a really interesting conversation that's happening in Viva Engage and being able to direct people to it that SharePoint has its role there. So I think that kind of combination, as you say of SharePoint is the curation engine, Viva Engage is this kind of fast moving employee notice board and teams for the kind of more collaborative stuff. I think that those three things working really well together.
Jarbas Horst [00:06:25]:
That's a good point. That's a good summary. I think like this three angle like all those three tools and we see like as I said before, like our clients adopting it that way, which is nice. Now what I think like this helps base the idea of this prediction here. Well, first of all, like those observations coming like from a few years here and also like an increase in investment for Microsoft as I said, so it hasn't stopped. It continues and continues in 2025. There are kind of two kind of nice improvements coming.
Jarbas Horst [00:06:52]:
One is surfacing the content from Engage into Microsoft Search. So when you search for content, we're also like going to get results from Engage. And the other feature that's coming then is having kind of this content from Engage then appearing in Copilot results. So it's basically Microsoft helping increase the reach of Engage across the Microsoft 365 platform. And I think that's a, it's a signal that the adoption of Engage has been successful. So we see well, Microsoft continue kind of the investment here like in adding more functionalities and also like here combine that with Copilot, combine that with the search. So makes that really, I think a strong candidate like for have more and more adoption in 2025.
David Bowman [00:07:38]:
Yeah, because you know, these aren't sort of fiddling around at the edges enhancements for Viva Engage. This is a pretty kind of fundamental engineering and employee engagement features that are being added into the product. You know, if I think back to the kind of conversations that I was having with customers a few years ago, you know, when Yammer was rebranding to Viva Engage with people saying, you know, this is the kind of death knell, it's the end of Y ammer, you know, being incorporated into other products. I think if anything, the complete reverse of that has happened that, you know, it's really continuing to establish itself as a, a kind of specific product with a very dedicated roadmap and what appears to be a team that really cares about how this product is working and how people are using it.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:21]:
So then home and the team, they are doing a good job. Kudos to them very much.
David Bowman [00:08:26]:
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's a product that really looks like it's on the up and up.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:30]:
That's great. That's great. Well then let's see how right. We are like, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes.
David Bowman [00:08:36]:
Talking about products that appear to be on the up and up as well. Obviously we're going to talk about SharePoint, but I guess our main kind of theme trend for 2025 for SharePoint is it going web publishing and becoming a bit more like a kind of web publishing a bit. I don't like to use the sort of WordPress example, but kind of having more of a feeling about kind of web publishing tools like WordPress. In this year you've been pretty close to the announcements and changes that are coming that are kind of driving this. Right. Give us a flavor of summary about what's happening to SharePoint in the next 12 months.
Jarbas Horst [00:09:12]:
Yeah, I like the way how you put that. And so go web publishing. So it becomes, you know, we talk about more than SharePoint since it was introduced a few like some years ago already. And I think now the way how you can present the content, that's really like state of the art. Right. And Microsoft has been introducing since last year, beginning of last year, maybe March or so, a lot of features that support this aspect. We have the brand center coming with like the support for custom fonts, something that Microsoft didn't have like in SharePoint but it's now available. When they add by default there is a set of options that you can choose from to apply kind of a different font and you can also bring your own font.
Jarbas Horst [00:09:54]:
Right. So then that's how that helps reflect your corporate branding guidelines. Right. So where custom fonts could be part of that then then we have the additional flexible layout something that's coming I think as we speak like as this episode will be published. So flexible layout sections, which means you are going to have on a page a new section where you have more flexibility on where you can position the content that can be a web part, some web Parts can be resizable. So you don't have that limitation of three columns as we used to have. But you are going to have up to 12.
Jarbas Horst [00:10:31]:
Yes, exactly. So they say like something around 12 columns. So you can like move the web parts within that space. And as I said so some web parts can be resized and that gives you like more flexibility in the way how you want to present your content. Right. So it's a very good addition will really help people present this content a different way. Design ideas, something that was introduced last year has the support of AI like for rendering the layout on a page in different ways and then AI coming up like with suggestions on how the content can be structured. Also like a good addition gives people like if you can focus as I think a communicator can focus on creating the content, then Microsoft gives you a lot of different options that help position present this content in different ways.
