This isn't a university, but a tech company I used to work for (~100 engineers) used to do this.

Often the talks would be about the project we happened to be doing. It was a good way for everyone to keep in touch with the various things going on within the organisation.

Often too, the talks might be a more in-depth technical dive into a subject. This would be a fairly quick sketch of the state of the art in some area, some of the history of how we got here and why it's important, and the immediate challenges to push forwards with the field.

And occasionally it was completely unrelated. Sometimes we would have someone doing a quick talk through a hobby such as photography which had no relevance to work but still might be generally of interest.

The key thing to recognize here is that the technical details may not be important. Most people are ***really bad*** at communicating, especially in front of a large audience who may not all have the same technical chops or background.  Academics get a job because of their technical ability, but that job also usually involves a teaching role to undergraduates, and most lecturers (I speak here from personal experience on my uni course!) are tragically awful at this part of their job. Some also may prepare a script to read from, but fall apart when asked more free-form questions.

Presenting material to an audience is a skill you can learn though - witness the various organisations such as Toastmasters. If your department's leadership can see the value in this, then it's a great way to upskill your people. Like Toastmasters, it needs some way for the audience to feed back how the presenter can improve though. The learning process has to be two-way: the audience learn about a subject; and the presenter learns how to do better presentations.