The Must-Have Workplace Tech for 2025: AI Search

No matter the use, no matter the software, the goal of workplace technology is ultimately the same: improve efficiency and quality of work. More and more, though, the increasing number of apps has the opposite effect.

So what’s the solution? A strong digital workplace is a great starting point, but most digital workplace solutions today cannot erase the gaps between the business apps in your tech stack and centralize all the disparate information across your organization. AI search within your digital workplace bridges the gap that most intranets and digital workplaces can’t address.

Let’s look at how AI search works, and what benefits it will bring to the workplace.

The Challenge All Businesses Face

As the amount of software grows, so does the burden of navigating it. Sixty-eight percent of workers switch between apps 10 times per hour, with the average worker taking 23 minutes to regain focus afterward.

This routine task not only represents a 40% reduction in employee productivity, according to Workgrid, but has broader impacts on the quality of work. Just as navigating the internet used to be tedious and challenging before search engines, navigating your tech stack and corporate knowledge has become similarly difficult.

In offices, it’s easy to see how quickly work quality can go downhill if the available information is inaccurate, outdated, or out of reach. But even on the frontlines, the policies and SOPs intended to ensure safe work and quality output can easily go overlooked or misunderstood if not easily accessible.

This disconnect between employees and information is also a key source of the frustration that fuels turnover.

The Workplace Technology Solution

Just as Google unified the internet into a single, accessible entity with the right information available in an instant, AI search unifies the digital workplace. Intelligent Search by Igloo uses industry-leading AI technology to provide instant access to answers to your questions, regardless of which tool information is stored in—all from a search bar in your intranet.

This isn’t just a major convenience for employees, but a groundbreaking innovation to fuel productivity and across your organization in four key ways.

1. Information Accuracy

Employees can only make use of the information they have available, which makes your knowledge management system critical to ensuring strong output from teams of all kinds. On the frontlines, that could mean easy access to the latest retail promotions or factory SOPs, while in offices that could mean immediate access to specific information from last quarter’s sales report.

Intelligent Search achieves an unparalleled 95% first-try search accuracy in a few ways. First, the task of finding the right resource among the many possible locations can be a significant obstacle. Intelligent Search makes it easy to access information across all apps, giving employees no incentive to cut corners and operate off incomplete knowledge or old documents.

Second, context is key. Intelligent Search leverages an AI model with deep, contextual understanding of all the knowledge within your tech stack, providing thoughtful summaries backed by links to relevant source documents. These answers are reinforced by user feedback, further training the AI model for ongoing improvements.

How Igloo improves knowledge management →

2. Data Security

If you paid attention during your last IT training module, you’ll remember that you often need to think twice about security when using most AI tools. This is true of generic large language models (LLMs) that have broad public availability. Intelligent Search is so effective for the same reason it is so secure: it only uses your data internally to improve results your own search results.

The AI model that powers your instance of Intelligent Search is self-contained. It never shares information outside of your organization, and your data is never used to train other LLMs. For added control, Intelligent Search can be configured with your own preferred AI model.

Existing user permissions and internal security rules are preserved throughout the Intelligent Search function, ensuring that the AI summaries never read or discuss materials not intended for the specific user. The entire experience is designed to be immediately and reliably secure, with no additional oversight required by your team to keep corporate data secure.

3. Time Savings & Tech Adoption

Workgrid estimates that a typical employee spends 54% of their time locating, validating, and formatting information. This staggering figure not only harms productivity in an obvious way, but it is also a major impediment to tech adoption.

The more time and effort it takes to learn, access, and utilize your tech stack, the less likely your employees are to do so.

By offering a single point of access to resources from across your entire tech stack, Intelligent Search eliminates the most common barrier to entry. Desked and frontline workers no longer need to juggle numerous logins, apps, and websites when everything can be accessed instantly from a single search bar.

More ways to get value from your integrations →

4. Employee Retention

Digital friction—the constant, chafing hassle associated with managing and navigating many disjointed apps and websites—is a major cause of employee burnout. This is particularly apparent on the frontlines, where 70% of workers say they need better workplace technology.

Offering a powerful way to do the same job with less stress and reduced effort shows workers that they are valued. According to a Brandon Hall study, “Workers feel more empowered and appreciated when given modern tools that make their jobs easier.”

Tools that make life easier drive engagement, and that engagement pays dividends. Companies with high employee engagement experience 43% lower turnover.

Conclusion

AI technology truly hit the mainstream in 2024, and in 2025 we can expect to see it become more refined, purposeful, and prevalent in the workplace. But, there’s one area where AI will have particular impact: search.

By creating Intelligent Search, a contextual approach to AI search for the workplace, Igloo has pioneered a solution for your corporate knowledge that will have the same impact Google had for the internet: everything you need, in an instant.

Learn more about how an intranet can make 2025 your best year yet. Talk to an Igloo expert, or watch an on-demand demo now: