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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.
Welcome everyone to a new episode of Fresh Perspectives. We are talking today about the ClearBox report. Well, not analyze the ClearBox report, but they can look behind the scenes.
And we have someone very special today, and that's Suzie. I'm Jarbas Horst, senior product manager for Fresh. And with me, you have my colleague, David.
Hello. David Bowman, product director for Fresh Intranet.
Suzie, you are probably a very familiar face to a lot of people.
But just so it's clear for everybody, who are you, Suzie?
Give us a quick introduction to who you are and tell us a little bit about the ClearBox Yeah, sure.
So that's a strange thought actually that I might be familiar. I just kind of do my thing in the background and don't think that people might know who I am. So hello everyone, I am Suzie Robinson. I have been in the world of intranets and internal communications since about two thousand and eight, which is a scarily long time ago now that I think about it.
And I joined ClearBox Consulting in 2019 and I was brought on board to look after the ClearBox Report as well as to help with the consulting side of things.
And the ClearBox report is now a free resource for anybody to download.
The current edition at the time of recording is the 2025 edition which is just over nine hundred pages long.
The 2026 report might actually be a little bit longer than that, and analyzes the best products that are on the Internet internal comms employee experience market.
And you have a pretty big team of people now that work on the report. Is there anyone in particular that you'd like to give a shout out to?
All of the reviewers. So, yes, this year, we've got a pretty big pool of people. It's changed a little bit each year so we've had some people who've come along and helped us out and they've not been able to the following year, but this year we do have a large number of people. I have to give a particular mention to my colleague Andrew who's been doing it for many years alongside me, Guy who has been around for a very long time, been doing this longer than I have as well, and Steve Bingle as well who has been our editor for a number of years as well, and then everybody else who is reviewing this year who will be name checked in the introduction of our report, But there are quite a few of them, so I won't name everybody just now.
Wonderful. Thank you to all of those people for helping to create this. You know, what I think is a really good resource for people that are looking to make a purchase of an entrant in the market because it is a big and very busy market and can be very difficult at times. Know, even as someone that has a product in the market to spot the difference between all of these vendors that sound more or less like they're doing the same things.
As a team that are working on this report, what's the thing that motivates you to come back and do this year after year?
Perspective, I think the people that work on the reviews just really like seeing behind the scenes of some of these products.
We have a three and a half hour long demo from all of the products that we do full reviews of.
And anything that's a product overview review, we have a ninety minute demo. So they're both quite long demonstrations, which you don't really get if you're going through a product selection process, whether that be for your own organisation or if there's a consultant working with a client.
And so it really does give people an opportunity to go and play with these platforms that we often see advertised or sponsors or just kind of little snippets of case studies. And so I think for the people writing it there's that passion there behind the scenes of wanting to see that.
But from a clear box perspective we changed the way that it worked. So a few years ago it was a paid for resource, we did ask people to pay to download it, but we realised that really the people that needed the information were probably the people who couldn't afford to pay a few hundred dollars for just basically a piece of paper as it were.
And so we changed our model and so now vendors very kindly cover our admin costs so that we can have a group of people who help us write and edit and so on. And that means we can offer it for free because we really do want to cut through that noise, cut through that kind of marketing perspective, seeing the same names in lots of places, sponsored Google ads, that sort of thing. We want to try and help people really sit back and think about what they truly need from an internet or equivalent system. And therefore what is the best solution for those leads, not who gives them the best demonstration on a particular day or at a conference.
You have done this like for so many years now. So what's kind of the hardest part of producing the report? We kind of know the part of the vendor and getting everything ready, but like what's that like as someone who is creating the report?
Yeah, if you ask me on different days, I would probably say different things.
But right now I am still in the midst of editing so time is the hardest thing.
So I am the kind of the consistent thread between all of the reviews. And so being that little bit of a bottleneck is kind of a hard position to be in to make sure that it's all done and publishable in the beginning of January. But beyond that, I would say it is just trying to make sure the reviews are honest whilst also respecting the feelings of our participants because vendors are paying to take part. And so whilst we are honest and we do point out things that are missing or maybe things that aren't done very well, there is that just that fine balance to not be overly critical or just be mindful about the way that things are written.
And then having that discussion with vendors as well around maybe how we've positioned some things and making sure that we have the full understanding that we need. So we go through quite a robust fact checking step, so every vendor sees what we're going to say before we publish it. And if we've misunderstood something, if we've written something incorrectly, or if it's a little bit vague, then we'll revisit it and make sure that it's fine from that vendor perspective as well as from our own.
