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Applying AI at scale
How Microsoft adopted Copilot for Microsoft 365
Authored by Cynthia Johnson, Product Marketing, Microsoft
Contents
Executive summary ................................................................................................................... 3
Copilot for Microsoft 365: Applying AI at scale ............................................................ 4
Get ready: Planning and governance ................................................................................ 5
Prepare the tenant for the deployment ................................................................. 5
Microsoft works council collaboration ................................................................... 6
Prioritizing key departments and employees for maximum return ............ 7
Getting Copilot into the hands of more Microsoft employees ................... 8
Extending Copilot with plug-ins and connectors to amplify returns.......... 8
Onboard and engage: Enabling employees ................................................................... 9
Generating excitement about Copilot .................................................................... 9
Building a Copilot community with Viva Engage ............................................ 11
Getting down to business ......................................................................................... 11
Developing departmental use cases to grow Copilot usage ...................... 13
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 14

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Executive summary
Microsoft has deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more than 330,000 employees and
contractors. Early feedback obtained by Microsoft Research suggests that Microsoft
employees are rapidly integrating Copilot into their tasks and seeing immediate benefits.
Seventy-four percent of internal survey respondents report feeling more productive, with
an estimated time savings of 20 minutes per day.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 has the power to transform the way businesses operate, but it
requires employees to change their habits and adopt new ways of working. Before
Copilot, most employees did not have a personal assistant always ready to help perform
research or writing tasks. Now they must learn to delegate these tasks to Copilot. To get
everyone started, Microsoft initially focused its change management efforts on helping
them learn how to communicate effectively with Copilot using prompts, which are
instructions or questions used to tell Copilot what they want.
For the rollout, Microsoft engaged the Microsoft Digital global change management team
and departmental-level adoption teams who had assisted with other AI-related change
management programs in the year prior to the Copilot rollout. While Microsoft Digital
provided foundational training on using Copilot, the departmental teams provide
specialized coaching by role and region. By closely monitoring usage at the team level on
Viva Insights dashboards, the departmental adoption teams can provide outreach to build
motivation and deliver additional training.
This two-pronged approach also includes helping departments extend and customize
Copilot for their needs through connectors and plug-ins. Individual teams identify
opportunities for integration and product enhancements to improve key processes and
work with the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence to implement solutions and ensure
proper governance is in place. With a firm belief in the value of AI for its business,
Microsoft has set a goal of including AI assistance into 25% of employee applications by
the end of 2024, with the anticipation of leveraging AI across all core business workflows
over time. With this approach, Microsoft is gaining value at three levels:
• Individual value – Using basic Copilot prompting skills, like summarizing
meetings and emails or creating a first draft, helps employees manage their time
and tasks at work more efficiently, so they can accomplish more in a day and
improve their work-life balance.
• Departmental value - Integrating Copilot into common business practices like
responding to an RFP or reducing support ticket times helps individual
departments improve their success metrics, such as specific OKRs tied to
opportunities created, customer satisfaction scores, or other role-specific metrics.
• Organizational value - Infusing Copilot capabilities into applications and
processes used across departments, such as employee onboarding or closing sales
opportunities, creates value across the company.

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 Image 1: Growing Copilot value through adoption and extensibility

Copilot for Microsoft 365: Applying AI at scale

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has the power to help transform
the business landscape in much the same way that Microsoft
Office did when it was released more than thirty years ago. “We’ve moved from
“I’m inspired by the transformative power of AI,” says
Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft
talking about AI to
Digital, Microsoft’s IT organization. “I’ve been impressed with applying AI at scale.“
how quickly our employees have put it to work for them.”
Microsoft has now deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 to —Satya Nadella, Microsoft
more than 330,000 Microsoft employees and contractors. Chairman and CEO link
With its flexible orchestration engine that can interpret
language, find relevant data, and interact with large
language models and other solutions, Copilot for Microsoft
365 provides a way to bring AI into the daily activities of all
employees through solutions they use most. Internal surveys conducted by
Microsoft Research found that employees are rapidly integrating Copilot into
their daily tasks and seeing immediate benefits: for example, seventy-four
percent of internal survey respondents report feeling more productive with an
estimated time savings of 20 minutes per day.

