This makes accurate content essential. If our content is stale, even the best agent or search engines will return wrong answers, which is frustrating to everyone.

“Knowledge management today is about making sure people can find the right answers the moment they need them. When knowledge stays current, employees get unblocked faster and productivity improves, making the overall support experience far more efficient.”

Silvina Olkies, senior director, Service Management, Microsoft Digital

That means the knowledge bases that get tapped for answers need be accurate, and for that to happen, they need to be updated frequently and without delay.

Internally here at Microsoft, that’s where our team got involved.

We’re Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and our team saw an opportunity to use AI to dynamically and proactively update our knowledge management systems.

Our first step was—in partnership with our Global Help Desk—to strengthen our self-serve help and reduce the number of steps users need to take to find the right answers. It’s a process that many of our own customers can apply to their knowledge management transformation.

“Knowledge management today is about making sure people can find the right answers the moment they need them,” says Silvina Olkies, a senior director of Service Management in Microsoft Digital. “When knowledge stays current, employees get unblocked faster and productivity improves, making the overall support experience far more efficient.”

The challenge: Fragmented knowledge, manual reviews

For our Global Help Desk, the challenge wasn’t just the volume of content, but also its condition. Support knowledge is spread across thousands of self-service articles, agent-facing systems, and SharePoint sites, all constantly evolving.

“If the knowledge isn’t accurate and current, the experience breaks down immediately. Bad content leads to bad answers.”

Kevin Verdeck, senior IT service manager, Microsoft Digital

In today’s fast-changing AI-powered world, it doesn’t take long for knowledge to become incomplete, out of date, or redundant. This shows up in the inaccurate answers employees might receive.

In an environment increasingly powered by search and AI, weak knowledge equals weak results.

“If the knowledge isn’t accurate and current, the experience breaks down immediately,” says Kevin Verdeck, a senior IT service manager in Microsoft Digital. “Bad content leads to bad answers.”

At our Global Help Desk, keeping that content current required a manual review process.

Our teams analyzed usage data, depended on support agents to report missing or outdated content, and worked through recurring review cycles that relied on subject-matter experts to help confirm whether articles were still accurate. This took significant time and coordination, and even then, some issues were identified only after employees had already hit a dead end.

The result was a system that was reactive and hard to scale.

When employees couldn’t find answers, issues were pushed to advanced support. Poor knowledge quality created poor outcomes, while those responsible for fixing it were struggling with maintaining it.

“One five-member team was reviewing 1,900 self-service KB articles and 1,700 agent-facing KB articles every six months, and that didn’t even include the many SharePoint sites,” Verdeck says. “It was basically their full-time job doing regular reviews.”

Turning raw data into knowledge

Our team in Microsoft Digital set out to build AI for Knowledge Management, a centralized system that could scale across multiple repositories, cut the manual work of keeping content current, reduce reliance on busy content owners, and prepare knowledge for people and AI to use.

“When you have a large volume of data, it’s a silent gold mine. The sheer brilliance lies in taking that data, making it sing, and letting it tell you exactly where the treasure is.”

Ankit Guddewala, software engineer II, Microsoft Digital

An AI pipeline solution made sense because we wanted to fix the issue at scale.

The real opportunity was to turn every resolved support ticket into a signal that looked at what the employee was asking for (nature of the issue or request), whether the answer was already documented, and how the AI and human agents handled it. So, we began with our large amounts of support ticketing data and systems as the starting point.

“When you have a large volume of data, it’s a silent gold mine,” says Ankit Guddewala, a software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “The sheer brilliance lies in taking that data, making it sing, and letting it tell you exactly where the treasure is.” 

The stages to complete the work happen as follows:

1. Ingest the raw support data: The team pulls in large volumes of incident data from our ticketing systems.
2. Clean and structure noisy data: Tickets can include conversation notes, incomplete details, inconsistent writing styles, and abandoned issues. We use the AI enrichment layer to turn those details into structured fields, such as reported versus actual problems and remediation steps.
3. Find patterns across incidents: We cluster tickets to help identify recurring issues and avoid cluttering the knowledge base with one-off scenarios.
4. Compare patterns against existing knowledge: We use the system to search current articles and rank how closely the resolution aligns to current content to determine what steps to take next. For example:
   • Below 40 percent: Create knowledge
   • 40 to 80 percent: Update existing knowledge with missing details
   • Above 80 percent: No update needed
5. Notify the appropriate knowledge managers: Subject-matter experts are notified by email so they can validate the change(s) and add more detail if needed.

“Our goal is to free people from the manual work of maintaining content so they can focus on improving its quality. With the right human-in-the-loop balance, AI can do the heavy lifting while people make sure the final knowledge is accurate and useful.”

Namrata Ladda, product manager II, Microsoft Digital

The result is far less time spent reviewing thousands of articles during every review cycle. We keep humans in the loop to validate the output. Their feedback helps tune the AI model, so it improves over time.

“Our goal is to free people from the manual work of maintaining content so they can focus on improving its quality,” says Namrata Ladda, a product manager in Microsoft Digital. “With the right human-in-the-loop balance, AI can do the heavy lifting while people make sure the final knowledge is accurate and useful.”

Impacts and what’s next on the journey

Using our new AI for Knowledge Management platform, our Global Help Desk teams can identify knowledge gaps without waiting for someone to report them. They’re using AI to generate structured article drafts so humans can focus on quality, not search through data.

The Global Help Desk projects the solution will save them an estimated 16,000 hours annually; result in a 10 percent reduction in support tickets; and reduce the number of advanced support escalations. This leaves everyone on the team more time to directly help employees more quickly, when needed.

“Turning our knowledge base from a static thing into a living knowledge base is a big step forward,” Ladda says. 

Other Microsoft teams, including HR, have expressed interest in leveraging the content management platform. Once the product has completed internal testing, AI for Knowledge Management will be released to all company employees and customers.

“This solution moves knowledge management from manual maintenance to an intelligent capability that helps organizations scale and apply what they know more effectively,” Olkies says.

The post AI for Knowledge Management: Keeping support content up-to-date at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, this shift is grounded in years of investment in our neurodiverse employees. From launching our Microsoft Neurodiversity Hiring Program to building a company-wide focus on neuro-inclusive employee experiences, we bring our lived experience to how we design and build our products.

We set out to better understand where our products could do more for all our users and challenge established accessibility norms.

“When we create space for neurodivergent voices to shape our products, we don’t just improve accessibility, we build better technology for everyone. Accessibility is strongest when it is informed by lived experience, and initiatives like our product feedback sessions make sure those voices directly influence how our products evolve.”

Neil Barnett, chief accessibility officer, Microsoft Accessibility

Neurodiversity Celebration Week became the launch point for a new approach to product feedback and co-design at Microsoft. We used the event to create an ongoing program that brings the perspectives of neurodivergent employees directly into the product development process, especially individuals who experience challenges with executive functioning tasks such as focus, learning, memory, organization, and task completion.

For our first feedback round, 150 neurodivergent employees evaluated 10 products across multiple divisions using real-world scenarios. Rather than focusing only on traditional accessibility checks, they shared insights on how products support everyday thinking, learning, and productivity.

The feedback provided product teams with a deeper understanding of where experiences can be simplified or made more intuitive and easier to navigate. More importantly, it established a repeatable process for gathering perspectives from people across the cognitive spectrum, helping teams build products that work better for more people.

“When we create space for neurodivergent voices to shape our products, we don’t just improve accessibility, we build better technology for everyone,” says Neil Barnett, chief accessibility officer in Microsoft Accessibility. “Accessibility is strongest when it is informed by lived experience, and initiatives like our product feedback sessions make sure those voices directly influence how our products evolve.”

How neurodiversity can help a broader audience

Neurodiversity refers to the idea that neurological differences—including autism, ADHD, and dyslexia—are a natural part of human diversity. It recognizes that there’s no single “right” way for the brain to work.

“Neurodivergent employees bring an innovative way of thinking and have ideas that help make our products better.”

Tarena Shanaberger, senior PM, Microsoft Accessibility

Product groups at Microsoft value feedback from our neurodiverse employees. However, without a consistent way to get it, product groups had to reach out with ad hoc requests through the different inclusion networks at the company.

We saw an opportunity to create both lasting change and more efficiency in this process.

“Neurodivergent employees bring an innovative way of thinking and have ideas that help make our products better,” says Tarena Shanaberger, a senior PM on the Microsoft Accessibility team.

Designing with lived experience

Neurodivergent inclusion is most valuable when it’s built in early in the product lifecycle, preferably before assumptions take hold and shape the product in ways that are harder to change later.

“Lived experience is a genuine form of expertise. You can have telemetry, design reviews, usability metrics, and KPIs that mean things to people who review data, but there are aspects of cognitive load and human behavior that become much more visible when you involve people who experience systems differently.”

Karl Niblock, architect, Engineering and Architecture Group Security

Karl Niblock, an architect in our Engineering and Architecture Group Security team, believes that early intent can result in experiences that delight users by making products “shockingly” easy and a joy to use, even for something as routine as logging into a tool.

Designing systems that help reduce unnecessary cognitive friction means more people can do their best work consistently and with more confidence. Those are the types of human-centered insights that aren’t possible to derive from data alone.

“Lived experience is a genuine form of expertise,” Niblock says. “You can have telemetry, design reviews, usability metrics, and KPIs that mean things to people who review data, but there are aspects of cognitive load and human behavior that become much more visible when you involve people who experience systems differently.”

When people share their experiences, everyone can learn and benefit.

“One of the patterns I often see is dead-end workflows, where a user follows the process exactly as instructed but ends up stuck, with no obvious next step,” Niblock says. “For someone with dyslexia or autism, the challenge is often not the task itself but the repeated effort of decoding similar-looking instructions and trying to determine what went wrong. By designing clear recovery paths, plain-language guidance, and visible next actions, we can dramatically reduce cognitive friction. Those improvements help neurodivergent users, but they also make products easier and less stressful for everyone.”

Building a better path for product feedback

Software engineer Jordan Cowe surfaced an idea to host an annual neurodiversity bug bash to uncover where products pose challenges for neurodivergent users. He explains that neurodivergent employees are often some of the first people to identify points of friction before release and says that the bug bash helped shine attention on these issues and encourage product group action on the feedback.

“If something affects a neurodivergent employee, it likely also affects many people who don’t identify as neurodiverse. Fixing these issues improves the products for everyone, making them easier to use and better at keeping users engaged.”

Jordan Cowe, software engineer II, Copilot Engineering team

This bug bash led to a structured way to bring in testers, distribute feedback results to product groups, and infuse key learnings into our products. Our testers asynchronously went through the instructions, followed the scenarios, recorded their screens, talked through their pain points, and completed a product survey. We used the results to rate product usability, which helped us identify issues and ideas for improving our products.

“If something affects a neurodivergent employee, it likely also affects many people who don’t identify as neurodiverse,” Cowe says. “Fixing these issues improves the products for everyone, making them easier to use and better at keeping users engaged.”