Yeah. It's a super tough balance to get right, I expect. You know, as a speaking as a vendor, you know, you want your entry to read as kind of marketing friendly as possible. But, you know, I think also there's a recognition that people are making difficult decisions with all of these products as they're reading through that report. So, you know, it does need to be, you know, fair, balanced, proportionate, reasonable.
You know, it's a good job that all vendors are reasonable, I And the feedback that we get as vendors is also helpful.
Help us evolve the solution. Think we see working with ClearBox as a partnership, getting the feedback and that helps us, has been helping us evolve the product in the right direction.
And from our perspective as well, we are using the same framework to assess everything And so we, in every one of our eight business scenarios, they are looking at a business situation. So one of the scenarios that's new for the 2026 edition is a knowledge and content management scenario.
And so we know that that can have quite robust requirements for some organisations around governance, for example, and life cycle, also the way that maybe there's analytics that are specific to reference materials rather than just news. And so our framework is quite robust to look at those things. But there will be some platforms where robust knowledge management actually isn't the right thing for them and their clients. And so we don't expect every platform that we review to do really, really well in every single scenario.
And in fact, if there is a very light and lean and very focused platform or product that we're analysing, it may mean that they don't score very highly across any of our scenarios. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. And I think there's that understanding, I think, that comes over time with vendors as we work with them. Like just because you don't score a perfect five out of five, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with your platform. It just means for people looking for this thing, you don't do that thing.
Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, it's, you know, I I know from kind of reading reading through the report, you know, it's difficult to not compare yourself to some of the other vendors in the in the report. And, you know, I I imagine that everyone goes through some level of this of, you know, everyone wants to be kind of number one, you know, top of the stack in the report. So, you know, it's good to hear that, you know, not everybody needs to be number one in the report.
No. And the most important thing is not how highly platforms score in individual scenarios or indeed overall, it's actually how well do the things that we've covered meet the needs of the individual businesses. Yeah. And that's the thing, that's where the scores are there as like an indicator to show the comprehensiveness almost or maybe if something is done particularly unusually or is quite unique in the space or is what the platform is known for, then those would be indicators that if you're looking for this particular thing then go and read these particular reviews. But it doesn't mean that something else that scores poorly in a particular area won't meet your needs just as well. So it's kind of there to show people maybe which reviews from the nine hundred odd pages that you should go and have a look at, rather than being one of the few people in the world, myself included, who reads the whole thing.
That's very Multiple times over as well, I expect, Suzie.
Yeah. Exactly.
So do we talked about it a little bit already about, you know, the purpose, the kind of why behind the ClearBox support. What is it that you hope people do with it? You know, because as as you say, it's not you're not necessarily gonna read it cover to cover, you might, you know, dip in and out. Do you know, you do you have a view about what you hope people get out of it? Do you get feedback from people as to kind of positive outcomes that they've had from the report?
Yes. So we know that people tend to look at the different business scenarios and identify the ones that matter to them, and then go and read reviews of the products that score particularly highly in those areas, which I would say is probably quite a sensible approach to take.
It will give the best kind of guide around maybe those things that may be a better fit.
But to get there you need to know what it is you're looking for. So actually before even looking for the report, looking for a platform, we would always urge people to do research and to figure out a strategy and to get all of that understanding in place before then even starting a platform selection. So what our report can also do is to kind of give an indication of what is possible. So that kind of realm of possibility.
So if there's an area that maybe an organisation hasn't thought about, integrations is quite often a common one where people don't know what's possible and so they don't necessarily know what to ask for from a vendor. But if they see something scored really highly in our report and read through and say, Oh, I didn't know that it's possible to have these agents that will allow you to just ask a question and go and access all the different business systems without you having to even know that they exist or what the payroll system is behind the scenes, nothing like that. That sort of information is things that internet managers or whoever is looking after an internet may not understand.
And so I hope that the report gives that level of information to give that perspective and to give that little bit of guidance.
As well as there being a lot of industry information for, so for those people who are just interested in the world of intranets, internal comms, everything associated with that, we've got quite a hefty section, which is kind of our kind of state of the sector as it is right now, and looking at all of the trends and the way that technology is evolving and what we're seeing right now and what we expect to happen and the directions we expect it to take.