Jarbas Horst [00:11:15]:
We have image cropping also and the image shape is so you can apply different shapes to images and also allowing you to present that in different ways. Video pages so content can be more focused like on videos. We are quite used to like consuming video content as we have for example here like the podcast or a lot of communication happens via videos. So Microsoft or SharePoint supports this also now like with those video pages. So those are just I think a few of options that Microsoft has introduced in terms of improving the way how content can be presented. Right. So custom fonts, flexible layouts, design ideas. Also like some new web parts coming there.
Jarbas Horst [00:11:54]:
I saw today like a post about the editorial card. It's a new web part that helps you like present curation so present specific content more visually focus more like on that information. So as we see like there is a lot of additions around kind of this topic and then we have also like the aspect of the person creating the content. Right. So you have content authoring so you can have like multiple people working the same piece of content at the same time. And then we have here then copilot also coming and helping you on the page. So when we're working on the page you can have real writing via copilot which means like you don't need to copy that content. Put me like in chatgpt you a different source or maybe copilot via like the web browser.
Jarbas Horst [00:12:37]:
So you have that help directly within the page. And then we have Copilot in SharePoint helps you with the page creation. I think it's a game changer. Also like in terms of how you can generate content in SharePoint. Right. So you're going to have a UI where you can have like the initial prompt, you can add documents for context that Copilot can use when creating the content of the page. And then Copilot based on that information provided, based on the prompt, based on the context you provide via the documents, it can then generate the page with text, with images. So this will also be quite powerful when it's available then to users.
David Bowman [00:13:16]:
Yeah, this is a lot of new features and functionality for people to get more impressive layouts, more impressive pages and lots of good automation tools. You know, I think particularly on the kind of page and site creation, regardless of the system that you're using, this can be onerous task, particularly if you've got kind of source material, PowerPoint decks, Word documents that you're building content pages from. Of being able to ask Copilot to turn some of those things into a site or a page or a series of pages. That there is a tremendous amount of value being delivered there.
Jarbas Horst [00:13:49]:
Yeah, it does. And so I think one important part here is also the aspect of governance that goes with kind of those new features that get added, isn't it?
David Bowman [00:14:00]:
Yeah, and the need to have some sort of, I guess in the short term, the need to have some sort of guidelines or plan as to, you know, how some of those new features will be introduced. Because these additional design features give your content creators the ability to create some pretty impressive looking pages. But having some guidelines on how to keep that within the kind of brand guidelines of the organization. Right. Of having a kind of consistent elements either at the top or the bottom of the sites or pages that belong to the intranet and some guidelines on how people should be incorporating this functionality into their existing intranets. Because you could end up in a situation where you've got lots of content and lots of different sites that looks completely different from each other. And that is going to create a bit of a. Introduces some friction for people that are wandering through the intranet.
Jarbas Horst [00:14:48]:
It does you want to support consistency on the content or how you present the content, how you present the sites, the pages, and that's something that a solution can support. So of course looking into Fresh. So that's something where we look a lot at trying to support this consistency aspect. But of course things like custom fonts. So if you apply one font to one site and the other site has a different font, there is a risk here. Right. So and I think when you are developing a solution looking here at Microsoft, so those are things you need also like to keep in mind. Right.
Jarbas Horst [00:15:20]:
So you're putting something out there and what's the impact that something like a custom font has if there is no governance around it? So those are good considerations. I hope this will improve.
David Bowman [00:15:30]:
Yes. And great opportunities for developers, builders like us to be able to create new features and functionality to help people manage these new capabilities. And you know, I guess on, on that note, you know, we've had some questions from customers that are kind of deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem saying how do you know, how do we feel as a product vendor about some of these changes that are coming to Microsoft 365? We love this stuff. You know, there are things that we haven't built around page creation and we lean very heavily on the out of the box publishing and content management elements of SharePoint. This is all great news for us because Fresh is able to use some of these things straight off the bat. So this is all extremely positive steps forward for us.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:14]:
Yeah, honestly I see it exactly the same way. So we haven't touched this space right. Of the page and the page creation. We have been using what Microsoft provides and it's really nice then to see like so many improvements coming then into this space which really adds value to the clients and supports the message we have like that's Fresh Intranet and SharePoint and then you see the benefit of both kind of things coming together. This is really beautiful. And of course people like quite close technology. We are I think always in love with more options to build upon, like Copilot and like all of the additional enhancements that are there now.