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 To deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft
relied on the same deployment and adoption
playbook and programs that it used when
introducing Microsoft 365, Viva, and other
modern work solutions. Microsoft Digital, the
internal IT organization at Microsoft, took its
usual lead in governance, technical readiness,
extensibility, and managing access and
security. But for Copilot, Microsoft took a
unique approach to enabling employees. While
Microsoft Digital performed corporate-level tasks such as delivering support, preparing
Viva Learning courses, holding global, localized instructor-led courses that introduced
Copilot for Microsoft 365 and application specific agendas, and moderating Viva Engage
sites, the Global Engagement team focused more than ever on supporting departmental
adoption teams. It partnered with them to define each organization's change
management strategy and unique change management
plan. This approach ensured that Microsoft employees
received training and support from people who
understood their roles, cultural and language nuances, Best practice – Copilot Success Kit
and how Copilot for Microsoft 365 could deliver value.
Much of the guidance and best practices
In this article, we’ll share how we deployed Copilot for highlighted in this article have been pulled
Microsoft 365, how we’re continuing to promote learning together into the Copilot Success Kit.
and adoption to drive business transformation, and how This set of downloadable materials
various departments inside Microsoft are measuring included technical readiness guidance and
value for their employees who’ve adopted Copilot. And user enablement materials to help make
we’ll also provide recommendations and resources to your Copilot deployment a success.
help you consider how to drive deployment and adoption
of copilot for Microsoft 365 inside your own organization.

Get ready: Planning and governance

Adopting new technology is never easy, which is why executive support is so important to
provide the resources and encouragement employees need to overcome the inevitable
challenges that arise. At Microsoft, the impetus to quickly deploy and adopt Copilot for
Microsoft 365 came directly from CEO Satya Nadella. “Today marks the next major step in
the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the
way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said Satya Nadella,
Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more
agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface —
natural language.”

Prepare the tenant for the deployment

Copilot helps users find and interact with content from across the organization. Because
Copilot makes data access so easy, proper data hygiene is critical to keep your sensitive

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data protected. Microsoft uses sensitivity labeling to provide employees with access to the
data they need, while limiting access to confidential information.
Microsoft encourages employees to create new SharePoint sites for each project instead
of reusing existing spaces with mismatching permissions. Microsoft Purview automatically
labels all new sites as “Confidential\Internal Only.” File labels are inherited from the site
label, but to verify the content-level permissions Microsoft also uses Purview to provide
auto-labeling to detect and control sensitive content. Site owners must attest each site
every six months to keep the content from expiring.
Microsoft uses Purview to limit oversharing by defaulting to company-shareable links
instead of forcing employees to grant access to large groups. Microsoft also specifies that
employees can only share highly confidential items with specific people. Microsoft then
uses Microsoft Graph Data Connect extraction in conjunction with Microsoft Purview to
catch and report oversharing.

Image 2: Best practices for tenant hygiene and data governance

Microsoft works council collaboration

Because Copilot for Microsoft 365 has a large impact on employees, Microsoft Digital
collaborated with the 12 country-specific works councils that Microsoft established to help
boost internal product rollouts. These councils represent Microsoft employees’ interests
and help to examine the regulatory and ethical boundaries for Copilot usage across the
company. They also evaluate how AI can increase productivity and job satisfaction among
their members. And from an inclusion and diversity standpoint, they provide critical insights
that help us respect cultural nuances and ensure language accessibility.

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Prioritizing key departments and employees for
maximum return
MS Digital worked with Marketing and Product Engineering teams to prioritize the Copilot
rollout to targeted audiences with a clear view towards business impact. They considered
priorities such as:
• Measuring impact on business KPIs and employee productivity
• Function-specific learning strategies
• How product development teams would get feedback from employees
• What use cases to test across departments and roles
• How to educate executive and communications teams on Copilot value
• How to train internal experts to provide support
With those priorities in mind, licenses were initially assigned to groups that were
predicted to make the most of the Copilot capabilities available at the time. These
included features like meeting and email summaries and aligned well with many Sales
roles. Microsoft also prioritized teams that were rapid adopters of other recent technology
such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva to maximize the opportunities for feedback,
as well as employees in the early adopter program. To supplement the early adopters,
individual department leads were also asked to nominate 200-300 people from their
departments to receive Copilot early. Many of these people were in roles working on
Copilot. They were instrumental in testing role-based use cases and often joined the pool
of departmental champions who helped lead the broader rollout.