Yeah, the lead into the report, super useful, I think, for a lot of people that are exploring this area for the first time. There's some really good kind of rich content at the top there.
Yeah, we are very generous with our information. That's something that I like helping people. It's why I've ended up kind of in the role that I'm in right now. And so we are, as a ClearBox team, we're very generous with our knowledge because we just want people to upskill and for everybody to choose the right things for their organisations.
And with all of the view and insights you have across different products, what do you think makes a product stand out? But not looking just at features, but in its complexity.
I think that there will always be a gut reaction to seeing screenshots. That is nothing to do with how fully featured a platform is. It's all about whether you as an individual actually like the look of something.
We do reflect that a little bit in our reviews and around the kind of the look and feel of something and the way that the interface works, for example. But sometimes you will just as an individual look at something and go, no, don't like it, and there's nothing that you can put your finger on. But then the opposite is true as well, that there are some platforms that just always seem to kind of capture hearts and minds because they just look really lovely and seem to work in a really nice kind of logical way. And I would say sometimes those are the ones that stand out or just those that just have this appeal that you can't quite put your finger on.
But beyond that, I would say that customer service has always been, but particularly is a really important element now. Yeah. And so organisations really are looking for partners or guidance and strategic information, those sorts of things that can run alongside having those features and functionalities. And those are the areas where we see platforms or vendors stand out.
And that's something that we keep in mind when we're thinking about our choices awards, so the platforms we choose to win a little badge, or a little badge, to win a badge, during our reviewing process. But also when we're talking to clients as well about what it is they want, the sorts of relationships that they want with, with their provider to make sure that we're reflecting that properly.
Yeah. Completely agree. You know, we were at a conference recently, and I was sitting in in a case study, and they were talking about kind of their vendor selection process.
They were saying that they found it very hard to build into their requirements document that had been presented by IT about how valuable the ongoing relationship is going to be with the vendor that they've selected of, you know, how easy is it to get feedback? How easy is it to get support? What are they like to work with? You know, those kind of qualities actually are probably more important in some cases than the technology itself.
I think so. And I think that's something that we can reflect to a certain extent. So we have a voice of the customer section where we ask for feedback from real customers, and we reflect that feedback in each of our reviews, but we can't validate it. And so any sort of reviewing process, there's always ways for vendors to encourage those who are happier with their platforms to get feedback.
Even though we ask for kind of those areas they'd like to see it evolved slightly, that's always included. But it does tip the scale slightly.
But it's something that people who maybe have looked at our reviews and think, right, I've got a short list or a longish list of those platforms I now want to see for myself.
And then going through that selection process and having demonstrations. I think that's something that should be on people's lists when they're having a demonstration is that how do I feel I would get on with these people? Because I'm gonna be working with them for at least three, five beyond years. So is there that working relationship? Does it feel like it's there? And that's something that hopefully our reviews will then set people up to go and to really assess and decide whether they can go ahead and do it.
Yeah. We've talked already, you know, a bit about, you know, how tough it can be to kind of manage all the personalities in the space, you know, consumers of the report, vendors, reviewers presumably as well mixed in there.
And, you know, I guess the kind of scoring mechanism that you've got and the categories that you assess the products with, feels like quite an important way of being able to manage that. Can you talk a little bit about how you manage that scoring system and the impact that it has?
Yes. So it starts in early summer when we revise our scenarios, is we look at the feedback that we've had from the previous edition or editions, the ways that the industry maybe has changed, and also just when we've been doing product selection processes for our clients, have we felt that we've been missing information that we've had to go and ask the vendors for when we've been doing that process?
And that helps us to evaluate our own framework and come up with that structure.
And this year, so for 2026, there are quite a few changes from 2025. So I've already mentioned there's a brand new scenario. We have removed the analytics scenario as its own thing because we found by itself it wasn't really doing enough, but we've now dropped analytics into individual scenarios, which we think will then help to really make those differentiators in some of those scenarios stand out as to those that are all kind of fully featured versus maybe where there are a few gaps.
And so once we've got that structure of the subsections of each of our eight scenarios, we then look at the balancing of the points, which we don't share with vendors, so that's only for our reviewers reference.
And again, this year we've shuffled around the weighting of some of those points, where we can see that certain things are more important to clients and so we give those more importance within individual scenarios. So even though it doesn't look like a scenario has changed much, so our community engagement scenario for example has been around for a few years, it doesn't look like it's changed on the surface but actually there are a few points rebalancings in the background.