What feedback looks like from the product side

Microsoft AI UX researcher Audrey Aday used feedback from the co-design sessions to explore what makes an AI response feel inclusive, useful, and manageable. Tester feedback showed that the issue wasn’t capability, it was control.

“Instead of treating accessibility as a check-the-box exercise, we’re building relationships with neurodivergent employees and embedding their feedback into the full product development lifecycle. We’re moving away from ‘test this for us once’ to ‘build this with us, continuously.’”

Audrey Aday, UX researcher II, Microsoft AI Design

Testers consistently said Copilot can feel overwhelming when it returns too much information at once. They want more control (not less capability) over how much detail they see. In response, product teams are exploring custom instruction menus, smarter defaults, and adaptive personalization that learns individual preferences without creating extra work.

Product teams across Microsoft see lived experiences as a quality driver, not an edge case. Neurodivergent employees help teams spot usability opportunities that benefit everyone, especially around information overload, pacing, and clarity.

“Instead of treating accessibility as a check-the-box exercise, we’re building relationships with neurodivergent employees and embedding their feedback into the full product development lifecycle,” Aday says. “We’re moving away from ‘test this for us once” to ‘build this with us, continuously’.”

How the Inclusive Tech Lab supports co-design

Support also comes from the Inclusive Tech Lab, where Microsoft design teams work directly with users with disabilities to uncover exclusionary designs and identify new product opportunities.

“The best time to engage with us is when employees are starting something new or revising old designs. The Inclusive Tech Lab helps teams partner with disabled advisors early in the design process.”

Sarah Heinzen, senior designer, Microsoft Design and Research

The lab connects teams with people who bring their lived experience across different scenarios, such as limited mobility, photosensitivity, low vision, and neurodivergence. This co-design approach brings in users early and keeps them involved so their lived experience can shape product decisions from the start.

“The best time to engage with us is when employees are starting something new or revising old designs,” says Sarah Heinzen, a senior designer on the Microsoft Design and Research team. “The Inclusive Tech Lab helps teams partner with disabled advisors early in the design process.”

Building feedback into how we work

While the product teams work on incorporating feedback, we’re hard at work solidifying this continuous feedback loop and adding it to everyday product development at Microsoft.

Partnering with the Inclusive Tech Lab, we’re setting the foundation for making that a reality using:

• One consistent path to feedback. Product teams have a unified way to engage with employees from the disability and neurodiversity communities.
• A participant pool of testers. We’re building a diverse network of volunteers to make sure diverse lived experiences consistently inform product decisions.
• Inclusive ways of working. We’re establishing guidelines to make sure testing scenarios match real user needs.

The expectation is start early, stay engaged, and build with the people you’re designing for.

“Even as a software engineer and someone who’s neurodivergent, accessibility used to feel like something you thought about later,” Cowe says. “Now I pause early and ask: Does this make sense for real users? Is it clear? Is it usable? It’s changed how I build. I’m looking for the small friction points, the things people struggle with, and I’m catching them sooner. It’s made me a better engineer.”

The post Boosting accessibility at Microsoft with help from neurodivergent employees appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But this kind of fragmentation slows down reasoning. Engineers spend more time navigating tools than diagnosing issues.

To address this, the Microsoft Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant organization in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, is building Infrastructure Graph (IGraph), a unified platform that brings topology, real-time telemetry, and operational context into a single view.

On top of this foundation, agentic capabilities enable AI agents to reason across these signals, surfacing insights, explaining issues, and recommending next steps. This shifts the experience from exploring data to making decisions faster and with greater confidence.

“Engineers increasingly face fragmented visibility. We wanted to unify live telemetry, topology, and context into one single intelligent visualization experience and show engineers what’s really important, so they don’t have to dive into oceans of data.”

Astha Sinha, product manager, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

This visualization layer and intelligence platform provides a view of our entire Microsoft enterprise network—including more than 20,000 on-premises devices across 900 sites worldwide—to instantly surface the most critical issues and offer proactive recommendations to our engineers.

“Engineers increasingly face fragmented visibility,” says Astha Sinha, a product manager in the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital. “We wanted to unify live telemetry, topology, and context into one single intelligent visualization experience and show engineers what’s really important, so they don’t have to dive into oceans of data.”

Network insight at speed

IGraph displays the following in a single pane-of-glass view for a given site:

• Topology and dependency context: Visualizes routers, switches, access points, client devices, and their relationships, enriched with path and dependency awareness to localize impact areas
• Real-time health and telemetry insights: Surfaces live performance signals (utilization, errors, abnormal behavior) correlates directly onto the topology to highlight where the network is degraded or “running hot”
• Operational and incident context: Integrates incidents, tickets, and change signals into the graph, enabling engineers to understand what is happening and where and what systems are affected in a single view

“Fragmentation across operational data sources was only part of the problem. The harder challenge was externalizing and structuring the implicit domain knowledge engineers rely on, then integrating it with real-time telemetry and topology to enable low-latency, context-aware reasoning in the agentic layer.”

Vinod Kumar Singh, principal software engineer, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

On top of this visualization layer, the team is building an agentic layer using Azure Foundry that allows AI agents to discover and use external tools and data sources.

Without IGraph agent, accessing data involves pulling from multiple existing sources, including servers and logs, with mixed latency (from minutes to hours). This fragmentation makes near-real-time reasoning almost impossible, as agents lack a unified, low-latency view of topology and telemetry.

“Fragmentation across operational data sources was only part of the problem,” says Vinod Kumar Singh, a principal software engineer in the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital. “The harder challenge was externalizing and structuring the implicit domain knowledge engineers rely on, the integrating it with real-time telemetry and topology to enable low latency, context-aware reasoning in the agentic layer.”

How IGraph works

The user starts in context. Say they’re on the IGraph UI for Building 32. They can already see the building topology, recent incidents, support tickets, and live health and performance metrics.

The engineer can ask a natural language question such as, “The internet is not working in Building 32—what’s going on?”

The AI agent begins reasoning across UI context (location, devices, open incidents), topology (involved devices and neighbors), historical metrics, and real-time device calls. It works with specialized MCP servers and agents to identify impacted devices, test live responsiveness, measure neighboring impact, verify data flow, and flag abnormal utilization or error trends.

“Engineers spend a lot of time firefighting. The visualization layer gives them the view they need to quickly solve the incidents. It helps free up their time to engage in more systemic improvements on their applications.”

Abhijit Vijay, principal software engineer manager, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

Using this context, IGraph pulls in the relevant logs, real-time telemetry, and incident history to complete the analysis.

Instead of raw metrics and hundreds of rows of data, the agent returns a clean summary that provides a view of the failing device, the health of neighboring devices, and the blast radius. It shows what’s broken, what’s still healthy, the likely causes, and next actions.

The engineer stays in one UI for all this, and isn’t forced to use different tools or manually correlate data.

“Engineers spend a lot of time firefighting,” says Abhijit Vijay, a principal software engineer manager on the team in Microsoft Digital. “The visualization layer gives them the view they need to quickly solve the incidents. It helps free up their time to engage in more systemic improvements on their applications.”

The impact of incident visibility

IGraph offers a new real-time telemetry layer that:

• Uses a UI that surfaces telemetry and topology by correlating data from upstream systems
• Decreases effective latency for users, enabling near-real-time insights (often within seconds)
• Provides near-real-time signals in the UI on health, performance, routing state, and neighboring device relationships

“Our goal is to accelerate how network engineers understand what’s happening, enabling them to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive prevention—identifying and mitigating issues before they occur.”

Nevedita Mallick, principal product manager, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

Combined, these capabilities give network engineers an up-to-the moment view of what’s happening across the network, before small issues can cascade into larger incidents.

By making live telemetry easier to access and interpret, IGraph helps teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive prevention.

“Our goal is to accelerate how network engineers understand what’s happening, enabling them to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive prevention—identifying and mitigating issues before they occur,” says Nevedita Mallick, a principal product manager for the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital.

That speed and clarity are especially important for new engineers.

“The tool delivers value right away, especially for newer engineers. Instead of having to piece things together, they get an instant view of the network that shows how devices are connected and displays the already-surfaced incidents directly on the graph.”

Manjiri Keskar, principal cloud network engineer, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

Complex networks rely on unwritten knowledge and experience built up over time, which can slow onboarding and make troubleshooting harder than it needs to be. IGraph shortens that learning curve by making the network’s relationships and current state immediately visible.

“The tool delivers value right away, especially for newer engineers,” says Manjiri Keskar, a principal cloud network engineer in the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital. “Instead of having to piece things together, they get an instant view of the network that shows how devices are connected and displays the already-surfaced incidents directly on the graph.”

What’s next for IGraph Agent

Without IGraph Agent, network analysis is largely reactive.

Teams often address failures after customers have already felt the impact, instead of preventing issues by acting when early warning signs appear.

“Agentic AI is transforming networking DevOps from manual, reactive operations into intelligent intent-driven systems that can provision, validate, and troubleshoot networks autonomously. Looking ahead, it will power self-healing networks and dramatically accelerate buildouts, allowing engineers to focus on architecture, strategy, and innovation.”

Sonika Munde, senior network engineer, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

Teams often address failures after customers have already felt the impact, instead of preventing issues by acting when early warning signs appear.

“Agentic AI is transforming networking DevOps from manual, reactive operations into intelligent, intent-driven systems that can provision, validate, and troubleshoot networks autonomously,” says Sonika Munde, a senior network engineer in the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital. “Looking ahead, it will power self-healing networks and dramatically accelerate buildouts, allowing engineers to focus on architecture, strategy, and innovation.”

That unified network intelligence will let IGraph Agent communicate with multiple lightweight agents that continuously analyze network conditions, dramatically compressing response times.

“What used to happen in hours will happen in minutes,” Munde says.

Now, the team is pushing further. One example is layering in weather intelligence to help engineers anticipate issues before they materialize, as big storms can trigger power fluctuations that ripple through the network. By visualizing this data, engineers can proactively communicate with customers and take mitigation steps that protect operational workloads.

Overall, IGraph lets teams focus on prevention. Engineers spend less time navigating dashboards and cross-checking data and more time detecting patterns and surfacing emerging risks. Manual analysis is reduced as the agent highlights insights in real time.

“By bringing telemetry, topology, and AI together in one intelligent layer, we’re turning fragmented signals into real-time intelligence so teams can move faster, act earlier, and protect the critical workloads that power Microsoft.”

Jason Thompson, principal group product manager, Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team, Microsoft Digital

The technology is poised to go even further. IGraph will eventually help power self-healing networks and speed up network build-outs, freeing engineers to focus on architecture and innovation. The future vision for the tool includes fully automated predictive network intelligence across all Microsoft campuses, with agents that monitor, reason, recommend responses, and safely take action.