Image 3: Assign seats with a focus on value

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Microsoft decided that the internal support team at Microsoft
Digital should be one of the first entire teams to test Copilot Best practice – Three tips for
since they would need to answer questions coming from
accelerating works council
employees during the broader rollout. A clear business case
reviews of Copilot for
existed for support team members using Copilot for Microsoft
365 to help them resolve issues faster. Using the semantic Microsoft 365
search capabilities in Copilot, support teams can find
information faster and respond to cases with clear, 1. Give your works council
comprehensive replies generated by Copilot. Microsoft also members early access to the
added a plug-in to ServiceNow, the solution Microsoft Digital product. This gives them time
uses for support ticket management. The support team used to understand how it works,
the following metrics to measure the value gained from using and they can give their seal of
Copilot: approval much quicker if they
• Reducing onboarding time for new support team members. can test it out themselves.
2. Have a regular cadence with
• Streamlining access to knowledge.
specialists who can answer
• Eliminating repetitive administrative tasks. technical questions they might
• Reducing ticket volume. have, working with your
Microsoft Account Team and
Getting Copilot into the hands of more your own IT folks. These regular
check-ins can help you resolve
Microsoft employees
questions and misconceptions
For the broader Copilot rollout, Microsoft started with early.
customer-facing roles. The remaining Sales and Customer 3. Raise understanding of Copilot
Support roles were the next set of employees to receive value for employees by
Copilot. Again, Microsoft saw a clear business case that
defining a learning path using
improving Sales and Customer Support efforts would have a
available learning materials
direct impact on revenue and customer experience. The
from Microsoft Viva Learning or
deployment team believed people in these roles could use
Copilot to create better content, summarize and organize LinkedIn Learning on what
customer information, and find product information quickly. generative AI is and how
That way, they could focus on customers and close more deals employees can begin to
or resolve more support cases. The rollout to the remainder of interact with it as part of their
the organization quickly followed. daily work to help them save
time and focus on more
Extending Copilot with plug-ins and important tasks that align with
connectors to amplify returns team and business goals.

The AI Center of Excellence (CoE) is a dedicated team within

Microsoft Digital tasked with infusing AI into internal technology solutions at
Microsoft. Prioritizing opportunities to maximize value has resulted in a few
big bets including Copilot for Microsoft 365 extensibility. The team has
deployed three Graph connectors internally so far, for ServiceNow, Workday,
and SAP, and will continue to extend Copilot into key solutions. Extending
Copilot and other AI technologies into line-of-business tools and other places

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where employees interact with technology amplifies the value Copilot brings
to Microsoft.
Microsoft is also using Microsoft Copilot Studio plug-ins to bring AI into
various processes like AskHR and Microsoft Support. Copilot Studio is a
low-code conversational AI platform that enables people to extend and
customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 with plug-ins, as well as build their own
copilots. The AskHR virtual agent is deployed on Teams and has 35,000
installs within Microsoft. It is currently resolving 27 percent of HR support
inquiries without involving a support employee.

Onboard and engage: Enabling employees

Within Microsoft, the Microsoft Digital Global Change Management Team
leads employee enablement efforts. Using their standard adoption framework
for internal deployments, the team quickly began implementing the plan to
help drive Copilot adoption across communications, readiness, champions,
and communities.

Image 4: Copilot adoption team model showing departmental approach

Generating excitement about Copilot

To help generate excitement about Copilot, the Microsoft Digital End User
Engagement Experiences team sent an initial welcome email to employees
with information and resources, including a link to the MS Digital Copilot for
Microsoft Onboarding site hosted on SharePoint Online. The site contains a

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variety of learning options to engage people with different learning styles and
at different points in their adoption journey. Learning options included self-
guided online courses in Viva Learning, short demos and videos, a prompting
toolkit, and a comprehensive FAQ. Throughout the adoption cycle, this
content was updated based on internal feedback and as new resources
became available.

