Frontline Communication, AI Governance and Intranets People Actually Use: Intranets 2026 Day 2 Recap

How do you reach employees who never sit at a computer? How do you let communicators use generative AI without creating legal risk? And how do you build an intranet people actually open? Day 2 of ALI Conferences’ Intranets 2026 Virtual Conference on August 27 tackled all three with three case studies and a panel on capturing employee attention.

Chairperson Ben Skelton of Habanero Consulting opened by asking attendees for their Day 1 takeaway. The most common theme: communication challenges look remarkably similar everywhere. Here’s what Day 2 added.

Case study: when the all-in-one solution isn’t the right fit (TreeHouse Foods)

Karen Nicholas, Communications Manager, Social and Digital Engagement at TreeHouse Foods, shared a refreshingly honest case study. TreeHouse makes private label food and beverages across 26 facilities with about 7,000 employees, most of them on production lines where phones aren’t allowed. The SharePoint intranet and biweekly newsletter worked well for office staff, but plant employees were missing out.

Facility digital screens were filled with five-page PDFs and text-heavy slides nobody could read, which slowly ruined a valuable channel. Leadership chose an all-in-one platform: short messages on screens with a QR code linking to intranet articles in a new app. A pilot at one plant surfaced the problems quickly:

• Employees already had too many apps (timekeeping, Workday, recognition) and wouldn’t download another one.
• Frequent password changes made single sign-on a hassle.
• Consumer streaming sticks powering the screens kept going to sleep.
• And people missed the weather widget on the old screens.

When the company went private and leadership changed, the team stepped back and asked facility HR managers what they really needed: digital signage and non-emergency text messaging. TreeHouse broke the all-in-one apart and is now evaluating separate vendors with much sharper questions about hardware, translation and what happens when the power goes out.

Two lessons stood out. First, a monthly photo gallery of facility gatherings became the most-read intranet article every month. Second, on a plant visit, an employee showed Nicholas how she gets information: she photographs the flyer taped to the break room wall and reads it at home. “If no one’s reading it, it doesn’t matter. You didn’t communicate it.”

Attendees added their own frontline wins. Kam Hodge of NORC at the University of Chicago got her best engagement of the summer by celebrating field interviewers on the intranet and digital signage. Matthew Tiefenbrun, formerly of US Cellular, described a year-long feedback group of 75 to 100 frontline associates, where sharing back what changed built real trust. Skelton called frontline engagement “the hardest problem to solve” in enterprise communications.

Case study: scaling internal communications with generative AI, safely

Kellen Shearin, an attorney who joined Fisher Phillips that week after time at Littler Mendelson and has practiced in AI since 2022, presented Deploying the Enterprise Megaphone. He walked through an anonymized engagement with a roughly 45,000-employee global company whose communications team produced more than 120 internal publications a month in 14 languages, with turnaround averaging seven to 10 business days.

What went wrong with shadow AI

The trigger was a confidential restructuring draft pasted into a consumer AI tool to “soften the tone.” A three-week audit found that 68% of communications and HR staff surveyed regularly used consumer AI with personal logins. Staff had pasted in financial forecasts, succession plans and product roadmaps, creating trade secret, privacy and cross-border data transfer risks.

Shearin highlighted a very communications-specific risk. An AI tool rewrote “employees may be considered for discretionary performance bonuses” as “employees who meet their benchmarks will receive their earned performance bonuses.” That kind of change can create an enforceable promise under the doctrine of promissory estoppel. He also flagged privilege waiver when legal drafts go into public AI tools, and the fact that purely AI-generated content may not be protected by copyright.

The fix: govern it, don’t ban it

Blanket bans push shadow AI further underground. Instead, the company negotiated enterprise AI contracts with zero data retention and no model training on its data, regional data residency, data loss prevention filters and IP indemnification. Then it introduced a three-tier review model:

• High risk (executive memos, layoff notices, benefits changes, crisis messaging): legal sign-off, full human review and full logging.
• Medium risk (town hall talking points, training manuals, regional memos): senior communications manager review, with legal involved only when statutory or financial issues come up.
• Low risk (newsletters, social events): the author fact-checks, with automated filters in the background.

Every AI-assisted piece gets a named human owner responsible for four checks: facts and numbers, “commitment scrubbing” for accidental promises, keeping privileged advice out, and a tone and bias review. As Shearin put it, there is no legal defense called “the algorithm drafted it.”