“By bringing telemetry, topology, and AI together in one intelligent layer, we’re turning fragmented signals into real-time intelligence so teams can move faster, act earlier, and protect the critical workloads that power Microsoft,” says Jason Thompson, a principal group product manager for the Infrastructure, Networking, and Tenant team in Microsoft Digital.

Key takeaways

To move from reactive operations to proactive AI-supported network management, we recommend starting with these steps:

• Start consolidating real-time telemetry into a single view. Even a lightweight dashboard is enough to prepare for AI-driven insights later.
• Identify high-frequency incident types to target for AI triage. Pick the most common or disruptive scenarios and map out what data engineers currently review for them.
• Document the decision logic your engineers use today. Before implementing AI, capture the human reasoning steps to help guide your approach.
• Pilot an agentic solution with one network segment or site. Start with one building, one lab, or a small testbed.

Try it out

Learn more about what Microsoft Azure can do for you.

Related links

• See how we’re boosting network performance at Microsoft with real-time telemetry and performance visualization.
• Discover how we’re reclaiming engineering time with AI tools in Azure DevOps at Microsoft.
• Learn how Microsoft is reducing operational overload with AI-guided insights.

The post Supercharging network operations at Microsoft with AI-based unified network intelligence appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’ve put that potential into action by building the Employee Self-Service Agent, a centralized “front door” for employee support inquiries on all things Microsoft. Whether the question is related to an IT, human resources (HR), or campus services-related challenge, this agentic solution delivers geographically relevant, role-specific content on demand.

Our agent was rolled out in stages to our global workforce, as we continually added topic categories, features, and geographic availability. It eventually reached our entire workforce—more than 300,000 employees and vendors in 103 countries and regions—before being publicly released last November.

Our team in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—played a pivotal role in our global rollout, working closely with the product team and providing valuable feedback throughout development. It’s all part of our Customer Zero philosophy here at the company.

The agent proved its value early, piloting in large, primarily English-speaking regions—including Canada, India, the UK, and the US—and reaching more than half of our global workforce. But we wanted to raise the bar, so we turned to the rest of Europe.

The next chapter in the rollout was the Europe North region, which brought in 21 countries that are home to a wide variety of languages, cultures, country-specific HR policies, and nuanced IT support requirements.

“For the Employee Self‑Service Agent to work in Europe North, we had to listen locally to understand each country’s realities and respect those differences, rather than forcing a single global approach.”

Allan Hvass, director, Employee Experience in Europe North, Microsoft Digital

However, early deployments in smaller markets in the region revealed that when local content for a specific geography was missing, the agent sometimes defaulted to policies related to the US or other unrelated countries. Sensitive HR scenarios and strict country-level rules increased the complexity and resulting challenges.

Our team in Microsoft Digital met the challenge by working through front‑end field adoption and back‑end product updates to successfully land the Employee Self-Service Agent in Europe North’s small and midsize countries. This included adapting the product to distinct local realities in each country.

“For the Employee Self‑Service Agent to work in Europe North, we had to listen locally to understand each country’s realities and respect those differences, rather than forcing a single global approach,” says Allan Hvass, director for Employee Experience in the Europe North region of Microsoft Digital.

Mobilizing field representatives

To help with the tricky aspects of driving local adoption of  the Employee Self-Service Agent, our team in Microsoft Digital formed an adoption advisory team. The team included leadership representatives from all major countries and business divisions.

The group established on‑the‑ground field representatives to create better communications channels with the Europe North countries. This helped us learn what was and wasn’t working locally while we extended support for neighboring countries and kept excitement around the agent alive.

“I encouraged my colleagues to use the agent, and then to tell customers about their experience,” Rusen says. “A story grounded in real use is much more powerful and authentic than any slide deck.”

Daniel Rusen, sales enablement and operations leader, Europe North

Because the team had already been communicating about the agent internally, including hosting all-hands meetings to spark early usage, we were able to collect thousands of instances of employee feedback. Key themes surfaced, including policy accuracy by country, quality of language, and IT support variance by market.

Daniel Rusen, a sales enablement and operations leader for Europe North, served as one of the field representatives. He helped the advisory team close the loop between the field and the core project by highlighting the language and local relevancy issues that were reported. He also became an evangelist for the agent, encouraging other sales executives to use the tool and experience it first-hand.

“I encouraged my colleagues to use the agent, and then to tell customers about their experience,” Rusen says. “A story grounded in real use is much more powerful and authentic than any slide deck.”

Driving adoption with contextual experiences

To support the rollout of the Employee Self-Service Agent across Europe North, we designed an adoption approach aligned with regional priorities and local ways of working.

We focused on making the value of the agent immediately tangible. Through Microsoft Viva Engage communications, we connected the agent directly to Europe North business goals and highlighted the most relevant, high-impact scenarios—helping employees quickly recognize when the agent was the right “front door” for their support needs.

“Adoption is not about pushing a tool, it’s about helping people recognize, in their own context, when it truly makes their day easier. By focusing on relevant scenarios, simple communication, and hands-on experiences, we made the Employee Self-Service Agent useful from the start.”

Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, Employee Experience in Europe North, Microsoft Digital

To avoid overwhelming users, we prioritized simple, focused communication formats. For example, an Advent calendar campaign combined the agent with Copilot capabilities, enabling employees to discover one practical, actionable use case at a time.

In parallel, we hosted targeted readiness sessions to demonstrate key end-to-end scenarios and share practical tips and best practices. This ensured employees not only understood the value of the agent, but also felt confident using it from day one—creating a strong and positive first experience.

“Adoption is not about pushing a tool, it’s about helping people recognize, in their own context, when it truly makes their day easier,” says Edith Dubuisson, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “By focusing on relevant scenarios, simple communication, and hands-on experiences, we made the Employee Self-Service Agent useful from the start.”

Fine-tuning the agent

Built in Copilot Studio, the Employee Self-Service Agent works on global, regional, and area levels to make sure that users receive the content that corresponds to their geographical location and preferred language.

The Microsoft Global Support Services group manages the agent capability and improvements, driven by a strong partnership with internal engineering teams. The team triaged feedback and partnered with the product group to tag accurate policies and knowledge by country, and to tune agent behavior and guardrails for localized content. They prioritized quick fixes and high-impact content gaps.

Updating the Employee Self-Service Agent to fix content mismatches in Europe North wasn’t about tweaking the AI in isolation. Instead, we needed to overhaul the content that the agent relies on.

“Instead of treating mismatches as failures alone, we used them as signals to improve the underlying content—revising articles, correcting categorization, and closing gaps in coverage. Over time, this combination of tightly scoped data sources, country-level tagging, and ongoing content curation turned the agent into a far more reliable assistant.”

David Finney, director, IT Service Management, Microsoft Digital

The team “grounded” the agent in a set of trusted, IT-approved sources: About 250,000 vetted knowledge base articles and 15-20 different internal SharePoint sites containing policies, guidelines, how-to articles, and related information.

Then they tackled regional nuances, one of the biggest drivers of content mismatches (when a user gets a reply based on content that doesn’t match their country or region). The team tagged content by geography (such as UK-only or Romania-only), so the agent would be fed the correct information for that geographic area.

The process of fixing mismatches also yielded insights.

David Finney, a director of IT Service Management in Microsoft Digital, frames the process as a clear lesson: AI is only as good as the content behind it, so the real work is often on the back end.

“Instead of treating mismatches as failures alone, we used them as signals to improve the underlying content—revising articles, correcting categorization, and closing gaps in coverage,” Finney says. “Over time, this combination of tightly scoped data sources, country‑level tagging, and ongoing content curation turned the agent into a far more reliable assistant.”

Impact and results

The Global Support team added a continuous feedback loop to keep the agent’s content aligned with reality. Users can flag low-quality and inaccurate answers directly through the agent interface. That data flows to a dedicated knowledge management team, creating an efficient pipeline for feedback to inform back‑end fixes and product improvements.

“We’re measuring success by a reduction in tickets, but that’s based on the user having a better experience using the Employee Self-Service Agent versus calling our global help desk and talking to a person. We can only be truly successful if we are creating a better experience for our users.”

Anders Jepsen, director, Field IT Management, Microsoft Digital

Today, the Employee Self-Service Agent’s metrics are moving in the right direction.

The team is optimistic as the Global Support Services data shows agent activity steadily increasing after it officially went live last October, as shown in the following image. At the same time, usage of Legacy Bot (an existing digital support chatbot) decreased, along with support interactions via phone, email, and web.

This data suggests the agent is meeting its ultimate goal: To provide users with an improved support experience, including better first‑touch answers that build employee confidence and yield faster issue resolution. This reduces escalation to human-run support channels and decreases the volume of tickets our employees have to create.

“We’re measuring success by a reduction in tickets, but that’s based on the user having a better experience using the Employee Self-Service Agent versus calling our global help desk and talking to a person,” says Anders Jepsen, a director of Field IT Management in Microsoft Digital. “We can only be truly successful if we are creating a better experience for our users.”

What’s next for self-service support

Our experience deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent in Europe North has allowed us to create a playbook for other small and midsize countries in similar situations, including dealing with multiple languages and specific regional policies.

“Our long-term ambition is to reduce our human-led support tickets by 40 percent. In some areas, like Europe North, we are already taking a significant step toward that.”

Trent Berghofer, general manager, Microsoft Digital Modern Support

The agent now serves as both a self-service tool and the first contact point for employee questions. It doesn’t completely remove humans from support, because if that first point of contact doesn’t resolve the IT issue, a team of humans is available to help.

In the end, the fewer support tickets that are opened, the more time employees can have back for higher-value tasks.

“Our long-term ambition is to reduce our human-led support tickets by 40 percent,” says Trent Berghofer, a general manager in Microsoft Digital Modern Support. “In some areas, like Europe North, we are already taking a significant step toward that.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is a great example of using the power of AI to increase employee productivity and efficiency, as they access highly curated support through the tool on demand. It fits in with our company’s overall strategic efforts to evolve into an AI-driven Frontier Firm.

“The agent brings IT, HR, and facilities together in one place,” Dubuisson says. “It’s not just a Q&A bot. It gives you information, guides you, and even holds your hand through troubleshooting. The agent tells you what to do and can even do it for you. It standardizes, simplifies, and still lets you chat with someone or get a call back when you need it.”

Key takeaways

Here are steps organizations can take today to implement an AI-powered employee support hub:

• Evaluate your employee support systems. Assess whether employees have a single, trusted “front door” for support issues, or if your organization’s support is still fragmented across different tools.
• Audit local policy coverage in your AI solutions. Identify where tools may be defaulting to global or geographically incorrect content–especially in regions with multiple countries or languages–to validate accuracy and boost trust.
• Pilot localized AI support efforts in a diversified region. Engage regional HR, IT, and field adoption teams early on to make sure that AI experiences reflect real, country-specific employee needs.

