The 2026 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards are now open for entries, with a closing date of 21 April 2026.  We’re always fascinated (and excited) to see the submissions we’re going to receive. We see new ideas, flashes of brilliant execution, projects which took great patience, classic deployments, beautiful designs, highly innovative approaches and more. And we’re hoping that as this is our 20th year, we’re going to get some extra special submissions this time around.

While we wait for the entries to come in, each year we ask our judges about the type of entries they’d love to see in the Awards.

Here are some of the things they said:

• Intranets where inclusion is designed from the outset to reduce bias, friction and cognitive load across diverse workforces
• Strong intranet governance and active management, potentially delivering value and engagement for years
• Intranets that are tightly aligned to organisational strategy that positions it as a core operating platform
• AI governance operationalised in intranets in a way that’s comprehensive but also scalable
• AI embedded into everyday workflows with clear human oversight
• Enterprise social at scale which are very much alive and supporting engagement, knowledge-sharing and more
• Advanced ways to personalise and target digital workplace content, for example using AI to automatically tailor what is of interest
• Organisations using data analytics in ways that transform processes and engagement
• AI applications that save time and reduce mistakes
• Comprehensive employee wellbeing approaches facilitated by DEX, not just data-gathering on sentiment
• Digital workplaces that are truly frontline-first, showing an understanding of the tasks frontline workers really have to do
• A modern take on delivering multi-lingual content that incorporates machine translation
• Digital workplace transformation guided by employees rather than by organizations
• No code apps or AI services which enable employees to create their own solutions
• Enterprise search in the age of AI
• Integration of Power Apps and Copilot agents in the digital workplace (across vertical applications)
• Out-of-the-box SharePoint intranets that really do stand out and have great adoption
• Innovative and imaginative approaches to launch and ongoing adoption

Perhaps you have implemented an initiative which matches one of the above, or something completely different. Whatever you’ve done, we’re looking forward to receiving your entry!

(Don’t forget that the closing date for submissions is 21 April 2026 and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like some advice on what to enter.)