Intranets, intranets. They’ve been around for decades, and have gone through countless evolutions – from the early static page to the social intranet and mobile first solutions. And, they’ve always remained a core channel throughout.

The intranet in 2026

This year’s Workshop 2026 Internal Comms Trends Report sheds an interesting light on the state of intranets today.

Intranets continue to reign as a top comms option, with 31% of respondents finding it to be one of the most effective channels.

This places it behind only email and in-person events, meaning the intranet continues to trump newer ‘trendy’ tools such as social media, digital events or video.

However, 29% of teams also say it’s the most challenging channel they use.

So… it’s effective yet taxing and useful but frustrating…

Issues arising

Over the last year, intranets were at the top of mind for those communicators really drilling down on digital employee experience (DEX).

The intranet has so much that should go for it – it’s a great central hub, it can be dynamic or static, it can provide relevant information, and link out to other tools too when needed.

But none of this matters if, well… your employees can’t find anything!

This was one of the several issues that kept resurfacing: intranet governance is unclear; platforms are old and looking for information is worse than finding a needle in a haystack.

The result is often a behemoth of a digital platform – a tangled web of content, access and communication issues. And that is never useful, for those trying to navigate it.

CoPilot is coming

Another trend we’ve observed is that, in many companies, CoPilot is being increasingly used for tasks that were once under the umbrella of intranet functionality. For instance, employees can ask CoPilot to bring them relevant templates or useful documents.

With some businesses developing their own chatbots, such as Microsoft’s HR Virtual Agent bot that answers routine HR questions (and has saved HR service advisors tens of thousands of hours according to HR Grapevine), even more nuanced information could be quickly available at the touch of a button.

The big question here for the longevity of the intranet is:

• If employees can go to CoPilot, or an AI bot and ask them for an answer – why would they try and search the Intranet?

It will be interesting to watch this space. CoPilot, AI bots and agents are perhaps not there yet. But with the leaps we’ve seen in the tech it may not be long.

There may be a new evolution of intranets on the way – maybe it’ll be a place to promote news that you wouldn’t know about even if you asked CoPilot? Or the more ‘human’ centre of interaction and idea sharing?

Is the intranet dying?

So, with all these challenges is the intranet going the way of the dodo? Well, it appears not.

In fact, the intranet has emerged as the number one priority, with 52% of respondents wanting to invest more time, energy and resources into it.

How this plays out remains to be seen. Communicators are more stretched than ever, and an intranet overhaul is no small task.

We offer SharePoint and Intranet services, from conducting audits and aligning content top making your intranet truly work for your people.

If you’d like to learn more about what we do, click here.