Image 5: Provide a variety of readiness and adoption resources

A key next step was offering instructor-led training

courses held multiple times a day and in multiple
Best Practice – Take advantage of the
languages to provide a guided introduction to the
Copilot UI and basic prompting skills. About 30,000 Copilot onboarding toolkit and
Microsoft employees attended these courses. Now that Copilot Lab
the rollout is complete, the team has introduced a To help customers with their own Copilot
more advanced set of courses, with one for each rollouts, Microsoft collected the emails it was
Copilot application. These courses are also available using internally and turned them into
on-demand through Viva Learning. customizable email templates. Check them
In addition to the learning content, Microsoft Digital out at Copilot Onboarding Toolkit. The
ran a series of internal communications and marketing Toolkit provides a series of email templates
campaigns that began before the rollout and that can be sent over several weeks to
continued for the next couple of months. The launch provide the reminders often required to help
campaign included materials such as Viva Engage employees form new habits. Viva Amplify
posts from executives, Viva Connections articles, and also has ready-made email templates for
banners on key internal SharePoint sites. These Comms managers.
campaigns generated a groundswell of excitement and After employees had tested and provided
energy—driving awareness and encouraging adoption feedback on Copilot Lab, we made it
of Copilot by highlighting benefits, use cases, and available to Copilot for Microsoft 365
prompt guidance. customers.

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The Digital Comms team also created a gamification program called the
Digital Copilot Passport Campaign to drive excitement and spur employee
adoption with a fun and slightly competitive aspect. Employees can get
stamps on their passports by completing activities using Copilot. They are
encouraged to show off their passports on Viva Engage along with their
favorite prompts.
Microsoft found that teaching employees how to communicate with Copilot
through prompts was a key training requirement. The team hosted instructor-
led and on-demand courses specific to prompting. The courses focused on
learning how to communicate with Copilot to get the best results, and
employees left the training with specific prompts that would provide
immediate value in their daily work. Beyond the extensive learning content
Microsoft provided for employees on the corporate Copilot adoption site, the
Product team also developed Copilot Lab, a web site that helps employees
find prompts they can use for key activities and learn how to create their own
prompts. Microsoft has now updated Copilot Lab with
role-based prompts to enhance its value.

Building a Copilot community with Viva Engage

During the early adopter
phase, employees receiving
Copilot for Microsoft 365
were automatically enrolled
as members of the Viva
Engage site for internal
Copilot users. After Copilot
was rolled out to 50 percent
of employees, membership
became voluntary. This active
community is a resource for
everyone to share experiences and ask questions and is the first place most
Microsoft employees go to see what’s new. Microsoft Digital uses the site to
communicate product updates and share new learning resources, so
employees can continue to learn new skills.
Internal experts, whether from the Champions community, product
engineering, or marketing teams, actively moderate the site. Active
moderation helps ensure that questions get answered quickly and
accurately. The site now has more than 70,000 members, with about 46,000
monthly active users.

Getting down to business

One unique aspect of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment is that, while
there were significant centralized efforts for support and content creation led
by the IT Global Change Management team, much of the change
management work is being led at the departmental and regional level.

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Copilot is excellent for helping employees with unique
tasks that require creativity and are often specific to a
role. Since use cases across different departments Best Practice – create a
require specific knowledge, Microsoft Digital believes Champions program for Copilot
adoption efforts for each role should be led by teams
Who are Champions?
that are as close to that role as possible.
Champions evangelize and help train
To support these efforts, the Global Change
their teams on the new ways of working.
Management team created the Copilot Champions
They build awareness, understanding,
Team, which is open to all Microsoft employees.
and engagement throughout the
Champions receive additional training and support to
community. Champions help to:
help them become experts on the product. They help
expand the reach of the Change Management team and • Create the groundswell of
bring diversity across roles and regions. More enthusiasm that grows adoption.
importantly, Champions deliver Copilot training in local • Build a circle of influence among
languages to correctly demonstrate the nuance required their teams.
in prompts.
• Bring the new ways of working to life
Each functional department also created their own across teams.
Copilot change management teams to lead employee
enablement efforts within their own organizations. • Identify business challenges and
Guided by an advisor from the Microsoft Digital Change possible solutions.
Management team, each team created specialized • Provide feedback to the project team
content, held training sessions, and gathered and sponsors.
requirements for development efforts to extend Copilot
• Reduce strain on core project team
into their department’s LOB applications, which the AI
through active, ongoing
CoE helps to implement. The teams also meet regularly
engagement.
to exchange best practices as each has proven to have
unique skills and perspectives.
Microsoft created additional Viva Engage communities
for groups like the Copilot Champions and individual departments. Role-
specific communities provide the opportunity to share information relevant to
that team. For example, the Champions site allows the Change Management
Team to give Champions the resources, tips and tricks, and materials they
need to excite and onboard their teams. It also lets the individual Champions
share best practices amongst themselves.