Try it out

Learn all about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Check out our in-depth guide to deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• See how we’re accelerating support services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read about how the agent improves campus and facilities-related support at Microsoft.
• Explore Microsoft Learn content about the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Watch a Microsoft Ignite Session about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

The post Transforming IT support across Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we shape and propel many of our groundbreaking products through our role as the company’s Customer Zero—and we want to tell that story. At this year’s Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we hosted a variety of sessions focused on change management, AI adoption, and how we manage governance in the era of the Frontier Firm.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft 365 Copilot, we embedded the technology into our employees’ daily workflows and carefully monitored the results. That journey from early experimentation to broad adoption of the tool across our organization continues to guide the company as we explore what comes next.

Today, that’s agents.

“Copilot changes how our employees work. Agents are changing how the work gets done. Our focus is to make the technology practical and valuable, so people want to use it daily.”

Stephan Kerametlian, senior director, business program management, Microsoft Digital

We’ve reached a level of maturity with Copilot that allows us to move from individual productivity to systems that can reason and collaborate on our behalf. Our focus now is on driving the adoption of agents across the company, grounding them in our workflows to solve problems.

“Copilot changes how our employees work,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a senior director in Microsoft Digital. “Agents are changing how the work gets done. Our focus is to make the technology practical and valuable, so people want to use it daily.”

Adoption doesn’t happen without trust

As we’ve empowered employees with more capable AI tools that can help automate tasks and make decisions, we’ve been equally focused on making sure the right safeguards are in place.

Innovation and safety are extremely important—the challenge is to enable both at the same time. And this is where governance comes in.

“We’ve spent a lot of time getting governance right. This means giving people confidence, not slowing them down. When employees know the guardrails are there, they feel empowered to experiment and innovate safely.”

David Johnson, principal PM architect, Microsoft Digital

At Microsoft, good governance is what makes innovation sustainable. It’s how we protect the company, our data, and our customers, while still giving employees the freedom to build and push boundaries with AI.

“We’ve spent a lot of time getting governance right,” says David Johnson, a principal PM architect in Microsoft Digital. “This means giving people confidence, not slowing them down. When employees know the guardrails are there, they feel empowered to experiment and innovate safely.”

How Microsoft does IT: Managing and governing agents—empower with risk-aligned oversight

Session description: See how Microsoft Digital empowers employees with tools to build and manage agents. From agent management with Microsoft Agent 365, to securing our environment with Microsoft Defender, to managing our productivity estate with Microsoft Purview, this session offers broad insights into how we use our own technology to accelerate agentic innovation while mitigating risk.

Speakers: David Johnson, Naveen Jangir, and Mike Powers

David Johnson leads our internal Microsoft 365 and productivity services with responsibility for tenant strategy, architecture, and governance. He manages how we empower employees with guardrails and manages our capability onboarding and tenant configuration.

Naveen Jangir is a principal architect in Microsoft Digital. He drives Microsoft 365 security and compliance strategy and leads tenant architecture and capability onboarding, while overseeing secure adoption of services across the enterprise.

Mike Powers is a senior service engineer and AI administrator in Microsoft Digital who manages Copilot features, Agent 365, and enterprise AI operations. He partners with internal product groups and security stakeholders to make sure AI tools and agents are deployed responsibly and governed effectively.

More on AI agents and governance at Microsoft

• Read the guide to how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• See how we’re embracing the agentic future to become a Frontier Firm.
• Learn how we deployed the Employee Self-Service Agent at Microsoft. 

Inside Microsoft: Reclaiming engineering time with AI in Azure DevOps

Session description: AI tools embedded directly into Azure DevOps (ADO) are changing how engineering teams work, eliminating manual tasks without creating separate tools or increasing cognitive load. This session explores how ADO AI Chat and the AI Work Item Assistant accelerate coding workflows at Microsoft. You’ll learn how to improve your backlog quality, sprint hygiene, and downstream effectiveness of GitHub Enterprise and Copilot, helping your teams reclaim capacity and focus on the work that moves products forward.

Speakers: Gopal Panigrahy and Sumit Dutta

Gopal Panigrahy is a product leader and member of our product management team in Microsoft Digital. He’s an advocate for our customer-first approach to product development and is passionate about helping people overcome challenges in the era of AI.

Sumit Dutta is a product-minded technology leader working at the intersection of AI, enterprise platforms, and scalable product design. Offering a strong blend of engineering knowledge and product strategy, he focuses on building systems that are not just functional but also extensible and reliable.

More on AI and IT engineering at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re reclaiming engineering time with AI in Azure DevOps at Microsoft.
• Read about powering the new age of AI-led engineering in IT at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re streamlining engineering at Microsoft with Azure DevOps.

How Microsoft does IT: Microsoft 365 governance in the age of Copilot and agents

Session Description: Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot agents are powerful tools, but without proper governance, you could be putting your company at risk. In this lightning talk, you’ll learn how Microsoft Digital protects our enterprise while enabling employee innovation with Copilot and agents.

Speaker: David Johnson

Johnson brings hands-on experience operating Copilot and AI-powered agents inside Microsoft, with a focus on identity, permissions, data boundaries, and real-world misuse prevention. He takes real-world lessons and makes them practical for others.

More on governance at Microsoft

• Learn about how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Check out our guide to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in five chapters.
• Read how we’re powering data governance with Purview Unified Catalog.

Accelerating AI adoption with Copilot controls: Lessons from Microsoft Digital

Session description: Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents unlock productivity gains, but without careful oversight they can also introduce security and compliance risks. The session covers how the Copilot Control System helps scale AI safely, including adoption insights and satisfaction signals. You’ll also see demos of popular agents, including the Employee Self-Service Agent and the Admin agent.

Speakers: Amy Ceurvorst and Reshma Kapoor

Amy Ceurvorst is a director of business programs In Microsoft Digital. She’s worked extensively with Copilot controls and evangelizes a unified way to view Copilot health reports that help administrators understand Copilot health.  

Reshma Kapoor is a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital with 20 years of experience leading and shipping products at scale. She is customer‑obsessed, grounding product decisions in real customer signals to deliver intuitive, high‑impact experiences.

More on AI and Copilot adoption and deployment

• Read how we’re shaping AI management at Microsoft with Agent 365 and Copilot controls.
• Explore our five-chapter guide to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally.
• Learn how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage at Microsoft.

How Microsoft does IT: Driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents across Microsoft

Speakers: Cadie Kneip and Stephan Kerametlian

Session description: Our team at Microsoft Digital led the first enterprise-scale deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot, launching to more than 300,000 employees and vendors worldwide. Learn how the team drove adoption using change management strategies to encourage employees to thread Copilot into their daily work. Now we’re doing the same for agents across the enterprise. Learn best practices for accelerating adoption and maximizing value while guiding your own journey with Copilot and AI agents.

Cadie Kneip is a senior business program director and the Copilot Champs community lead in Microsoft Digital. She specializes in turning complex AI initiatives into confidence-building pathways that help employees thrive in an AI-powered workplace. 

Stephan Kerametlian is a senior director in Microsoft Digital, where he leads our global change management efforts for Copilot and agents. He thrives on learning how people use AI and on finding ways to get more people to embrace the technology.

More on adoption and deployment of Copilot and agents

• Explore our guide on how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot internally.
• Find out how we’re skilling up for the future of work at Microsoft with Agent Launchpad.

Real-world adoption stories: A fireside chat with a key customer

Session description: Pull back the curtain on the customer experience with Copilot adoption. Join this fireside chat with a Microsoft customer to hear about lessons learned and the real impact that Copilot is delivering across their organization. You’ll glean practical insights you can apply immediately at your own company. 

Speakers: Karuana Gatimu and Sam Crewdson

Karuana Gatimu is a director of Customer Advocacy – AI & Collaboration in Microsoft Digital and a solution architect driven by a passion for people, storytelling, and leadership. With 30 years of experience at the intersection of technology and human impact, she turns complex innovation into compelling narratives that help organizations adopt change and deliver business value.

Sam Crewdson, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, is passionate about turning user insights into product improvements. His work focuses on driving adoption of the latest SharePoint features and helping users take advantage of the power of both SharePoint and OneDrive. Working at the intersection of IT, users, feedback, and strategy, he translates real‑world business needs into collaborative experiences that scale.  

More insights on Copilot adoption

• Learn about how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft
• Check out our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in five chapters.
• Read our executive-level guide covering our Copilot deployment.

Try it out

• Learn more and sign up for the 2027 Microsoft 365 Community Conference.
• Start using Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to build your own AI-powered agents and workflows.

Related links

• Find out about the keynote presentations that happened at the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference.
• See how we’re serving as Customer Zero at Microsoft in the era of AI.
• Read about Copilot Control System security and governance.
• Learn about deploying Microsoft Agent 365: How we’re extending our infrastructure to manage agents at Microsoft.
• Discover how the Employee Self-Service Agent helps employees quickly complete IT and HR tasks.

The post Unfolding our AI-in-IT story: What to expect at the 2026 Microsoft 365 Community Conference appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) is our company’s end-to-end software development lifecycle (SDLC) solution for planning, coding, testing, and delivery. It combines tools for work tracking, source control, pipelines, and artifacts so teams can manage the entire SDLC in one environment.

Although ADO excels at streamlining the development process, we found that users were still spending significant time performing repetitive administrative tasks, like creating and breaking down work items, writing and managing queries for reporting, and reclaiming lost permissions.

Our Engineering Systems Platform team successfully embedded AI into ADO, resulting in ADO experiences that replace manual workflows and free up our IT professionals to concentrate on work that makes a real impact.

Identifying the opportunity

The Engineering Systems Platform team supports 15,000 active users across one of the largest ADO platforms at Microsoft.

“We saw the toll these processes took on users, whether they were compiling information or performing manual tasks. Even with automation, there was still an opportunity to give time back to engineers.”

Gopal Panigrahy, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Three years ago, the team began exploring opportunities to automate repetitive ADO tasks like creating and updating work items, navigating project data, gathering statuses, and breaking large initiatives into sprint-ready work.

While they found ways to automate some of these tasks, they discovered decision-making and information synthesis still consumed valuable time and occasionally introduced some human errors.

“We saw the toll these processes took on users, whether they were compiling information or performing manual tasks,” says Gopal Panigrahy, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Even with automation, there was still an opportunity to give time back to engineers.”

Adding AI to ADO workflows

ADO spans a vast area at Microsoft, serving a wide range of enterprise use cases and personas. What these workers have in common is heavy workloads. With this in mind, different categories of ADO users expressed the desire for AI-powered experiences that could help streamline workflows and speed up day-to-day development tasks.

As generative AI matured, our team explored whether they could embed AI technology inside ADO to act as a real-time assistant, handling administrative work and answering contextual questions using natural language.

“We saw it as a win-win experiment. If we could give engineers back in ADO, they could spend it building, not managing artifacts.”

Debashis Sahoo, principal group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

The guiding principles of the experiment were simple: Stay in context and preserve user control while aligning with existing ADO permissions and processes.

That vision led to the creation of two complementary Microsoft Copilot agents: The DevOps Assistant and the AI Work Item Assistant.