David Bowman [00:16:51]:
Yeah. And I think, you know, lots of these things are addressing kind of long standing concerns maybe that people have with SharePoint about design and branding options. So it'll be great to be able to deal directly with some of those challenges that maybe we've always struggled to talk about in demos and conversations with customers.
Jarbas Horst [00:17:07]:
Yeah, by the way, like the demos become like even more interesting and nicer to present with all of these design options now.
Jarbas Horst [00:17:14]:
The prediction here is then that people who have much more fun then like using creating content in SharePoint, that's one of the options also hidden there.
David Bowman [00:17:23]:
And you know, when we were sort of discussing this earlier, we were kind of talking about it that it's AI will be transformational in 2025, but maybe small T transformational than kind of all caps transformational. And we're thinking about that in the kind of the world of intranets, employee engagement, employee comms. I'm sure there are lots of other areas where AI will be all caps transformational. I guess our sort of main item on this really is the kind of continuing rise of Copilot for all organizations. You know, I think maybe I was a bit surprised, it sounds bad to say I was a bit surprised maybe last year about just the sheer volume of take up that Copilot had. I shouldn't have been surprised, but perhaps I was a little bit. And you know, as a we're obviously part of a larger organization that has a big consulting services practice and just the amount of interest that we had as a consulting business on how do we activate copilot, how do we run trials, what are the adoption challenges, helping organizations to successfully roll out Copilot to their employees? And we saw some of this at the events that we were sponsoring and attending last year to go from beginning of the year where people weren't really talking about it, to kind of end of the year where people were coming to us asking what we're doing in this area.
David Bowman [00:18:54]:
So I think Copilot will continue that, continue its ascendancy and I guess the amount of investment, the amount of obvious investment that's going into Copilot for Microsoft as well, their main kind of flagship event at the end of last year Ignite, primarily talking about Copilot in a kind of general sense, in the infrastructure sense, but then also introducing this concept of agents. Tell us a little bit about what are agents, what is agentic?
Jarbas Horst [00:19:23]:
I think we can start with Copilot, right? And the example here is like let's say you go to Copilot and you ask Copilot for the latest updates. So Copilot will return to you like content from Outlook, content from Teams, content you have collaborated with your coworkers like in documents. So this is like you get that summary and that's presented to you, right? And it's kind of a broad scope that you get there. Now agents are scoped so they are looking at a specific space or area or tool and will be returning information like they're very specialized, very scoped and they will be returning content and from that specific place or like be interacting; it doesn't need to be just like retrieval of information. Agents can be smarter so they can also perform actions on your behalf and that becomes quite powerful. So then the UI for AI, so Copilot there and then those agents really helping you use them.
Jarbas Horst [00:20:19]:
Copilot as well like the UI for interacting with multiple applications without you really like having the need to go there and look for information like or maybe perform a task so the agent can do that on your behalf. And I think that's what we're going to see more and more this year.
David Bowman [00:20:36]:
Yeah. So kind of cutting down on the amount of work that as an end user you've got to do by being able to interact with agents and those agents are performing some very specific tasks. The amount of additional logic that you can build into these agents, this can be pretty significant as well. There are kind of pro code approaches for building these very comprehensive agents that are tightly scoped that are integrated into specific systems that are performing these transactional type things for you.
David Bowman [00:21:05]:
You know, rather as you say, rather than this kind of very broad chatbot that you're talking to which is bringing content from lots of places, the agents are performing a very specific action for you or have very specific context.
Jarbas Horst [00:21:16]:
That's very powerful I think and can become very interesting. Like we are looking at that right now. So. And how we can connect the intranet into copilot via agents. Right. So that's one area we're exploring more and more trying to understand what are the use cases that make sense for users to consume like through an agent in Copilot as you mentioned. So we see like more and more adoption of Copilot amongst our clients at Advania. And of course so it also makes sense like to have a compelling story here where things go hand in hand.
Jarbas Horst [00:21:47]:
Agents seem to be kind of a very good place, a good way like to do that. Microsoft I think we are going to select this is like Microsoft well bringing kind of the out of the box agents things coming more and more in that space. They have already made some announcements at Ignite. I think one of those kind of this employee self service agent that connects like to IT and HR content helping kind of the end users in that area. And of course like Microsoft will be rolling out more and more agents pushing this topic. I think there is also like this option of the pay as you go option where maybe you are going to use also if you don't have a Microsoft license you can use an agent via this pay as you go model. So Microsoft makes it easier for people to use agents via Copilot, simplifying kind of this license topic or adding kind of the pay as you go option. It will become a topic that's more present I think in 2025.
