Organizations that have implemented Copilot's are already seeing benefits.

According to the latest Work Trend Index, 70% of Microsoft Copilot users said they were more productive after just three months, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. And the most productive Copilot users saved over 10 hours a month.

However, such productivity gains are only possible when companies take a deliberate and programmatic approach to implementation. “Becoming an AI-powered organization is not a flip of a switch. Artificial intelligence is unlike any other technology we've seen before, which means it requires a unique strategy to implement and drive adoption. Organizations that take a thoughtful and purposeful approach will be the ones that reap the benefits of AI

Copilot AI – along with key lessons from leading companies.

1. Organize your data.

What have we learned?

The magic of Copilot lies in its ability to analyze all the data and content in an organization - allowing it to deliver personalized, relevant and actionable answers. It automatically inherits existing Microsoft 365 data and security permissions, making it essential to have solid content management and data management practices in place before you begin implementation.

Futurist Amy Webb advises leaders to ask their teams, “When was the last time you conducted a data audit?” If you want a future where you can get the full value of AI, you need to strengthen your internal infrastructure. Are all confidential files marked appropriately? It's a good idea to make sure your data is marked appropriately so that only those who should have access to it have access to it.

How are early adopters doing?

In the highly regulated financial services industry, security is a top priority. “We wanted to find an AI solution that would provide us with great time-saving benefits without making us feel like we were exposing ourselves to unnecessary risk,” says Vicki Holman, owner of the collaboration platform at Hargreaves Lansdown, a British financial services company. With Copilot for Microsoft 365, "we found a highly secure alternative to the AI solutions that employees were using outside of our highly protected environment."

Because Copilot automatically inherits an organization's security, compliance and privacy policies for Microsoft 365, Holman and her colleagues felt confident that the new AI system would protect their data. “We were comfortable using Copilot because we already had Microsoft 365 E5 licenses and were mature in terms of security and compliance that we had already implemented.”

2. Approach implementation consciously.

What have we learned?

To maximize the return on your AI investment, you need to ensure that the first people who gain access are the ones who get the most value. With Copilot, we've found that a three-pronged approach works best:

Transferring technology to entire teams within a specific business function, such as customer service or sales. In this way, they can share insights and learn from each other - multiplying the impact of technology.

Allocate the remaining slots to different roles and levels, from senior leaders to IT administrators to project managers. We recommend that the majority of places go to non-executive staff.

Define clear goals for how each team will use the new technology, such as “reducing ticket volume” in customer service. This will help focus employees on the most pressing business needs.

What are early adopters succeeding at?

International technology company Lumen Technologies has made Copilot available to its customer service and sales teams for the first time. Customer service teams use AI to summarize tickets, while sales teams use it to enrich customer interactions with additional depth and context. “Our employees see immediate improvements in productivity with Copilot,” says CEO Kate Johnson, which ultimately helps them better serve their customers and makes it easier to do business with them.

3. Appointment of leaders

What have we learned?

AI advocates show exactly how Copilot can help you in your everyday work and encourage friends and colleagues to try it out. Identify power users on your team who will be representatives and empower them to lead internally.

Another way to start: Have your employees make short social media-style videos of their favorite ways to use AI in their work, and share them with your employees in regular emails or Teams messages.

What are early adopters succeeding at?

Our first Copilot leaders at Microsoft are discovering agile ways to share their skills – and passion – across teams, quickly scaling AI habits and helping everyone learn. They have hosted virtual demo workshops, Ask Me Anything sessions, and Copilot Teams channels where they share their favorite prompts. One of the most impactful initiatives to date Function-specific training sessions where each champion delivered interactive training focused on everyday work, for example in marketing. “Grassroots champions have been key to Copilot adoption,” says Daniel Vargas, senior director of product marketing – and unofficial Copilot ambassador – at Microsoft. “When people incorporate AI into their everyday work and share the things they've done with it, it helps others see the potential and inspires them to explore the technology themselves.”

4. Prioritization of skills.

What have we learned?

Without ongoing training, AI will have little impact on your bottom line. That's why it's so important to create and maintain virtual spaces where people can share tips, ask questions and find resources. Organizations should encourage people to share the most powerful AI prompts with their teams, says AJ Brush, human-computer interaction researcher and Partner Group Manager at Microsoft.

What are early adopters succeeding at?

To get the most out of Copilot, Morula Health, a small company that provides regulatory medical writing services to the healthcare industry, has created its own library of prompts. Sharing great tips helps your team save time as they use Copilot to track action items, write first drafts of blogs, and edit documents. This process, says Philip Burridge, chief operating officer and strategy officer at Morula, "ensures consistently high quality production, allowing us to seamlessly integrate technology without compromising consistency."

5. We help people build new habits at work

What have we learned?

To build an AI-powered organization, leaders must help their teams adopt new mindsets and habits. Before starting any project, document, email or presentation, first ask yourself: How can AI help me with this task?

Working effectively with AI requires the ability to delegate tasks, exercise good judgment and apply expertise - in other words, you need to think like a manager. You will also need to relearn how to search. In our global survey of 18,100 people, respondents said they spent more time searching for information (27%) than creating it (24%), communicating (24%) or consuming it (25%). Artificial intelligence alleviates this pain by scanning the entire universe of data – emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, as well as the web – to find what you're looking for.

How are early adopters doing?

In the Crop Science division of Bayer, a global enterprise focused on healthcare and agriculture, researchers and data scientists can use a few key phrases in Copilot in Teams to quickly locate research and predictive models elsewhere in the company. Using a customized Teams plug-in, Copilot not only calls the appropriate models, but also identifies who is responsible for the research - making it easier to connect with an expert source on a specific topic.

In one case, a researcher in the United States was working on a project that would require a significant amount of time to complete. By using Copilot to examine other models being created at the company, the researcher identified a predictive model developed by a researcher in Germany, preventing the development of a duplicate model. This saved two to three months of work and accelerated the time it took to deliver the solution to farmers.

At the global advertising agency dentsu, Copilot completely changed the workflow. “Previously, we would sit in a session with a client, come up with ideas together, take that information away, and a few days or weeks later we would come back with creative visualizations of those ideas,” says James Thomas, Global Head of Technology at Dentsu Creative. “With Copilot, we already have visualizations and initial ideas of what initial designs might look like, which means we can get to the right idea faster.”