“We saw it as a win-win experiment,” says Debashis Sahoo, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “If we could give engineers time back in ADO, they could spend it building, not managing artifacts.”

What makes this initiative distinctive is it brings AI closer to the core ADO product and its users. It allows for secure, confidential, and context-rich ADO data to be used safely for meaningful AI-powered experiences.

DevOps Assistant offers conversational, in-context support

DevOps Assistant is a chat‑based experience present in the ADO user interface (UI). It’s activated in a side panel where users can ask natural language questions to retrieve information, check project statuses, and run common DevOps actions without navigating away from their main ADO display.

The DevOps Assistant enables cross-source discovery, which reduces context switching and discovery time and helps lower the cognitive load for engineers and product managers. By reducing the time it takes to switch contexts and search for information, the DevOps Assistant helps ADO users move faster and stay focused on product delivery.

Under the hood, the DevOps Assistant is a constellation of specialized agents, each of which is focused on a different segment of the DevOps lifecycle:

• Work Item Agent creates, refines, and scopes work into sprint-ready backlogs
• Knowledge Board Agent surfaces the right DevOps knowledge at the right moment
• Permission Agent handles access and permission requests
• Bulk Complete Agent runs repetitive, large-scale updates
• Sprint Board Agent summarizes sprint status and provides instant, prompt‑driven insights

“We didn’t just build a chatbot. We built a distributed system of agents that understands the intent of the DevOps user and acts on it securely and in context.”

Apoorv Gupta, principal software engineer, Microsoft Digital

Agents are built in Copilot Studio and coordinated by Orchestrator Agent, Copilot Studio’s front door.

For example, if a user asks to create or refine work items, the Orchestrator Agent routes the request to the Work Item Agent to handle. If the question is about permissions, then it delegates the work to the Permission Agent. It does this for each task.

“We didn’t just build a chatbot,” says Apoorv Gupta, a principal software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “We built a distributed system of agents that understands the intent of DevOps user and acts on it securely and in context.”

At present, the DevOps Assistant is available across all our internal ADO environments at Microsoft. The plan is to make it available to external customers soon.

AI Work Item Assistant provides inline assistance

The AI Work Item Assistant is a real-time embedded experience within ADO work items. Powered by Microsoft Foundry, it helps users create and refine work items using context and business requirements.

The assistant works immersively, keeping users focused and within ADO as they structure work items or generate child items from the parent.

For product and program managers who start with high‑level ideas, the assistant understands intent. It can automatically suggest logical, sprint‑ready breakdowns, helping to dramatically reduce the time spent on planning, sorting, and prioritizing work items.

Turning newfound time into innovation

The key to reclaiming time for your workforce isn’t just the introduction of new AI-driven features. It’s using the technology to enforce structure and quality at the beginning, so that everything downstream moves faster.

Panigrahy describes the practice as three reinforcing feedback loops.

The first loop is upstream quality amplification. AI agents help consistently structure work items with clear acceptance criteria and templates. The structure then feeds other tools (such as GitHub Copilot), allowing them to generate higher-quality code and more predictable outcomes—shortening the overall software development lifecycle.

The second feedback loop is acceleration of execution. In a typical sprint planning session, a team of eight engineers might:

• Take an hour (or more) to manually break user stories into more than 100 tasks
• Create different tasks in their own style, introducing inconsistency and ambiguity
• Generate uneven details, then spend time clarifying data later

With DevOps Assistant and AI Work Item Assistant, that same task breakdown turns into a prompt-driven action that no longer requires hours of work.

“It burns a lot of time for everyone to manually create each item in their own way, making sure they’re using the correct inputs from the product manager and confirming they aren’t missing anything,” Panigrahy says. “Now, with AI magic, it takes less than three minutes.”

The third feedback loop is capacity reinvestment. Instead of spending hours on tactical DevOps mechanics, teams can now spend more time on engineering judgment, resulting in better estimation, technical decisions, and design. They can use these reclaimed hours to learn new tools, experiment with new agents, and innovate on the SDLC.

“Capacity saving keeps giving back, in a loop,” Gupta says. “You get more capacity back. You innovate. You learn. You do better.”

What’s next on the AI-in-ADO journey

The DevOps Assistant and the AI Work Item Assistant can help change user behavior, shifting from time spent doing tactical DevOps tasks to performing higher‑value, judgment-based work. These tools can help teams increase work quality and reduce wasted time.

“Our next chapter is about making AI smarter, more action-oriented, and truly agentic,” Sahoo says. “The goal is to reduce cognitive load and allow the experience to live wherever users are—from Azure DevOps to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365—so the agent works seamlessly across their workflow.”

AI-driven productivity gains are arguably the biggest opportunity in the industry. It’s fundamentally redefining the engineering experience at an unprecedented pace.

“While we’ve made huge strides embedding AI into the everyday Azure DevOps experience, it still feels like we’re just getting started,” Sahoo says. “Staying relevant means continuously evolving to deliver ever-greater value and efficiency to engineers.”

Key takeaways

Keep these tips in mind as you get started on your own journey with AI and Microsoft ADO:

• Treat AI as a strategic accelerator, not as an add-on. Identify where your engineering process can use AI to move from simple assistance to transforming your workflows.
• Target high-effort, high-volume tasks first. Analyze where your teams are spending significant manual time, even if AI tools are already in place in those workflows.
• Validate productivity with measurable data, not intuition. Track time reclaimed, workflow efficiency, reduction in manual steps, and user satisfaction. Tangible data can help your initiative earn trust and justify the expansion of AI tool use on your team.

Try it out

Get started using the AI Work Item Assistant in Azure DevOps.

Related links

• Discover how we’re powering the new age of AI-powered engineering in Microsoft IT.
• Learn how to build and manage agents in Copilot Studio.
• Read about ways we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations at Microsoft using AI.
• Check out our IT playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm in the era of AI.

The post Reclaiming engineering time with AI in Azure DevOps at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

As AI transforms how we build and experience technology, accessibility has to be built in from the start.

Designing with and for people with disabilities isn’t optional—it’s fundamental to building technology that works for everyone and to building trust at scale. And yet today, about 96% of websites are still inaccessible.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to creating accessible products and services—designed with and for the disability community—that benefit everyone.

Our “shift left” approach to software production—which involves moving quality-assurance, testing, and accessibility checks to earlier in the development lifecycle—means that implementing assistive features and tools is a high priority for Microsoft, rather than a late-stage addition.

And with the rise in importance of AI tools and products, paying close attention to accessibility standards and building these key capabilities into game-changing tech like Microsoft 365 Copilot is a crucial part of our mission here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization.

“After my accident, I became immediately reliant on accessible technology. Because I worked in tech, I could leverage accessibility features and assistive technologies to continue doing my job. It was literally a lifeline for me.”

Laurie Allen, accessibility technology evangelist, Microsoft

Evangelizing for accessibility

Laurie Allen is one person who knows first-hand the importance of accessibility in enterprise software. A little more than a decade ago, she experienced a spinal cord injury and became a quadriplegic.

Today, Allen works as an accessibility technology evangelist at Microsoft. Every day, she relies on assistive digital technologies to help her be successful in her role—which involves ensuring that our software products are accessible to everyone.

“After my accident, I became immediately reliant on accessible technology,” Allen says. “Because I worked in tech, I could leverage accessibility features and assistive technologies to continue doing my job. It was literally a lifeline for me during that transitionary phase, because my job was the one thing about my life that didn’t dramatically change as a result of the accident.”

The following graphic shows how widespread disability is around the globe: 

Shifting left for inclusivity

At Microsoft, our accessibility strategy includes such disability categories as mobility, vision, hearing, cognition, and learning—because accessibility empowers everyone.

“We view accessibility as a quality of our software, not simply a feature. Like with security and privacy, we prioritize accessibility to ensure that people can effectively perceive and operate our products and services, delivering an inclusive experience for everyone.”

Ankur Garg, accessibility program manager, Microsoft Digital

We begin with the concept of “shift left,” which in this context means incorporating accessibility principles from the project’s outset, instead of waiting until a product is already built.

This strategy mirrors our approach in other key trust domains, such as security and privacy.

“We view accessibility as a quality of our software, not simply a feature,” says Ankur Garg, an accessibility program manager in Microsoft Digital. “Like with security and privacy, we prioritize accessibility to ensure that people can effectively perceive and operate our products and services, delivering an inclusive experience for everyone.”

Here in Microsoft Digital, that manifests as treating accessibility as a core requirement validated through rigorous internal testing of AI agents and embedding standards and inclusive design early in every tool’s development life cycle. We also use internal AI tools to streamline guidance and testing before expanding those practices across the company.  

Accessibility challenges in the age of AI

Technology is moving fast, especially with the advent of AI-powered tools. It’s easier than ever for companies and individuals to quickly generate and publish an app, website, or other digital product.

That means it’s also easier than ever before to create inaccessible software. It’s important to remember that much of the data that generative AI models have been trained on includes websites and apps that were built without considering accessibility guidelines.

“We want people with disabilities to be represented and see themselves in the technology we’re producing. We work with our AI models to make sure they have disability data in their training sets, so that the final product will reflect these values.”

Alli Hirt, director of accessibility engineering, Microsoft

As a result, we’ve found that many AI code-generation tools and models produce code that by default fail to meet Microsoft’s high standards for accessibility.

“We want people with disabilities to be represented and see themselves in the technology we’re producing,” says Alli Hirt, a director of accessibility engineering at Microsoft. “We work with our AI models to make sure they have disability data in their training sets, so that the final product will reflect these values.”

When we’re developing AI-driven products like Microsoft 365 Copilot, the tool must have comprehensive knowledge of different disabilities and be able to give appropriate, contextual help.

“Let’s say I tell Copilot, ‘I have a mobility disability; what software tools can I use?’” Allen says. “Copilot must recognize what a mobility disability is and identify which tools will support me. That’s the data representation we need in our AI models.”

Allen noted that sensitivity and bias are also big factors when creating these kinds of tools.

“Copilot should not respond with, ‘I’m sorry you have a disability,’” she says. “That’s the type of bias we’re working to train out of the models.”

Accessibility as a core commitment

When Satya Nadella became Microsoft CEO in 2014, he redirected the core mission of the company. The new vision was simple: To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And accessibility is a core part of that mission.

“At Microsoft, accessibility is in our DNA. It’s who we are as a company.”

Laurie Allen, accessibility technology evangelist, Microsoft

Meeting global accessibility standards is our starting point. For example, the hub-and-spoke business model of the Accessibility Team helps ensure that accessibility is everyone’s responsibility.

The Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) group oversees accessibility across the company, helping products align with internationally recognized accessibility standards, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and EN 301 549. These standards ensure that digital content, websites, and apps produced today are designed with accessibility in mind.

Understanding how products and services align to key accessibility standards and requirements is an important step in providing inclusive and accessible experiences.