Over 12 months, the company reported turnaround cut by 60% (from about eight business days to under three), more than 1,400 AI-assisted communications published without a disclosure or privilege incident, shadow AI use within the communications teams dropping to zero as far as they could find, and about $1.2 million saved on translation and agency costs.

Case study: building the Oklahoma City Thunder’s first intranet

Landis Tindell, Manager, Corporate Communications for the Oklahoma City Thunder, walked through From Zero to Launch. The problem was familiar: too many emails, misinformation spreading through side conversations, and no central place for request forms.

During the 2022 off-season, the team chose SharePoint’s built-in site features, worked with IT to make the intranet, called Home Court, every employee’s browser homepage, and ran focus groups with someone from every department, from 15-season veterans to new hires. Lessons from four years of iterating:

• Cut what nobody uses. Video recaps went away because employees had already seen the content on social media or been at the event.
• Useful beats flashy. Top content includes event registrations, open enrollment, monthly Wellness Wednesdays, a “Milestones” series profiling 10- and 15-year employees, the org chart and a central calendar of games, arena events and community appearances.
• Give chatter a home. An open conversation feed handles spare moving boxes and rec league sign-ups, so those don’t need full stories.
• Digest emails, not email blasts. SharePoint news digests go out Mondays and Thursdays, and the rule is to post the Home Court story first, then link to it from any email or calendar hold.
• Audit every year. Analytics plus an annual company-wide survey decide what stays.

Panel: cutting through the noise to capture employee attention

The closing panel featured Dayna Lovelady, Employee Engagement Manager at The Christian Broadcasting Network; Lauren Anderson, Internal Communications Manager at Water for People; Emily Watkins, Associate Director at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Matthew Tiefenbrun, Strategic Communications and Brand Activation Leader; and Diane Gayeski, Professor of Strategic Communications at Ithaca College.

Relevance is everything

• MD Anderson, with about 27,000 employees working around the clock, keeps broad communications to what everyone needs and targets anything requiring action.
• Lovelady warned that irrelevant messages to international offices are “crying wolf.” She includes the who, what, where, when, why and how in every message.
• Skelton described a listening lab where an employee ranted for ten minutes about another office’s “cake day” news. Irrelevant content isn’t neutral. It’s negative.
• Gayeski once had a bank make her a branch manager and send her everything a branch manager receives. She found “islands of communication,” mixed messages, and roles with more than 40 hours a week of content to consume. Her team calls that the “yell line.”

Formats that earned attention

• After a cybersecurity breach, Water for People created a water-droplet mascot, AquaShield, that works across languages.
• Lovelady offers messages as text, audio, video, infographic and translations using built-in Microsoft tools. A truck driver loved the audio version, and phone agents watch video at double speed.
• At US Cellular, a peer-to-peer sales video program and a “Happy Dance” campaign produced record engagement on Viva Engage.
• MD Anderson’s most-read stories are always about its people.

Measuring outcomes, not opens

Panelists measured whether the intended action happened: falling phishing-test click rates, the volume of questions to MD Anderson’s anonymous Inside Line, IT help desk tickets and search terms, point-of-sale behavior, and attendance at quarterly regional leadership sessions. Gayeski’s reframe: stop producing communications and start producing performance results.

Frequently asked questions

How do you communicate with frontline employees who don’t have computers?

Ask them. TreeHouse Foods found plant employees wanted readable digital signage and text messages, not another app. Celebrating frontline teams on shared channels and closing the loop on their feedback also drove strong engagement.

How can internal communications teams use generative AI without legal risk?

Provide approved enterprise AI tools with zero data retention, use tiered review based on risk, assign a named human owner to every AI-assisted message, and check specifically for accidental promises, privileged content, and tone and bias.

What makes a successful intranet launch?

The Oklahoma City Thunder made the intranet everyone’s homepage, involved every department in testing, cut features nobody used, and made the intranet story the source that all emails link back to.

Keep learning

Frontline communication is the focus of our Internal Communications Strategies to Connect Frontline Employees Virtual Conference on November 12-13, 2026. For intranets, channels and AI, join the Employee Communications, Intranets & Channels Conference on November 17-19. See all upcoming events.