For most of the last decade, the intranet was the punchline of every digital workplace conversation. I got used to seeing an “Is the intranet dead article?” pop up on my feed almost every year, and being asked by clients outgrowing custom SharePoint intranets whether they need a new one at all.
In the same decade, we’ve seen shadow IT exploding, and Microsoft 365 positioned as the solution. And somewhere in that chaos, organizations quietly concluded that a unified digital front door was a nice idea that didn't really scale. Give people the tools, connect them to Teams or Slack, and let them figure out the rest.
The problem is that employees did figure out the rest. They figured out how to waste enormous amounts of time switching between systems, hunting for documents, and emailing people to ask questions that were already answered somewhere they couldn't find.
In organizations where the quality of internal knowledge flows directly into the quality of the work, that waste adds up fast!
The early signal
In 2023, AbbVie’s Unily intranet made Nielsen Norman Group's list of the world's best intranets. For a 50,000-person biopharma company deep in the middle of the Microsoft 365 golden era, that was a contrarian move. Their platform wasn't recognized for being a slick content hub; it was recognized because it treated the intranet as organizational enablement technology: news and knowledge in context to support knowledge-intensive workers making the best decisions.
With hindsight, it was an early read on something the rest of the market was about to learn. The digital front door wasn't dead. It had just been waiting for enterprises to understand what it was actually for.
What it's actually for
The original digital front door concept was about surfacing information. This time it’s about turning information into action.
Johnson & Johnson understood the assignment on their intranet. With 138,000 employees across 65 countries and $17 billion going into R&D annually, Suresh Raman, their VP of Digital Transformation, was blunt about the stakes:
"We're dedicated to eliminating every friction point. To help 130,000+ employees do their best work, every day, without interruption."
Home, their Unily-powered platform, was built around three principles: Efficiency, Effectiveness, Experience. But the one that tells you everything about where the digital front door has arrived is Efficiency. Not "can employees find the news" but "can employees complete tasks without leaving the platform."
Their productivity dashboards have logged over a million interactions, carry an 88% helpfulness rating, and are the third most visited destination on the entire platform. Employees aren't going there to read updates, they're going there to get work done. This approach has delivered 150,000 monthly active users and has ultimately increased corporate comms consumption with overall content engagement rising by 104% from 2022 to 2025.
Their GenAI search rollout in 2025 takes the same logic further. Employees ask natural-language questions, get synthesized answers, and the system automatically surfaces related documents, news, and expert contacts. 35% of all search clicks now come from SharePoint content no one explicitly searched for. Information finds people rather than the other way around.
J&J’s Medical Professionals Directory, which puts qualified internal expertise a search away, got a direct commendation from J&J's CEO for speeding up knowledge sharing and breaking down silos. This example shows the best business value from intranets stretch way beyond comms tool territory.
Where’s the ROI?
With tech investments needing to prove ROI and quick, business leaders may be asking how do you put a dollar figure on what all this is worth; Wipro's story is the clearest one I've seen.
273,000 associates. 65 countries. After deploying The Dot on Unily, they captured $20 million in business value and cut email volume by 80%. This is calculated based on the time savings and productivity improvements made by every associate, and their impact per year. Their AI chatbot has handled 5.2 million queries and counting, actioning tasks across 5+ business critical systems.
The Dot-first strategy, routing everything important through one channel, didn't just reduce noise. It gave their people a place they could trust, which turns out to be the precondition for everything else.
Why this is the moment
Here's the thing I keep coming back to: the organizations that kept investing in their digital front door during the last few years built something that now compounds. Every layer of AI capability adds lands on a foundation employees already use and trust. Knowledge gaps get closed because the system surfaces unanswered questions. Leadership gets real signal about what's landing and what isn't.
The ones that outsourced this to a productivity suite are now trying to introduce Copilot into a digital workplace with no connective tissue. No single source of truth. No guarantee that what it's surfacing is accurate or current.
The digital front door is back. But what it means has changed. It was never really about the intranet. It was always about whether your people can find what they need, act on it, and trust that it's right. In industries where that's the whole job, getting it wrong is expensive.
It's a topic that comes up constantly in customer conversations right now, and it's one we're tackling head on. As Lokdeep Singh, Unily's CEO, puts it:
"The digital front door is having a renaissance, but the difference this time is intelligence. We're not rebuilding the intranet around technology. We're rebuilding it around the flow of work and people. That's what gives us the opportunity to be the intranet that actually reboots productivity."
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