“An organization’s accessibility program succeeds when it’s a priority at every level of the organization, starting with senior leadership,” Allen says. “At Microsoft, accessibility is in our DNA. It’s who we are as a company.”

Presenting content in a multimodal way

Here in Microsoft Digital, we embrace software products that provide our employees with a multimodal approach in presenting content. This means using more than one sense at the same time, like seeing, listening, reading, and speaking. This makes our products accessible to a diverse array of users, including people who learn and work in different ways. It lets our employees customize the way that works best for them.

“Seeing a visually impaired colleague demonstrate how he works—listening to a wiki being read at a speed that I could never follow—showed me exactly why accessibility is needed. It’s not just about being inclusive or compassionate; it’s a requirement for people to do their jobs.”

Eman Shaheen, principal PM lead, Microsoft Digital

For example, someone may not have a diagnosed disability, but they might be a better auditory learner than a visual learner.

This reflects what Eman Shaheen, a principal PM lead in Microsoft Digital, learned from a team member when observing how he used assistive technologies.

“Seeing a visually impaired colleague demonstrate how he works—listening to a wiki being read at a speed I couldn’t even follow—showed exactly why accessibility is needed,” Shaheen says. “It’s not just about being inclusive or compassionate; it’s a requirement for people to do their jobs.”

Here are some examples of multimodal accessibility capabilities offered by Microsoft 365 Copilot that are designed to support diverse user requirements:

How we demonstrate our accessibility vision

Here at Microsoft, we developed a strategic partnership with ServiceNow over the last five years. The two companies work together to accelerate digital transformation for our enterprise and government customers.

Through this partnership, we use the ServiceNow platform for internal helpdesk and ServiceDesk process automation, IT asset management, and integrated risk management.

“The biggest shift happened once ServiceNow started feeling the same operational pain we felt. That’s when they began fixing accessibility issues proactively, which changed everything.”

Sherif Mazhar, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

As part of this process, we uncovered 1,800 accessibility bugs (including 1,200 that were rated as high severity) in the platform—in our first assessment. By contrast, our most recent review found just 24 accessibility-related issues.

“The biggest shift happened once ServiceNow started feeling the same operational pain we felt,” says Sherif Mazhar, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, who oversees the company’s relationship with ServiceNow. “That’s when they began fixing accessibility issues proactively, which changed everything.”

The next major step for us is ensuring our ServiceNow platform updates aligns to WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards which will require reworking older versions of our products. However, doing this work helps us maintain momentum toward a world of more inclusive enterprise software in all lines of business and for all Microsoft customers.

What’s next in accessibility

Digital accessibility work is never done.

As new software and hardware are introduced, user needs and accessibility standards change and grow. At Microsoft, we are committed to making accessibility easier for everyone.

“Right now, we’re making sure every AI agent across Microsoft is tested with assistive technologies—like screen readers and keyboard navigation—to guarantee that the outputs are accessible and compliant,” Garg says.

This “shift left” mentality at Microsoft is ultimately about putting people first. It means that no one should have to wait for a late fix to be able to do their work, or simply to belong.

By embedding accessibility standards into product planning, instead of tacking it on as an afterthought just before (or even after) product launch, we’re helping ensure that these digital experiences will include everyone from day one.

“We may compete on products, especially in AI, but accessibility is a shared mission,” Allen says. “When the industry collaborates on inclusive technology, everyone wins.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips to keep in mind as you consider your own accessibility strategy in a world of increasingly AI-driven technology:

• Start with leadership. Championing accessibility from the C-suite signals that this is a top organizational priority.
• Raise awareness with training. Set up employee learning opportunities regarding accessibility in AI tools and encourage everyone to take part.
• Design with inclusivity in mind from day one (“shift left”). Incorporate accessibility from the beginning of the software creation process to make sure it isn’t lost in the shuffle of trying to ship a product on time.
• Think inclusively. Run usability tests with people with lived experience
• Treat accessibility as an ongoing practice. Digital accessibility work is never finished; document strategies and share your team’s learnings to keep improving iteratively as an organization.

Try it out

Get started with accessibility using Microsoft tools and solutions.

Related links

• Learn how Microsoft is raising the bar for accessibility and building a more accessible future for all.
• Try the Ask Microsoft Accessibility AI tool.
• Read how Microsoft and ServiceNow are building more accessible and inclusive experience.
• Read the Web content accessibility guidelines.
• Explore the Microsoft Inclusive Design hub.
• See how the Indiana Pacers use Azure AI Foundry to create the first live arena captioning service.
• Go behind the scenes with a Microsoft accessibility product manager.

The post Mapping the Microsoft approach to accessibility in the world of AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

And with the introduction of agents, Copilot can now also act on your behalf—agents extend the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot beyond conversation, giving you the power to elevate how you work, create, and make decisions.

“Copilot agents free you from the manual work, so you can concentrate on big-picture thinking.”

Eva Etchells, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

The challenge today isn’t whether to use an agent or Copilot module to help you accomplish more—it’s knowing which one to use, and when to use it. Making the smart choice can help you produce amazing work while streamlining workflows and reducing friction.

“Copilot agents free you from the manual work, so you can concentrate on big-picture thinking,” says Eva Etchells, a senior content program manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization.

Copilot thinks; agents ‘do’

Agents, simply explained, are purpose-built tools designed to automate tasks, handle repeatable work, and save time by improving efficiency. You can even create your own agents to match the way you work.

“I use several agents to simplify repetitive daily tasks. They help me stay organized, quickly research what I need, and analyze information so I can focus my energy on the work that requires the most strategic thinking.”

Opeoluwa Burnett, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

If Copilot and its modules help us think, create, and explore, then think of its agents as entities that execute and automate tasks.

Choosing the right agent or module is like selecting the right tool for a job: You want the one that fits the task at hand and helps you get your work done more quickly with less effort.

“Now I can quickly ask an agent to create a one page vision document in Word because the agent does the heavy lifting,” says Opeoluwa Burnett, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “I use several agents to simplify repetitive daily tasks. They help me stay organized, quickly research what I need, and analyze information so I can focus my energy on the work that requires the most strategic thinking.”

Read about how Opeoluwa Burnett uses Copilot

A day in the life of a Microsoft employee using Copilot

Facing agent adoption challenges

At Microsoft, we’re still navigating a few common challenges related to agent adoption:

• They have access to agents and the ability to create them but often feel overwhelmed or unsure where to begin.
• For those still learning Copilot, agents can feel like an additional hurdle.
• Others who’ve embraced “regular” Copilot may not realize that agents exist or know how to find them.

Our use of Copilot and AI agents continues to evolve. As Customer Zero within Microsoft Digital, we want to share how we’re using agents today, as well as what we’ve learned along the way.

Here’s a rundown of how our employees are using Copilot tools and agents to accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently:

Where to begin: Copilot Chat

Chat is often the starting point—the launchpad where you provide a prompt and kick off your interaction with Copilot.

Here you can search for general answers, explore complex queries, get quick results, or discover a Copilot agent that can help you complete your task.

“Copilot is a productivity booster. I can ask it to help me brainstorm and structure a use case and the results are pleasantly surprising, especially as the Copilot ecosystem continues to evolve and we fast-track new capacities.”

Swapna Malekar, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

When Swapna Malekar needed to create a presentation with a short turnaround time, she turned to Copilot. So Malekar, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, shared a screenshot of the slide she was planning to present with Copilot. The tool generated a presentation-ready script she could then read aloud in her meeting later that day.

Now, she incorporates Copilot into her everyday workflows.

“Copilot is a productivity booster,” Malekar says. “I can ask it to help me brainstorm and structure a use case and the results are pleasantly surprising, especially as the Copilot ecosystem continues to evolve and we fast-track new capacities.”

Seamless workflows with Copilot applications

Because Copilot is built into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, and Teams, you can navigate seamlessly between tools without losing context. Your Copilot Chat history follows you, no matter where you start.

That flexibility means you can work the way you naturally do. You might start a Copilot Chat in Word while drafting a document, then switch to Excel or Teams and continue the same conversation without needing to reset or start over.

There’s no single “right” way to use Copilot. Everyone approaches work differently, but Copilot meets you where you are, whether in the browser or in your go-to app, while helping you reach the same solution.

“Choosing the right Copilot for the job is like being in one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books,” Etchells says. “You pick the path you want to go, and you set off on your journey.”

Speed and efficiency: Copilot search

Copilot search shares the same underlying technology as chat. The purpose of the search function in Copilot is to process requests and retrieve results. The difference between the two lies in how the results are delivered.

Chat is designed for more explorational interactions, while search prioritizes fast, targeted access to content and links.

“The value prop for Copilot search is simple: Get what you’re looking for faster.”

Vasanthi Vangipurapu, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Search administrators also have access to the admin portal, where they can customize features such as bookmarks that know what employees are usually looking for when they search common terms.

“The value prop for Copilot search is simple: Get what you’re looking for faster,” says Vasanthi Vangipurapu, senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “When I need specific answers quickly, I use Copilot search. If I want to explore further, I love that it redirects me to Copilot Chat to continue my conversation there.”

Visuals at your fingertips

Copilot Create is a design generator that helps you produce visual assets such as images, posters, infographics, banners, branding, and video. It’s an especially useful tool for people who aren’t professional designers, but who need to create visuals quickly as part of their workflow.

The Create module also supports rapid iteration, making it easy to refine results without starting from scratch. You can adjust layout, tone, or visual direction through simple prompts. This lets you explore multiple approaches and keep creative momentum without getting bogged down in detail.

You can give Create a prompt, even a rough one. It often results in unexpected visual directions you may have not considered on your own—a bit like having an enthusiastic creative partner who’s tossing new issues and helping you discover fresh variations.

While you can also use Copilot Chat to generate visual assets, Copilot Create offers a consolidated experience specifically built for visual design.

Here are prompts you can try in the Copilot Create module:

Analysis and insights: Copilot Researcher agent

The Copilot Researcher agent acts as your supercharged research partner, providing deep analysis and generating detailed reports. You can use Researcher to quantify the expected impact of a new feature, gather usage data, analyze audience insights, and project outcomes based on target user logistics.

Here are some prompts you can use to get started with Copilot Researcher:

Streamlined operations: Employee Self-Service Agent

The Employee Self-Service Agent helps employees quickly find answers to their questions relating to human resources, IT support, and campus services topics.

This tool now serves as a centralized entry point for HR, IT, and facilities support at Microsoft. The agent removes the guesswork, delays, and frustration that our employees used to experience when searching across multiple systems, websites, and knowledge bases for answers to their employment-related queries.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager for Microsoft Digital. “And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities and other high-prio employee self-service topics.”

Here are some prompts that you can use to get help from your Employee Self-Service Agent:

Intelligent collections: Copilot Notebooks module

The Copilot Notebooks module is an interactive workspace that combines the flexibility of a notebook with the intelligence of an AI notepad. Copilot makes it easy to add your chats to a Copilot Notebook, where it can review all included content, summarize information, and answer questions about it—making it easier to navigate large collections of files, presentations, and notes. Notebooks can also be shared, making them useful for teams collaborating on a common goal.