David Bowman [00:22:43]:
Yeah. And lots of options for customers, developers like us to be able to build your own agents as well. So being able to generate an agent from a SharePoint site or a document library, you know, allowing people to chat to that kind of content, more advanced scenarios being able to be built using the Copilot studio. Then as I say kind of pro code approaches for kind of traditional software development to be able to create something that's maybe a more kind of repeatable product type approach. So lots of out of the box agents coming, providing more context and kind of specific tasks and lots of additional options for customers, power users, developers to be able to build their own.
Jarbas Horst [00:23:23]:
And let's see, like if we're going to have this scenario of agents talking to agents. Yeah, this is really exciting and can become very powerful of course, depending on how deep you go like with the implementation, all of that. But the options are really many here. Of course the features that Microsoft is going to enable in this space will allow people like vendors to build more sophisticated solutions. But yeah, I look really with positive eyes towards the agents that would be. I think it's the same introduction of topic kind of talking about regulations and government is always looking at making things better. Right? Putting that positive better. Yes.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:05]:
What is there?
David Bowman [00:24:06]:
Yeah. So you know, obviously we're paying some attention to the regulations that we are both aware of and regulations that may also be coming from elsewhere as well. And I guess probably the one that's top of mind for us has been the EU AI act. Just because we're based here in the UK with lots of customers that are kind of European based. So this is legislation that is underway, being developed. Parts of it are already in place with kind of rolling levels of enforcement. And I guess the sort of positive here is that this doesn't appear to be particularly onerous legislation. If you are building kind of minimal risk AI systems, applications or as we've been doing, kind of integrating AI into your existing solutions like Fresh.
David Bowman [00:24:51]:
There are some interesting things in here, some specific transparency risks about making sure that it is obvious that people, people in your organization or people that are using your AI systems are talking to an AI rather than a human being. Part of this is that you can't be pretending that this is a human being that people are talking to and that content, images, text that it's being made clear to people that these are being generated with AI. There are some specific regulations in here that is controlling things that have unacceptable risks or building higher risk type AI solutions and some kind of general principles for building AI. So you know, these are regulations that vendors need to be aware of, but also for organizations that are deploying these solutions to their employees as well. So, you know, if you're buying an AI service from a vendor, you have responsibility to make sure that that service is adhering to the legislation as well. So pretty broad legislation, but ultimately I think this is positive legislation for people generally. It feels like the kind of things that people should be doing with these technologies.
Jarbas Horst [00:25:58]:
Yeah, it increased like transparency. So as you mentioned here, so I haven't like, I didn't take a look at everything but like there's aspect of transparencies, you know, when fighting misinformation, like with deep fakes and those things. So if you have a label there that informs you that oh, this was AI generated, these will. Yeah. So help fight and like misinformation, which is of course good.
David Bowman [00:26:18]:
Yeah. These feel like sensible protections ultimately rather than legislation for the sake of it.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:24]:
Yes. Yeah.
David Bowman [00:26:25]:
And then you know, obviously change in presidency in the US next year there may be adoption of something similar to the EU AI act, there may be additional regulations. But you know, I think as AI is becoming more commonplace for, you know, in lots of scenarios, I think we will, we will start to see an increase in the amount of regulation of this as a technology, particularly given the kind of widespread use of it and the fact that AI systems can be pretty widely used. Right. And ultimately could do a lot of damage.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:57]:
Yeah, good point. Well, look, just one correction. It's next year is now. So it's. We're already like in 2025.
David Bowman [00:27:10]:
Yeah. So, you know, I guess related to this we've had this kind of working hypothesis about whether intranets are going to face an existential crisis in the face of AI. And I think, you know, our kind of prediction, our trend for 2025 is the intranets will still be relevant. Right. The effort that goes into creating a good intranet, a great homepage, it's still vital, valuable. This is not something that's going to get replaced by AI in the next 12 months. You know, I think that's a pretty, a pretty safe statement to make. Perhaps on a podcast at the end of this year I'll be sauteing and eating my own hat.
David Bowman [00:27:48]:
But it feels like an unlikely thing.
Jarbas Horst [00:27:50]:
I hope, I hope no. So I agree with you. So I think there are like substantial things that you can expect from an intranet that AI can support you with. But you still need the platform, right? So you still need the place for performing tasks like creating and publishing this content when it comes into publishing. Have a place where you can have the overview of the things that are up for publishing. Kind of the editorial calendar. Something like we have into our product and we see clients really happy about that, having kind of this one overview where they can see what's coming next. Do we have overlaps then also understanding how is this content resonating with my audience across the multiple channels? Because you are not just publishing into SharePoint, right? So you want maybe to send something via email, via newsletter, then you have the different channels that when we're Looking at Microsoft 365, we have then Teams, we have Viva Connections, so different places where people are maybe also publishing things like into Engage because our employees are also there participating in those enterprise social networks.
Jarbas Horst [00:28:51]:
So we have kind of, I think this aspect, right? So I don't think that AI will replace that entirely because you have kind of the Internet communicator performing like those tasks, but like in 2025, so we have then AI supporting people perform those tasks like Copilot in SharePoint helping you with the creation of the page, but like not doing everything on your behalf.
David Bowman [00:29:12]:
Then yeah, I think this concept of hyper personalization and personalization of intranets, you know, this is a. It's a really interesting topic to get into in reducing the amount of effort in getting content to people in the organization. And I'm not saying that that isn't a valid approach to be using, but I think the best examples of highly successful intranets that we've seen is where there is a human being or human beings that are doing some of the work because they understand the business, they get the people that are working in the organization and they are curating something that they know is going to be interesting. I think that that role, it's still going to exist. People don't always know what they need or what they want as far as an intranet or a homepage configuration goes. And there is a responsibility still, I think for human beings to be involved in putting together and curating an experience that's reflective of the organization's culture within an intranet. And I don't think that a text prompt in A system is going to replace that in the next 12 months.
Jarbas Horst [00:30:15]:
You also need like to perform that text prompt. Right. So, and then that means someone needs to be aware of that use case that can be anything, right. Like getting the latest news or getting kind of the who has birthday today. So which can be quite simple things that you can have on the homepage. Right. So birthdays, work, anniversaries, kudos, all of the things that, you know, we're talking about personalization and employee recognition.
Jarbas Horst [00:30:38]:
So the good homepage plays a role here as well. Right. So it's, it's not just about creating the content, publishing that, those aspects of personalization, as you mentioned, they're also important.
David Bowman [00:30:48]:
So I think the kind of ultimate combination of AI at work being used to get things done, simplify, make things more efficient, connecting people with content is great and that should be automated as much as possible. But I think that ultimately a successful intranet is still going to need human beings to be involved in a curation experience because they get it. They get the business, they get the people. And look, the challenge of intranet adoption, it's hard work, it's a noble endeavor, but it is hard work in order to create a successful intranet and connect people with information that sometimes they don't really want to read. That is part of the challenge. And that's going to need human beings to be curating homepages.
David Bowman [00:31:28]:
On this topic though, there are some things that people should be being aware of. And you've been talking about kind of thinking of generative AI Copilot in particular as being another channel. Right. That this is something that we should be giving some thought to. Right.
Jarbas Horst [00:31:43]:
The thing of Copilot being the channel. So yes, that's definitely. We talked about channels previously is right. So and you have a set of. You have like the multiple places where you can publish your content. I think as a communicator you can see Copilot as one new channel that you have to reach people. And then because if we look at Viva Connections feed that was also kind of could be a channel, could be as a place where people can consume content from now that content as a communicator didn't have any control over the content, over the order, how things appear on the feed.
Jarbas Horst [00:32:21]:
And now you could think the same about Copilot. Now with agents, you can have that control. Of course, it depends on how people Implement an agent. Right. So those are areas we are looking at right now as fresh. And you can build an agent that gives communicators that power to have Copilot as a channel also. And then we are like, I think what you want, like to add now here.
David Bowman [00:32:45]:
Yeah. And there may be some additional rules to think about in terms of creating content. The alliance between OpenAI and Microsoft means that Bing is, you know, is in. In place as a search engine in those tools. So maybe building some awareness of how Bing's SEO works, of constructing pages that are going to create summaries that are accurate and kind of key points presented to people. So there may be some benefit in starting to think about how is AI interpreting the content that we're creating in our intranet, particularly if you've got people in the organization that are using copilot. All right, and then final prediction then for 2025, and I guess it's sort of a continuation of a theme that email is still going to be a primary communications tool for a lot of organizations.
