In today’s fast-paced work environment, team members are often overwhelmed by a deluge of internal communication—struggling to stay afloat in a sea of emails, chat messages, and scattered data.

The core issue isn’t just the volume of communication, but the fact that the information knowledge workers need to do their jobs is hard to access. 

This critical information is often: 

• Lost in forgotten chats
• Limited to individual email threads 
• Locked away in colleagues’ minds

This lack of centralized, easily accessible information leads to a reactive, inefficient work environment where team members spend more time searching for answers (or asking others) than doing actual work.

Thankfully, pairing the right AI tools with supportive leadership can go a long way to helping solve the problem.

Why employee communication problems are often so costly

In my most recent book, Everyone Wants to Work Here, I wrote about how this constant need to ask others for information creates a cycle of distraction and interruption. Team members resort to sending emails or instant messages, expecting immediate responses. 

This synchronous communication style further exacerbates the problem, leading to a “culture of urgency,” one in which prioritizing tasks feels all but impossible due to the constant interruption of new communication.

The result is a team that’s always busy but rarely productive, spending their days reacting to requests instead of proactively working on important tasks. This inefficiency not only leads to stress and burnout, but also hinders the kind of deep, thoughtful work that drives innovation, success, and personal satisfaction.

The problem is further compounded by the lack of clear guidelines for team communication. Without agreed-upon guidelines for communication channels and expected response times, team members send the same message via multiple channels to ensure they receive a response. 

This chaotic situation leads to frustration when team members can’t find needed information despite the abundance of communication. Leaders add to the problem by responding after hours, unintentionally modeling an “always on” culture.

5 Ways to Improve Internal Communication with AI

AI-powered solutions can drastically enhance team efficiency and employee communication by streamlining access to information. These tools, such as Microsoft Copilot for 365 Subscribers, and Gemini for Google Workspace for business subscribers, can intelligently organize and synthesize vast amounts of data, transforming the way teams interact and collaborate.  

AI tools can help you:

1.  Summarize meetings and highlight action items.

An AI notetaker can transcribe and analyze meetings in real-time, generating concise summaries that highlight key decisions, discussions, and action items. This eliminates the need for manual note-taking, and ensures that all participants have a clear and consistent understanding of meeting outcomes. An AI notetaker can even go a step further by capturing or suggesting next steps, and assigning tasks based on meeting discussions.  

2. Speed up email processing.

AI tools can analyze and sort incoming emails, suggest relevant replies, summarize lengthy threads, and even flag important action items. This can significantly reduce the time spent on email management and help ensure that critical tasks are not overlooked. AI can also help maintain professionalism by suggesting improvements to tone, grammar, formatting, and phrasing.

3. Create a searchable knowledge base. 

You can use generative AI to analyze and organize company knowledge. You can create a searchable knowledge base that team members can access to find answers to their questions. This can reduce the reliance on subject matter experts and improve overall team productivity.

This is best done with “custom agents” in your AI tool of choice. For Microsoft users, there is a wealth of information on pre-built and custom agents here. For Google users, custom agents are called “Gems” and you can learn about those here. 

4. Centralize access to this knowledge.

These AI tools can integrate with your communication and collaboration platforms, creating a unified hub for information access. Team members can use natural language queries to search for specific data across emails, chats, documents, and other sources, eliminating the need to switch between multiple applications. If you are a leader in an organization that uses Office 365 but hasn’t yet deployed CoPilot, you can direct your IT department to this page to get started.

5. Build custom AI tools to summarize lengthy documents and extract key points.

AI can automatically generate summaries of lengthy documents, saving team members significant time and effort when reviewing research, reports, or other documentation.  For example, you could build a custom agent in CoPilot studio to analyze and summarize long documents. Here’s a great resource for pre-built CoPilot agents and more information on building your own.

By employing AI tools like Microsoft Copilot for these purposes, teams can shift from a reactive communication routine to a more proactive and efficient workflow. This transition helps create an environment where information is easily accessible and communication is intentional, freeing team members to focus on critical tasks with higher creativity and productivity.

Supporting Team Members Is Essential

All the right AI tools won’t help you improve team communication if the leaders aren’t doing their part to support their teams. Here are specific steps leaders can take:

1. Purchase and enable AI tools.

The resources linked above should get you started. 

2. Provide training.

AI tools will save your team time, so invest in teaching them how to extract all the value available. Your team may not have effective workflow processes. If you want them to “do more with less,” you need to teach your team how. It’s not the apps and tools that will make the difference but how you use them.

For specific software tips, check out my friend Dawn Bjork, the Software Pro, if you use Microsoft at your organization.

3. Encourage “self-serve” and asynchronous communication.

Promote using AI-enhanced platforms that allow access to information without needing to ask others and pressing for immediate responses. This reduces interruptions and lets employees manage their workloads more effectively. Make sure all team members who might need access will have it, so that individual contributors can self-serve the information they require to complete their tasks.

4. Set clear communication guidelines.

Establish clear guidelines on preferred communication methods for different situations. Allowing team members to default to their personal preferences contributes to communication clutter and wastes time.

5. Model desired behaviors.

Leaders should demonstrate appropriate use of communication channels. They should also respect personal downtime by not sending messages outside work hours. 

Use AI to Improve Communication and Productivity

By implementing these tools and strategies, leaders can cultivate a work culture in which technology becomes the solution, rather than the problem.

Using AI to improve team communications contributes to team members’ ability to end their work days thinking, “That was such a good day—I got so much done!”

This increases engagement, motivation, and happiness, and contributes to an environment where everyone wants to work.