For perspective, Copilot Notebooks is designed for project-based work where you can gather files, references, notes and have Copilot collectively reason over them, while Copilot in OneNote enhances notetaking, content creation and not project-specific reference modeling.

Some of our employees use Copilot Notebooks to prepare for their performance reviews. Instead of scrambling to gather six months of their work, feedback, and other documentation, they easily can assemble everything in one place using the Notebooks module.

“I can take all the campaigns I’ve worked on, the metrics, and any praise I’ve received, drop it all into a Word doc and add it to my Review notebook,” Etchells says. “Then I ask Copilot to tell me how I contributed to each campaign. It saves me a ton of time.”

Here are prompts you can use in the Copilot Notebooks module to do something analyze the impact you have had as a seller over a certain window of time: 

SharePoint agents

SharePoint offers two types of Copilot agents: the built-in Knowledge agent and a custom agent.

“You ask the question and the agent provides the answer, so you can focus on the work, not the search.”

Sunitha Bodhanampati, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Knowledge agent acts like a SharePoint content steward, analyzing and organizing content across your sites. It tags and structures information in ways that allow Copilot to deliver more accurate answers to site-related queries.

You can also create custom agents to manage specialized workflows, connectors, or administrative tasks. You define the agent’s rules and scenarios, and it can operate across other apps and external systems, not just SharePoint.

“Instead of navigating countless folders, files, and links, agents remove the need to remember where information lives,” says Sunitha Bodhanampati, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “You ask the question and the agent provides the answer, so you can focus on the work, not the search.”

Here are some SharePoint agent prompts you can try, depending on your role:

Create your own agent

If you don’t find a Copilot agent that meets your needs, you can create your own. Getting started is as easy as telling Copilot what your ultimate objective is, even if you don’t have all the specifics.

“Just ask Copilot, ‘How do I get started with an agent?’” Etchells says. “Copilot will walk you through it, step-by-step.”

One of our teams in Microsoft Digital built an internal agent we dubbed the Copilot Agent Ideation Partner. This is useful for employees who are just exploring or ready to build, as it helps employees brainstorm agent ideas by spotting repetitive tasks, uncovering work patterns, and turning everyday challenges into actionable concepts they can build into an agent.

“Every employee should build at least one agent,” Burnett says. “When you turn your daily patterns into an agent, you reclaim your time and free yourself up to focus on the work that matters most.

The future of agents

Each agent and module has its own unique strengths. Together, they are part of a broader, AI-powered shift toward helping our employees be more productive and efficient every day.

As the number and variety of agents grows, we’re continuing to raise awareness among employees and our customers about what agents are available and how they can start putting these game-changing capabilities to work.

“We’re still focused on helping people understand what agents can do and how they fit into our everyday work,” Etchells says. “As agents evolve, the goal is to make them easier to discover, try out, and apply within the workflows our employees are already used to.”

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you move along in your journey with Copilot agents and modules:

• Copilot is more than one tool. You can choose from multiple Copilot modules and agents designed for different tasks, roles, and scenarios.
• Selecting the right Copilot unlocks targeted results. Matching the right Copilot to the job reduces friction and helps create seamless workflows.
• Copilot agents enhance productivity and creativity. Whether through Copilot Chat, search, research, notebooks, or other specialized agents, each Copilot agent unlocks efficiency while sparking innovative ideas.
• Copilot agents are evolving into collaborators. These agents are reshaping how people learn, work, and innovate every day.

Try it out

Learn how you can experience Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant.

Related links

• Read our companion story on a day-in-the-life with Copilot.
• Jump into action with the Copilot Prompt Gallery (sign in required).
• Browse the Microsoft AI agent hub.
• Decide which Copilot is right for your organization.
• Find out how we’re powering AI value at Microsoft with Copilot extensibility.
• See an overview of Copilot and AI agents.
• Get started with Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn more about how Copilot and agents are built to power the Frontier Firm.

The post Picking the right Copilot for the job: Tips from our experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But as data sprawls across teams, systems, and borders, the task of ensuring that it remains secure, accurate, and well-governed is a daunting one. A sound approach to data governance is the backbone of responsible data use across the enterprise, creating clarity around data ownership and access.

In an organization the size of Microsoft, no single team can carry this responsibility on its own. Effective data governance must be a distributed effort across all departments and functions.

This story explains how our marketing organization uses the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog to organize and standardize the data we rely on daily. By putting clear ownership, consistent definitions, and reliable governance in place, we’re turning fragmented, unreliable data into an advantage that supports faster decisions and more effective campaigns.

Data governance at scale

As companies grow, their data governance becomes increasingly complex, with different teams creating their own versions of key data concepts, often without realizing it. The complexity is most visible in the way users across an organization define foundational terms.

“We found adoption to be much easier when helping teams focus on building more value in their data instead of driving governance like a compliance effort.”

Nick Doughty, senior product manager, Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog

Examples in marketing include what counts as a customer (active vs. inactive, marketing- or sales-qualified), what constitutes sensitive data (personally identifiable information, behavioral data, partner data), and what a metric means (conversion, engagement, attribution windows).

When inconsistent practices take hold, ownership becomes murky. With the increasing demands that managing data quality and integrity put on our leaders and their teams, effective data governance becomes one more hurdle to productivity.

“We started off implementing data governance like an issue register,” says Nick Doughty, a senior product manager within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog. “Then we progressed to more of an enforcement method, similar to how we were doing security at the time. We found that when we started to push really hard on teams, similar to how we drove other compliance efforts, it was difficult for them to justify or understand why they would want the added governance.”

The introduction of Microsoft Azure Purview in 2020 marked a turning point.

A united platform for data governance, security, and compliance, Purview helps organizations understand, protect, and manage data across environments. It also addresses fragmented data, lack of visibility into where sensitive data lives and how it moves, compliance complexity with regulations (including GDPR and HIPAA), and security risks.

“Our marketing teams used to spend hours hunting for the right customer list because multiple versions lived in different locations, each with unclear owners and inconsistent labels. Now our marketers can trust they are working from current information, while avoiding compliance risks associated with incorrect or unauthorized data.”

Sourabh Mathur, principal engineering lead, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

The Purview Unified Catalog serves as the AI-powered backbone, automatically discovering, classifying, and organizing information so users can easily find and trust the data they need.

By launching the unified catalog, we gave our users a consistent way to understand and use their data, while reinforcing strong governance and compliance practices. The result is data that’s more discoverable, reliable, and actionable. (The product was renamed Microsoft Purview in 2022 and became part of Microsoft 365 compliance tools.)

“Our marketing teams used to spend hours hunting for the right customer list because multiple versions lived in different locations, each with unclear owners and inconsistent labels,” says Sourabh Mathur, a principal engineering lead in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences, who helped set up Purview for our marketing organization.

With the unified catalog in place, Purview surfaces the dataset, shows its lineage, and applies the correct sensitivity classifications.

“Now our marketers can trust they are working from current information, while avoiding compliance risks associated with incorrect or unauthorized customer data,” Mathur says.

Powering marketing at Microsoft with Purview

With more than 200 Microsoft Azure subscriptions, our marketing organization manages one of the largest data estates at the company. The team faces the constant challenge of scattered data, unclear data ownership, and inconsistent governance practices that slow down campaigns and increase compliance risk.

“Marketing can now scale governance across hundreds of data products, support self-service data collection with guardrails, automate access decisions, and enable AI workloads on trusted data.”

Deepak Kumar Biswal, principal software engineering lead, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

By adopting Purview, our marketing team gained unified visibility, clearer classification standards, and smoother collaboration with other departments, like IT and legal. This reduces friction while strengthening data protection.

The result is an organization that moves faster with greater confidence in how it handles customer and campaign data.

Instead of relying on legacy knowledge, forcing users to dig through different servers and SharePoint sites, or constantly sending queries to the engineering teams, our marketing professionals can now explore the curated Purview Unified Catalog, making streamlined, efficient data discovery possible.

“Marketing can now scale governance across hundreds of data products, support self-service data collection with guardrails, automate access decisions, and enable AI workloads on trusted data,” says Deepak Kumar Biswal, a principal software engineering lead in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences. “Purview turns responsible data use into everyday practice, not extra work.”

Data governance and security: Two sides of the same coin

For our marketing organization, data governance and security are inseparable concepts. As soon as you have customer information, you need to make sure it’s secure—sensitive data must be carefully defined, consistently managed, and protected from misuse or breach.

Purview supports this goal by combining governance capabilities with security and compliance controls that provide added layers of protection.

Within marketing, the governance and security teams work closely together. Good governance measures ensure our data is properly defined and standardized, while strong security policies ensure it’s handled with proper safeguards. By pairing governance with strong security practices, our marketing team can remain compliant with data privacy laws, prevent misuse of sensitive information, and foster trust across their organization.

When our marketing team began its Purview journey five years ago, it adopted a centralized governance model. Much like the structure of a government—where federal, state, and local entities each play a role—our approach allows both centralized standards and local autonomy. This creates consistency across the organization without stifling agility.

Our Data Governance team took on the role of steward, defining standards, onboarding systems, and collaborating with its IT partners to connect data environments. Existing assets like data dictionaries and process flows were used to seed the catalog, ensuring the team started from known ground rather than reinventing definitions from scratch.

This deliberate, incremental approach allowed our marketing team to thoughtfully build out healthy governance practices. By moving slowly, the team learned from each step on its journey, refining processes and establishing consistent practices as it moved along.

For example, working closely with our team in Microsoft Digital allowed them to experiment with different ways of discovering and cataloging their data. This involved taking learn and refine how Purview tuned their data before they rolled anything out broadly.

Our goal is to transition to a completely federated model in which responsibility shifts outward. Rather than the marketing governance team doing all the stewardship, individual groups will take ownership of their data within Purview. This shift distributes accountability, embeds governance deeper into daily operations, and makes it easier for teams to monitor data quality and enforce standards on their own.

Impact across the enterprise

Since adopting Purview Unified Catalog, we’ve seen tangible results across our data estate and our data governance practices in marketing and across all verticals within the company. Here are some companywide highlights:

• Better consolidation: We’ve unified five catalogs into one.
• Increased scale: We added 250 data sources onboarded in six months, representing roughly 10 million assets.
• Higher internal adoption: We set up more than 50 governance domains, an effort we supported with reusable training assets, guides, and onboarding materials.

The benefits also include and extend beyond marketing:

• Teams across the company are gaining increased confidence in their data definitions.
• Compliance and privacy obligations are being met more effectively.
• Business value is being generated through better, more trusted use of data.
• Organizations are benefiting from faster time-to-insight.

Launching the marketing governance domain

We’re using Purview to combine essential capabilities like data governance, classification, and quality checks across our Microsoft services, which creates a unified foundation for our enterprise-wide metadata management. These unified capabilities make Purview an indispensable tool for us, and for large-scale enterprises.