Jarbas Horst [00:33:34]:
Now you're talking about email. We have just talked about AI right now and Copilot, which is, you know, quite advanced. Then we talk about email. So is that realistic?
David Bowman [00:33:42]:
Look, this is a challenge that as a vendor you've got to operate in. Right. Because the reality for a lot of people, a lot of organizations, is that email is still a primary tool for people, especially some of the older audience like me, that are wedded to their email. And if you want to get information to people like me, you know, email is going to be the best route to use. And ultimately, if you want people to consume your content, you've got to put it in the channels where they live. Right. Hopefully you can adjust that behavior somewhat. But email is still going to be a primary communication tool.
David Bowman [00:34:14]:
And it's not difficult to kind of understand why. Right. Because everybody gets it. Everyone understands email, I guess maybe a kind of younger employees, you know, less wedded to their email, you know, less likely to use it as a communications channel. So, you know, thinking about that kind of multi or omnichannel strategy. But again, I think the reason that it's still a powerful tool is that everybody understands what happens when you click that send button. You can imagine that email turning up in everybody's inboxes. You might not read all of it, you might not take action, but you do know, you do feel comfortable that basically the addresses that you sent it to have received it.
David Bowman [00:34:49]:
So it's still a vital tool in the kit bag.
Jarbas Horst [00:34:52]:
It's easy to understand how it works because we are used to that, right? We have been using emails, like, for so long and like, you know, I was kind of challenging here, but it's. It's actually supporting the narrative. So we see clients, right, coming to us and saying, like, do you have an option? Like, we're in the product. We can send like emails, like newsletters to our users. And they are doing that today, right? So biweekly or weekly, they are creating kind of summary of news events, announcements that happen kind of with the organization and sending that as a summary at the end of the week to the employees. So people, as you say, can get that in the mailboxes, have kind of this summary of what has happened in the organization recently. And, well, we have just added this feature into the product. Now it's actually being released as we speak.
Jarbas Horst [00:35:42]:
And, you know, like adding the newsletter functionality, letting people choose from templates, define audiences, define, of course, curate the content to have that dynamically appearing, tracking kind of then like engagement with the links. So adding really, I think a powerful option that our clients will benefit from, based on what you said. So it's. It is something that people come back to us and say, like, we need this functionality. We are doing that today. We would like to do that via the solution directly.
David Bowman [00:36:08]:
Yeah, and you're right. You know, it's a sort of a weird challenge that we're faced with as a product vendor in this space, that this is the reality for people. So we're, you know, building on a. Building on a technology that's been around for, you know, what feels like hundreds of years, and at the same time, having conversations about generative AI, building agents, automating as much of this stuff as possible and, you know, that kind of balance of delivering features for people living in the reality of where they are today versus what does the future of this look like as a product service platform?
Jarbas Horst [00:36:39]:
That's the reality of vendors, isn't it? Like, if you. We need to look into the future and what might be people requiring in a few months or like in a year. And we also needed to look like, what is the reality? What are the things that they need right now? That was kind of dated to our calendar. For example, we talked about this recently and having, for example, people have been using Excel to organize their content publishing now. Like, we have that in the product and people like sending emails and having that regularly happening. Then we have the newsletter feature. We need to look at both angles, right? So the present, the future, how we can support that.
David Bowman [00:37:15]:
Okay, so our predictions for 2025, Viva, Engage, building momentum. SharePoint goes all we're publishing on us. Still a lot of talking about AI, but intranet's still relevant. And ultimately, people are still going to be leaning pretty heavily on email.
Jarbas Horst [00:37:32]:
That's right. So then at the end of the year, we do kind of another episode and we see, like, how right we were with all of those predictions, David.
David Bowman [00:37:42]:
Yeah, yeah. I think we'll be all right.
Jarbas Horst [00:37:43]:
That's good. That's good. I'm most, like confident here, but looks like we have then the end of this episode. Was nice chatting to you today again, David, like always.
David Bowman [00:37:53]:
Enjoy. I'll see you soon.
Jarbas Horst [00:37:54]:
Cheers. See you.