So we give all of that to our reviewers and they use that to then form the reviews and we go through the fact check to make sure everything we've written is correct and we have a look at the scores again at that point. But the final thing that we do in the process that's the particularly weighty piece of work is, we look at all of the scenario write ups and all of the scores, each of the eight scenarios, essentially sort them by lowest to highest, and then check them line by line that a seven reads like another seven reads like another seven, and doesn't need to dip down a little bit to a six or up to an eight and then we halve the scores so it's out of five and easier for people to read. So we go through quite a robust process all the way through and so that fact check step with vendors really is that point where we can say, Are you one hundred percent happy that what we've written is accurate because this is what we're going to use the basis score on?
And since we've been doing that the last few years, we've really reduced the number of conversations we've had afterwards with vendors where they said, Oh, we're not sure that that score is right. And actually last year, don't think we had any conversations with vendors afterwards. Was more like, how can we improve it next time or what was But nothing where it's like, we don't agree that that score was correct. So that's good to feel like the scores really are as accurate as they can be now, we hope anyway.
Super comprehensive, it sounds.
Yes. Yeah, the whole process is, yeah, it's quite detailed and I don't know, I hope that that comes across. I'm so in the weeds of it, as it were, that I don't know how evident that is to everybody outside, but the whole thing is very comprehensive so that we can be as fair to everybody in the space as possible. So our reviewers have everything they need, they feel confident with what they're writing and vendors know that we're writing things on an even keel for everybody and reviewers then know that they can read our reviews with the faith that they're as accurate as we can make them based on what we see.
The report might be comprehensive and maybe, I think from the point of view of people consuming that content, it's very well structured because the way you are talking about the part of analytics or AI, for example, you not just go there and like, oh, I want to find everything about AI, but it's within your workflow. So about creating content and then you'll find the aspect of AI and you have the aspect of analytics helping you make sense of the content you are pushing. I think that helps people also navigate the content that we're putting out there.
Yeah, we try and make it navigable as far as we can.
We kind of realized the way we were treating AI was the way we kind of needed to treat analytics. In that AI, the way that we see it, is a vehicle to achieve certain business needs rather than being the scenario in itself. And that's one of the reasons why we thought actually let's break up that analytics part and put it within the search scenario so that we can talk about how good the search analytics are or aren't, as the case may be.
And what's one thing that you love about report that people might not notice?
I think the best bit for me is seeing something that we've shared with a vendor one year, then appearing or improving the next year.
Even if it's a point of discussion during that fact check step as to whether it's valuable or not, whether it's needed or not.
And even actually just during a demo saying to a vendor, have you thought about this? And them saying, no, that's a really good idea and making a note of and then seeing it that year later. So actually being able to gently influence platforms to better meet organisational needs, I think is something that perhaps readers don't realise happens and it is very gentle and it happens only occasionally, but it is really pleasing see where that Yeah.
Absolutely. And kind of thinking more broadly about, you know you know, you you and reviewers, Suzie, are kind of in the middle of lots of vendors and market and talking at events and having conversations with sales with your own customers. What trends are you most excited about in the world of digital employee experience or intranets? What's kind of taking your interest at the moment?
I mean, from an internal comms perspective, it does make me very happy that internal communicators seem to still be a real focus area for vendors. And so seeing the range of features that are on offer expand each year just purely from that kind of, yeah, origin is great to see that those expanding because of the importance of internal comms teams as well to these platforms and the fact that quite often they are the owners within organisations.
But, I mean, AI, I mean, have to talk about it and seeing the ways that some of those have gone from generative AI features, which was just about creating an article drawn from the internet without any real kind of context being applied, which was rushed in by most products shortly after Chat UBT kind of burst onto the scenes. But seeing how a lot of that functionality has evolved and is now becoming a lot more supportive.
And I hope to see and look forward to seeing even more supportive features coming out that aren't about removing some of the fun stuff, like writing articles or creating imagery. Yes, sometimes those jobs need to be cut in half, but sometimes it's an enjoyable part of the process and you don't necessarily want to use AI. But then things like governance and lifecycle, those sorts of things which are absolutely vital to the success of a platform, having AI features that will support publishers maybe who are infrequent publishers and don't necessarily know what they need to do around the governance side of things because of various reasons.
And analytics again as well, that's a huge area where there's a lot of opportunity there.
And we're just seeing those really supportive features coming out now in search and the agents that I've already mentioned as well. And I think those have real opportunity in this space to deliver that value because intranets, employee experience platforms, whatever you want call them, are kind of agnostic with what they're trying to achieve.
We hear that the likes of say ServiceNow and Workday and similar platforms are making a play for this space. And because organisations already use Workday for all of their HR data, why not use it for their intranet as well? But actually those traditional intranet kind of features, I I'm yet to see anything that's robust enough in those other platforms that are within these dedicated intranet platforms. Yeah.
And that's because intranets are agnostic. They are there to improve people's day to day, to improve communication, finding things, integrating with other systems. They don't have that kind of purpose that something like ServiceNow or Workday does. They have to do ticketing.
They have to do that people management side of things. And so I think the fact that this space remains nimble means it's still a really kind of viable industry, set of technology that can adapt to what broader trends are doing whilst not losing sight of that. We just want to make people's day to day better. And we will adapt to whatever that needs to be.
Yeah. You know, I often wonder about, you know, if ChatGPT hadn't been released, there was no kind of AI big bang. You know, intranets felt like they were kind of heading towards more convergence. Everything accessible from a single place, shot window on the organization, lots of integrations, things being fed to people through one window.
And the AI kind of disrupted that model.
And, you know, maybe we are now veering towards more fragmentation rather than convergence.
Do you do you agree? Do you do you disagree? What are your views on this?
I think right now every market is kind of disrupted. I think there are huge global events happening beyond technology as well that are impacting people's thoughts and decisions. But then the broader AI piece where there's really sophisticated things happening in the world of AI that are outside of this industry and outside of individual organizations' kind of scope of what they're able to achieve. And I think a lot of people are just waiting to see what's going to trickle down and where there are real use cases that are then repeatable or that you can take inspiration from and then apply yourself to organizations.
And there are some good use cases out there already within our own industry, but they are still fairly few and far between beyond we just use whatever AI functionalities within the platforms that we have. And so I think partly because AI is popping up in lots of different tools, organizations are looking at lots of different tools to maybe see what fits quite well. But I do think that that fragmentation will become a problem at some point. And then that's where intranets and employee experience platforms have that flexibility to say, you know what, we can just absorb all this stuff.
And you can do all that cool stuff that you've got in different systems, but from within this one interface, if you want to, or you can go to wherever you work, you live. If it's Teams, then sure, fine, go there, you can do it there. But oh, the internet's also available there as well if you want to read the latest news. And I think it's something that's happened for years really, and we've seen various things crop up.
Like, before ChatGPT, there was Microsoft announced the Viva Suite. And the Viva Suites, before AI was a thing, was going to be the new way of doing everything.
And that was a big disruptor in the market. It sent loads of ripples out, lots of vendors were then trying to address how they would absorb some of that functionality or replicate it or integrate with it.
And since then we've seen some of those Viva tools disappear completely, like the glossary tool for example. And so I think it's still very early for such a big topic that there's still there just needs to be a bit of time for things to settle down, and I think a lot of organisations are quite tired with the amount of change and all of the other things going on that they I think that people are just waiting before they make any decisions.
Easy to be overwhelmed.
Yeah, absolutely.
The one thing that vendors need to be careful about is not just adding AI functionalities for the sake of we have AI capabilities, really adding value to clients for us, things that will really help benefit. I think that's the task that we have.
Yeah. And there was a tiny little bump of that in the last couple of years when Meta announced that it was sunsetting its platform.
And we saw lots of vendors suddenly bringing in loads of social features to kind of backfill the fact that meta was disappearing. But we and having conversations with some of them who were moving quite dramatically from having that kind of traditional, flexible internet approach to perhaps a very rigid, socially driven experience and saying to them, sure if that's what you think your clients want longer term, go for it. However, all of the customers we speak to want flexibility. If they want social, they want to be able to choose that they want to have it and perhaps have the flexibility to have other things around it.
And so don't necessarily do that if you think you're just reacting to this one thing that's happened in our industry. And I think AI is kind of a bigger example of that, where there is that situation where AI is just added for the sake of it, rather than what do our customers actually need and actually want, and what is going to be sustainably usable by them and beneficial for them, rather than just being maybe something that looks very swanky on marketing materials.
Yeah. Yeah.
