The latest on AI at work: December 2024

Every organization is looking to maximize their AI ROI, and we want to help. Each month, we’ll share how customers are using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to transform work and business processes, along with highlights of the latest Copilot innovations. Let’s dig in.

Learning from our customers

Dow and Bank of Queensland Group are two forward-thinking companies already seeing results with Copilot. Dow anticipates that Copilot will save millions of dollars on shipping operations in the first year. At Bank of Queensland, 70% of Copilot users are saving two and a half to five hours per week, and 25% are saving more than five hours per week.

Last month at the Microsoft Ignite conference, I spoke with Robert Wilson, Group Chief Technology Officer for Bank of Queensland, and Mike Weideman, Head of Global IT and Digital Innovation for Dow. Here are three key insights from that conversation:

• Start with a clear strategy. Ask yourself: what are one or two processes that—if you could make them faster, cheaper, or better—would be transformational to the business? Dow spends several billion dollars annually on outbound shipping alone, so inaccurate charges can add up to significant potential overpayments. The company is using Copilot and agents to automate the shipping invoice analysis process and streamline its global supply chain. Get the full story on WorkLab.
• Focus on practical applications. Bank of Queensland’s risk analysis team used Copilot to transform weeks-long analyses into a streamlined, one-day process and back tested the work to ensure confidence in Copilot’s outcomes. Other teams are replacing employee onboarding meetings and presentations with a series of Copilot prompts and templates that help new hires get up to speed faster.
• Measure your progress. Establish clear key performance indicators (KPIs) to align with your business objectives. Dow began by integrating Copilot and agents into a specific segment of its supply chain, meticulously measuring the outcomes to understand the true value that the technology could provide. Using this data as insight, the company is now exploring the next strategic area where AI can deliver significant value.

News highlights

At Ignite, we accelerated our ambition to empower every employee with Copilot as a personal assistant and to transform every business process with agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

• Copilot Actions automate everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts that you can set and forget. For example, you can automatically receive a summary of your most important action items at the end of each workday, create an action to gather inputs from your team for a weekly newsletter you send each Thursday, or automate customer meeting prep with a recurring action that summarizes your last few interactions ahead of your next sync.
• Agents in Microsoft 365 are designed to help scale individual impact and transform business processes. Our newest agents unlock SharePoint knowledge, provide real-time language interpretation in Microsoft Teams meetings, and automate employee self-service. Others take real-time notes in Teams meetings and chats, and automate project management in Microsoft Planner. And we’re just getting started. We’ll create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization.

• Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps, where millions of people work every day, continues to rapidly improve. Copilot in Teams can understand, recap, and answer questions based on visual content shared onscreen—from PowerPoint to the web—in addition to the transcript and chat. With a single prompt, Copilot in PowerPoint can translate entire presentations into one of 40 languages, while maintaining the overall design of each slide. And Copilot in Outlook can help you schedule focus time or one-on-ones with a colleague—looking across both your calendars to find the best time—and draft a meeting agenda.
• We’re adding new value to Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration—with rich artifacts. Now, you can prompt Copilot to create everything from interactive flow charts to blocks of code—drawing from data across Microsoft Graph—then share them in durable Pages your team can build upon.
• The Copilot Control System will equip IT teams to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents. It includes data protection to enable intelligent grounding on enterprise data while respecting your organization’s controls; management controls to govern access and usage of Copilot and agents; and the new Copilot Analytics to measure Copilot adoption and business impact.

See all the announcements from Ignite for more details and availability.

Prompt of the month

Copilot Prompt Gallery helps all AI users find inspiration and share their prompt success with others. Here’s one prompt you may find useful in December:

Write an end-of-the-year message to my team members congratulating them on a great year and all the work on [name a specific project here]. Use a warm and appreciative tone with some light humor. Consider incorporating bullet points to highlight specific achievements or milestones. 

Try it in Outlook: Create a new email, select “Draft with Copilot” and paste the prompt.  

Go deeper

In his latest edition of the “AI at Work” newsletter, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer for AI at Work, explains what agents are, how they relate to Copilot, and how they’ll change the way we work. “I expect a future in which organizations have entire constellations of agents—all working behind the scenes to sharpen existing processes and help invent new ones,” Jared writes.

• Start using Copilot today, and you can download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device.
• Visit Visit WorkLab for the latest research and more essential insights.