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Developing departmental use cases to grow Copilot
usage
Across Microsoft, teams are now documenting their own use cases to share
as best practices. The Finance organization has been laser-focused on
increasing the productivity of its team members for the past ten years.
Copilot is accelerating this trend. While Microsoft revenues have increased
more than 200% in the past 10 years, employee numbers have experienced
minimal growth, and the
amount of outsourced work
has decreased significantly.
When it came time to
deploy Copilot, the Finance
team first identified key
roles and asked the people
in those roles to document
their processes and how
Copilot could help. It now
has a library of role-based
scenarios that are on the
Finance Copilot adoption SharePoint site. The organization is seeing the
most benefits in collaboration and finding data such as responding to RFPs,
finding data for tax forms, evaluating risk and control results, and
communicating policy.
Microsoft Marketing used Copilot to help create Copilot for Microsoft 365
marketing materials. With that experience, it’s no surprise the Marketing
team brought new ideas to light when it came time to train their colleagues
on how to use Copilot. In its department-wide training sessions, Marketing
brought in engineering resources and developed a set of activities that
helped everyone quickly get to that “a-ha” moment where they could see
the value Copilot can deliver based on a well-constructed prompt. Based on
internal research showing that employees who save 10-15 minutes a day on
their usual tasks tend to become long-term adopters, Marketing found it
was a best practice to teach employees one or two skills that can help them
immediately experience those time-saving benefits from Copilot and begin
to drive more usage.
The HR team is developing new processes that integrate Copilot into hiring
and onboarding. They are also looking at how to extend Copilot to support
employee access to HR programs. Microsoft has more than 100 benefit
programs, and employee participation in these programs is a key metric for
the organization. By extending Copilot for natural language interaction with
HR web sites, the HR team hopes to deliver more benefits across the
company. The HR team also helps to evaluate use cases against responsible
AI principles.

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 Because Sales is the largest
and most regionally diverse
organization within Microsoft,
the Sales adoption team had
an immense challenge made
even more complex by the fact
that it was deploying Copilot
for Microsoft 365, Copilot for
Sales, and Copilot for
Dynamics 365 at the same
time. These complementary
products help to thoroughly infuse AI into the sales processes at Microsoft.
To help deliver a consistent message to close to 60,000 sellers, the team
created an Adoption in a Box, which is comprised of a collection of modules
to enable each regional team to build a customized adoption strategy. The
content was localized by regional teams and then executed by local Copilot
Adoption leads. The ultimate goal of the Sales organization is to drive
towards 100 percent usage by sellers to maximize the opportunities that can
be pursued and closed by each seller.

Conclusion
The work to enable an AI workplace at Microsoft is just beginning.
Extending Copilot capabilities into all solutions will take time and building
habits that use AI effectively requires ample reinforcement. The enablement
teams in Microsoft Digital and across each Microsoft department continue
to innovate and share best practices that will help Microsoft generate value
from its Copilot deployment.

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©2024 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This whitepaper is provided "as-is.” Information and views expressed in the
document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change without notice, You bear the risk of using it.
Some examples are for illustration only and are fictitious, No real association is intended or inferred,
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy
and use this document for your internal purposes

©2024 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This whitepaper is provided "as-is.” Information and views expressed in the
document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change without notice, You bear the risk of using it.
Some examples are for illustration only and are fictitious, No real association is intended or inferred,
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy
and use this document for your internal purposes

Applying AI at Scale Page 15