Changing moving away from tech slightly, Suzie, you're a woman working in the tech space and in Internet space. You know, I'm aware that we're living up to all the typical stereotypes being two white dudes running a podcast.
How do you know, what are your what are your experiences working as a woman in tech in the year 2025?
Do you think this industry is getting better, staying the same, getting worse?
I think so from my perspective, and that's the only perspective I can speak from, I feel like it is better.
But I think there are still situations where kind of historical issues are still around.
But I don't it's a difficult question actually, this is the one question when you sent through maybe some of the topics that I spent a long time thinking about, not ever really settling on an answer for it. Because I just act with integrity and hope that everybody in this industry does the same. And on the whole, I would say that it does happen. But then there are still situations where I was talking about the fact I was going to speak at a women in technology event and the person, the man I was talking to then decided to tell me about issues with women in technology, like back.
And there's still things like that that happen and I think it's there's just so many ingrained things beyond this industry that need to improve. And I feel like it's improving, but then being in that space where I do have the opportunity to have a voice and I am invited along to things like this or to webinars and conferences and things, I have that perspective because I'm being invited to these things. And so I think the important thing for anyone in this space to do is to look at people, whoever they may be, and how they behave, their opinions, their passion in this space and then give them that voice that's appropriate for them.
And try and just elevate anybody who needs elevating regardless of who they are, whether it is a man or if it's a non binary person or or anything beyond. I think everyone is complicated and I would say there's perhaps things that you don't know that someone fits into a group that maybe it's not public knowledge that they fit into a particular group. And so I think it's also dangerous to have assumptions that a line up doesn't include someone from a diverse background. It's like you don't necessarily know because a LinkedIn profile is very different from a Facebook profile for example.
But I think on the, that's a kind of a rambly answer to say on the whole I think it's, it has improved and I think the range of people that I see speaking at events now and the willingness for people to connect seems to have grown a lot more potentially since Covid and world of working online and working digitally has certainly helped that, I think. And being able to make those connections and recommend going to see or speak to someone or connecting with someone because of a particularly good reason, I think has really helped.
Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. And, know, similar to you, I was sort of debated about adding or not adding the question in the interview and then kicked myself afterwards because why am I not asking everybody question?' It would be a much fairer way of dealing with it. Because you know it feels like a topic that if more people were talking about it, it would hopefully produce less awkward situations of people.
Absolutely and I mean something just this afternoon actually that I've spotted is a lady that I follow on LinkedIn has conducted an experiment about sharing exactly the same post as one other woman and two male connections, similar sized audiences to see whether the LinkedIn algorithm would do anything different. And it seems that the men that post it had far greater reach with their posts than the women.
Right.
And so there's now a petition that's been started to try and encourage LinkedIn to have a look at its algorithms to try and see why is it suppressing some voices and not others, and opening this field up for others, I should say, rather than suppressing. And so I think it's maybe those situations that actually we need to start looking, rather than just like some of those things that we can affect within our industry, but also broader, technology and broader societal situations need calling out when they happen.
Yes. Yeah.
And, you know, again, I was with a customer a couple of weeks ago who was saying that one of the reasons that they've been holding back on launching, any generative AI services to their employees is because until they can feel very confident that it isn't just going to be producing biased content towards a specific ethnicity or a specific gender or for able-bodied people, that they can't feel confident about launching these services in their organisation.
Which I think is fair and actually is a fair pushback more broadly, as you say, it's any AI functionality at the moment has been trained on the internet as of a few years ago and the internet is not a balanced place. There are extremes on every end of every scale that you can possibly look at. And so we do as a group, as organisations, as individuals need to be aware of all of those things and try and mitigate them. And that's where the thing that I'm most worried about looking kind of at internet technology again is where there is that generative AI or where there's AI in search. If there's no way for, employees, publishers, whoever, to feed back to an Internet administrator and say there's a problem with this Then both the administrator and vendors can't fix it.
And that's something that I think is a problem with AI. One of the problems with AI is the fact that there isn't necessarily that feedback route to say, every time I ask you to create an image, it's always a white able-bodied person. And there needs to be a way to adjust that beyond it just being a prompt driven thing that the individual then needs to correct. The AI itself needs to be intelligent enough to know that that's not right.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, like this thing with the image that you described, still happens.
Like if you go, for example, ChatGPT and you ask like, I want an image of someone celebrating success, you might unfortunately get always kind of a man, which is unfortunate like Are there AI platforms available?
Oh, yes. Yeah. And do the same thing as well.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I worked for the BBC all of a sudden.
But it's true. It's absolutely true. And there needs to be mechanisms in place for every platform to allow for that feedback. And at the moment, it's there's not really, which makes me nervous. It makes me wonder if people will just get fed up with it and say, know what, I don't want to keep generating a happy white man every single time I do something. It's not representative of what I'm doing. So the usage will maybe trail off a little bit.
Yes. Well, I guess what you hope is that organisations that are using these technologies to create this content are configuring knowing that that bias exists, right? And specifying that it needs to be a more diverse representation in the prompt that's going in to balance out some of these unfair outcomes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Moving us towards the end of this discussion, I think that's maybe what we're also trying to go here, David.
What's kind of one piece of advice that you would share with someone looking for a new internet today? I have kind of an answer in mind, but like what can you say?
So I would say figure out what you want, look at employee needs and wants and gaps, and then look at organisational needs and strategy.
Work out what you need from that, your strategy, what you want to achieve, then figure out the functionality that you need from a platform to meet all of those needs, both kind of now, maybe in future if you need to do a little bit of work to tidy up people data, for example. And then once you've got that shopping list, then you can use that to then look at our reports, have a look and see maybe which scenarios best fit those particular bits of functionality, read the reviews and then make a list of, maybe a longer list of say five to ten that you want to explore in a bit more detail.
We have a section in each one of our reviews which is a bit like Amazon or similar shopping platforms, where if you like something then it makes a recommendation to go and look at something else. There's kind of threads between them. So that's also useful to maybe spot something that you hadn't considered before because perhaps it didn't score particularly highly in a particular area, may still address your needs.
And then take that list and then start exploring the vendors' platforms and attend webinars or listen to podcasts and then work out maybe that list that you want to start having informal demos with before you then go through a much more ingrained process.
Of course, you know, was gonna say, if you want any help, of course, then come and talk to ClearBox Consulting as well because we can absolutely help you with that bit.
Yeah. So was gonna say that the great news about being in a busy and thriving industry like Intranet's Digital Employer Experience is there is no shortage of webinars that vendors like us would love you to attend.
That's very true. And they're often really interesting. Do go and listen to quite a few and yeah, there's all sorts of things you can learn and case studies and examples that you can then take inspiration from and apply in your own business.
Okay. ClearBox. Well, sorry. That ClearBox, you also have the short, the short series of mini reviews and the blog posts that go along. So there's a lot of content that people can consume, not just from vendors, but also from Pierre Box directly.
Yes. And we are vendor neutral. Even though we work with vendors like yourselves and a whole raft of others for our reports and events and that sort of thing, we don't have any partnership agreements in place. So anything that we say in our reviews, any of the work we do with clients, it's all based on what we think from our own expertise rather than because we've got some sort of agreement in place with a vendor and they'll pay us a certain amount of money if we say or do something.
We don't we don't do that.
And, Suzie, we've been asking everybody this question on the podcast about do people have a current favorite app? Something that you come back to time and time again. We have had an incredibly varied number of responses to this question.
Okay. So I think the app that I use the most at the moment is Discord because I have so many different communities on there doing a variety of different things that I seem to open that up probably the most during the day. So to have those non work related conversations about all of those different things and actually having then suggested Discord as an informal or a more formalised channel for internal communicators who maybe don't have the budget to spend on a dedicated solution, having used it and found it to be pretty useful for that yeah, community and informal conversation kind of approach.
Very cool. Nobody has suggested Discord yet, that's a brand new one for And if people want to get in touch, Suzie, what's the what's the best place to do that?
Two places. Please do feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to have new conversations with people and see what you've been up to and to share things. I've shared mini reviews, both video and written ones and keep doing that next year as well. So do follow me on LinkedIn if you want to see any of my content. But then if you want to get in touch there's the ClearBox website, so ClearBox dot co dot u k. And if you want to talk to us about any of our services or if you're a vendor and listening to this and they're interested in getting in touch, then you can email us at hello at ClearBox dot co dot u k.
And if you are a vendor, make sure that those interviews don't turn out all that well for you.
Exactly.
Suzie, thank you so much for giving us up your giving up your time today. Really appreciate it.
You're very welcome. Thank you very much for having me.
Thank you.