Episode 9: Why Your Business Needs an Adaptive Intranet

Comms In A Nutshell is your go to place to listen to discussions with industry experts, global brands and our hosts Vic McEwan & Scott Ritchie about the most pressing topics surrounding the world of work and internal communications. 

You might have noticed Adaptive Intelligence on our website, you might have seen that we’ve transformed NatWest’s employee experience through our new Adaptive Intelligence or you might not have heard of it at all but you’re curious. What is it? How does it work? How can it help internal communicators, HR professionals and more? 

In our latest podcast episode Vic & Scott sit down with of Director of Product, Dave Ferguson who teaches us all about:

• What Adaptive Intelligence is
• What features make up Adaptive Intelligence
• What problems it solves
• The benefits of Adaptive Intelligence
• How it can help to personalise the employee experience
• What the future of adaptive intelligence looks like

Listen to the interview below, and be sure to subscribe to Comms In A Nutshell on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast player for all the latest episodes and discussions.  

Key Quotes

What is Adaptive Intelligence? 

So adaptive intelligence, I would describe it as a new direction of Oak as a product, as a whole. So adaptive intelligence, you're gonna see a lot more intelligence being brought into the product over the coming months and years. What that means is every part of, the product will get a hint of intelligence baked into it where appropriate. What our vision is really long term, is a product that builds itself as self forming, adapts based on how users are using it. It’s really smart features that are baked into existing features that actually take the pain away from internal comms teams. You need to understand whether or not messages are being delivered correctly and are understood by your employees. Comms teams can just get back to what they do best. And that is delivering the messages, actually just putting the messages out there and let the product work out how best to deliver those messages and then how to tailor and build and adapt the solution to make sure that people see the messages at the right time.

Creating a winning algorithm

We've been using this for many months now. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, with some large customers and, uh, and the results have been, have been bang on every time you were proven the fact that it was working every time. So, uh, you know, we've got big confidence in the algorithms. I mean the best way of liking it is the Google search algorithm, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Only the developers and even they probably don't know how it works now, but it nails it every time. Right. Yeah. And that's smart delivery in a nutshell.

Giving your employees a personalised experience

So going back to what we were saying, that personalization touch is what you need. So as a newsletter, what it does is it leverages the smart delivery algorithms and curates a personalised email to you, based on maybe what you've already read, what you haven't read and curates new stories to you that are relevant to you based on all the priorities and audiences that you set in the smart delivery configuration of a message. So now going back to what we said, we've got a big client, like I said, that gets 80,000 personalised emails generated every day. This is what they're using. And it's working really well.

Have you listened to our previous episode?

In our previous episode Vic & Scott chat to boohoo’s Internal communications manager, Madison Birtwistle as part of our challenges by industry series about:

• Maddie’s Role as an IC professional and what internal communications looks like at boohoo group - boohoo group is made up of 13 major brands from Karen Millen, Pretty Little Thing, Debenhams, Nastygall and boohoo itself! 
• How boohoo are driving employee engagement for their office based, remote and frontline workers through their intranet and their relatable content
• Their favourite features of Oak and how to make the most out of your intranet
• The challenges boohoo have faced with internal communications and how the pandemic affected their internal communications strategy

Listen to the interview here, and be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast player for all the latest episodes and discussions.  

Download Episode Transcript