The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2026 published on April 9. I conducted an in-depth analysis of 13 vendors and evaluated their platforms across 28 criteria (which included 21 criteria for current offering and seven for strategy). This assessment resulted in four Leaders, six Strong Performers, and three Contenders.
Here’s A Few Things That Jumped Out
The pace of innovation over the last several years has been astounding. Vendors in the intranet market moved quickly to embrace generative AI several years ago as it hit mainstream and are continuing to accelerate their AI innovation with the introduction of AI agents and agent management tools. Here are some of the key findings from this Forrester Wave:
AI is a must-have capability, yet customer adoption remains low. We asked about AI in a few areas, including AI-enabled search, breadth of AI assistants and agents for content generation, transformation, governance, and process automation, along with AI admin options. Despite the significant investment in these areas by vendors since our 2024 Wave, only about half of the reference customers we spoke to were using their vendor’s AI to the extent that they could speak to it in a meaningful way. Of the customers we interviewed, 17 of 35 were using their vendor-provided AI.
Dashboards and analytics continue to improve, with natural language assistants to query data. Content and communication creators along with intranet admins crave data to continually refine and improve how they deliver information to employees. Vendors have come a long way in recent years in their out-of-the-box reports and dashboards, but this continues to be an area that customers want to see improvement. AI opens a new opportunity to glean insights and improved performance in 2026. Several vendors are now bringing AI-based natural language queries into their reporting, allowing admins to ask questions of the data rather than having to run reports or interpret out-of-the-box charts and graphs. More proactive recommendations for improvement are also becoming common, with AI assistants using data to suggest better ways of scheduling, publishing, and formatting content for delivery.
Frontline (deskless) employee reach continues to be a battleground for vendors. Traditionally, frontline employees — those in the field, in a store, or on the manufacturing floor — were very underserved by traditional intranets. This has changed significantly in recent years with the rise of pure-play employee communication providers focusing on mobile-first deskless workers. Intranet platforms have also embraced this new potential audience as they continue to enhance their overall employee communication capabilities, but just having a cool mobile app doesn’t cut it for serving frontline segments. Frontline workers have specific needs that require capabilities that most desk workers don’t have. These include: integration with shift management tools, especially for hourly workers; apps appropriate for personal devices; do-not-disturb options to pause work communications while not at the workplace; and task management, collaboration, and chat tools to get work done without having licensing for traditional office productivity suites.
A big thank you to all of the vendors who participated, along with the reference customers who graciously shared their time with us during this evaluation.
As always, I’d love to talk more about your intranet, employee communications, and digital workplace needs. For Forrester clients, please feel free to set up a guidance session or inquiry call with me by contacting us here.