“With various role types like data curator and data reader, we can add more visibility into our data—where it lives, how it’s being used, and who are its primary owners. Clearly defining these parameters helps us use the data governance framework as a starting point and improve our data governance capabilities.”

Vinny Singh, principal program manager, Global Marketing Engines and Experiences

As early adopters of Purview Unified Catalog, the group launched the Marketing Governance domain, registering more than 200 data products using the Unified Catalog’s data map.

The products, spanning various datasets, are aligned with strict internal governance standards. This gives marketing the ability to govern, classify, and track data across its ecosystem—ensuring adherence to GDPR and other regulatory compliance measures.

“With various role types like data curator and data reader, we can add more visibility into our data—where it lives, how it’s being used, and who are its primary owners,” says Vinny Singh, a principal program manager in Global Marketing Engines and Experiences. “Clearly defining these parameters helps us use the data governance framework as a starting point and improve our data governance capabilities.”

Key takeaways

Our journey with Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog has generated key insights that you can apply to your own data governance efforts. These include:

• Start small: Don’t try to “boil the ocean.” Begin with three to five governance domains and scale from there.
• Leverage what you have: Data dictionaries, glossaries, and existing documentation provide a strong starting point for a governance platform founded on the Purview Unified Catalog.
• Focus on value, not enforcement: Governance resonates when teams see how it helps them, not when it’s mandated.
• Adapt to your organization: Each team at your company will use Purview differently. Flexibility helps encourage adoption.
• Build community: Data governance is not a solo effort. Collaboration among stakeholders produces stronger standards and better results.

Try it out

Sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Purview.

Related links

• Learn about Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.
• View a practical handbook for securing your data with Microsoft Purview.
• Explore how to use Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview to protect your data.
• Find out how we’re riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover more about Microsoft Purview data governance.

The post Powering data governance at Microsoft with Purview Unified Catalog appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Until now.

To address this challenge, the Microsoft Teams product group worked with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, to create Microsoft Teams Rooms Express Install for compact meeting spaces. This “room-in-a-box” solution quickly transforms small spaces into versatile, modern collaboration hubs.

And now the product group is working with our commercial partners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to extend this small meeting room solution to all customers.

Express Install is a modular meeting room solution that requires little to no physical modifications to a room, which makes it more affordable. Installation involves putting lightweight hardware into a room, turning it on, and connecting it to our Teams Room technology that comes baked in.

Optimizing for efficiency

The Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms story began in 2019. That’s when the product group and our team here in Microsoft Digital used The Hive, our 20,000 square-foot innovation lab, to engineer, architect, and design all the variations of our Teams Room product that are now available.

We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

After tackling high-end executive conference rooms, meeting halls used for all-hands and major company gatherings, and large “workhorse” rooms where typical team meetings are held, it was time to take on the plethora of small rooms at Microsoft. These are the rooms where individuals and small groups of people go to collaborate and do the work that powers the company.

However, the huge number of these types of rooms here at Microsoft (and at other enterprises) often made them too expensive to invest in upgrading.

“We knew we needed to find a way to solve this, to come up with an affordable, modular solution that was easy to install,” says Roy Sherry, a principal, technical program manager for AI-Enabled Meetings in Microsoft Digital. “We worked with the product team to build and test a solution that became Express Install. We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

As Customer Zero for the company, the role for Sherry and the rest of our team is to not only be the first to deploy the technology and services that we sell to customers, but in some cases to help our product teams build them—including these Teams Rooms and our Express Install solution.

We initially installed Express Install 70 times as part of a pilot, and after seeing extremely positive results, we expanded to 700 more rooms across the company. Now our plan is to gradually install it in all of our suitable small rooms.

Bringing the solution to customers via OEMs

After we got Express Install working internally here at Microsoft, we shifted to extending it to our customers.

We wanted to give them the same features and benefits we were seeing here at Microsoft, including:

• OEM availability: Customers can now access Express Install through trusted hardware partners, expanding reach and accessibility.
• One-hour deployment: They can get their small rooms up and running quickly with a streamlined process.
• Enhanced, AI-enabled audio visual (AV) rooms: We’re bringing the full Microsoft Teams experience to Express Install, so even the most budget-conscious organizations can outfit small spaces with the latest meeting technology.

Our partnerships with OEMs have produced a range of Microsoft Teams Rooms products, packages, and systems.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings. They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

Raven Vasquez, senior IT service manager, Microsoft Digital

These designs were created by different OEM partners for a variety of scenarios. So, if a customer has a specific preferred hardware partner, they can work with them to build an Express Install room.

Because the rooms are simpler and easier to build, even organizations with fixed budgets can set up more rooms. That sentiment is reflected in the feedback we get from customers.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings,” says Raven Vasquez, a senior IT service manager in Microsoft Digital. “They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

The Microsoft Teams product group began to work with OEMs who specialized in mounting and furniture solutions. Together, they developed stands and housing kits for Teams Room Express Install, giving customers flexible modular options to create intelligent AV and hybrid meeting experiences.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable. Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Sarika Kesavan, senior program manager, Microsoft Teams

Customers who have started using Express Install are starting to see some of the same efficiency gains that we saw here at Microsoft, which were significant.

“We saw a 40% savings in our cost and time,” says Sarika Kesavan, a senior program manager in the Microsoft Teams product group whose role includes bringing solutions that the company builds at The Hive to customers.

The big wins were that it could be installed in an hour and it wasn’t necessary to pay general contractors to modify rooms or pull cables through walls.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable,” Kesavan says. “Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Traditional conference room setups and upgrades often require permits, construction, specialized wiring, and weeks (or more) of disruptions. As a result, we and many customers have been hesitant to deploy advanced meeting technology, especially for small spaces.

With Express Install, that complexity disappears.

Deploying Express Install

Each Express Install kit is pre-engineered for fast delivery and setup, with flexible configurations for different scenarios and OEM devices.

 For smaller rooms, the package typically includes:

• Teams-certified compute device and camera, combined into a single unit for compact spaces
• Modular display or monitor, sized to fit the room
• Integrated microphone and speaker-bar system
• Simplified tabletop or freestanding mounting solution (no wall-mounting required)
• Pre-installed, preconfigured Teams Rooms software

“Express Install reduces the complexity of a traditional room setup while providing the same experience as a typical Teams Room scenario, but at reduced cost,” Kesavan says.

Gaining insights with the monitoring portal

There’s nothing more disruptive than discovering the in-room technology isn’t working just minutes before a meeting. That’s why it’s vital to be able to check whether your Teams Room is online at any time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity. If I can receive an alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

Divya Tiwari, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal allows you to monitor the compute device and all connected peripherals (such as the display and camera) in a meeting space, giving you full visibility into room status.

Instead of discovering issues only when someone tries to use the room, the portal proactively sends alerts—for example, if a display stops working—so problems can be resolved ahead of time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity,” says Divya Tiwari, senior product manager within Microsoft Digital. “If I can see the alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

The portal also provides insights into room usage and component performance, highlighting underused spaces and helping organizations improve meeting room efficiency.

Accelerating the future of meeting spaces

We launched the initial pilot of Express Install after recognizing a clear gap in the market: organizations needed a smarter, faster way to equip small meeting spaces for collaboration. And we continue to innovate as we roll out this solution to all Microsoft customers.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them. This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Roy Sherry, principal, technical program manager AI enabled meetings, Microsoft Digital

The simplified Express Install design gives organizations the power to scale quickly. If our customers have meeting rooms that need to be up and running fast, Express Install offers a cost-effective path to a fully AI-enabled Teams Room. Their AV budget goes further without sacrificing the modern, Copilot-powered experience that elevates every meeting.

“When we began working with OEMs to bring channel partners and AV integrators on board, we started with small rooms,” Kesavan says. “The value and the cost savings are even greater in larger spaces, so our next phase is to develop solutions for medium- to large-room setups.”

This is just the beginning.

Express Install is opening the door to a new era of fast, scalable, AI-powered collaboration, and we’re excited for our customers to see what’s possible.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them,” Sherry says. “This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms:

• Teams Rooms are for everyone: Express Install makes it easy to deploy interactive, hybrid-friendly features at scale. 
• Explore Express Install options through trusted OEM partners: Review room-in-a-box kits from trusted OEMs to find modular setups that fit your needs.
• Standardize small‑room designs with pre‑engineered kits: Adopt Express Install kits as a repeatable blueprint to scale modern meeting experiences quickly across multiple locations.
• Identify underutilized rooms and optimize space planning: Leverage usage analytics from the Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal to make data‑driven decisions about which rooms to refresh, repurpose, or scale up or down.
• Plan ahead for larger meeting rooms: As OEM partnerships grow, customers can start planning broader deployments that bring the sar.me simplicity and savings to larger spaces.

Try it out

For a closer look at the solution, visit the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience.  

Related links

• Take a virtual meeting room tour.
• Check out Microsoft Teams Rooms: Express Install video.
• Read more about Express Install on the Microsoft Teams blog.
• Watch Microsoft: The Hive 101 video.
• See how we developed the “room-in-a-box” approach of Express Install.
• Explore Microsoft Teams Rooms devices on the Microsoft Showcase site.
• Read about meeting room guidance for Teams on the Microsoft Learn site.

The post A one-hour solution: Scaling Microsoft Teams Rooms in small spaces with Express Install appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Literally.

We were the first enterprise to fully deploy Copilot in 2024, and now, not two years later, our use of the company’s signature generative AI product is maturing.

That doesn’t mean we’re getting serious—it means we’re having fun!

“Gamification is proving to be one of the most powerful ways to drive the more refined, higher-level use of Copilot that we’re looking for,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a business program management senior director within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “When it comes to getting our employees to find more sophisticated and creative ways to use Copilot, we’re finding that having fun is one our biggest differentiators.”

It all started when we took our employees camping—we didn’t really take them into the woods, but we did so in spirit. 

“We discovered that introducing a layer of fun transforms Microsoft 365 Copilot training from a routine task into an entertaining learning experience.”

Cadie Kneip, readiness business program manager, Microsoft Digital

We organized ‘Camp Copilot’ to bring our employees together in a fun way so we could show them how they could add Copilot to their daily workflows.

“We did things like have a superhero prompt where you got to show everyone your superpowers, you could create your own Camp Copilot pin, and we even had a scavenger hunt where you could win cool prizes,” says Cadie Kneip, a readiness business program manager with Microsoft Digital and the creative force behind many of our employee engagement-based Copilot adoption efforts.  

It was a lot of fun, and it worked—Copilot usage by attendees spiked afterwards.

“We discovered that introducing a layer of fun transforms Copilot training from a routine task into an entertaining learning experience,” Kneip says.

Under the guidance of Kneip—our CEO of fun—and others on our team, we created a companywide Copilot Expo, where we all came together to learn more about how to get more out of Copilot (where a reasonable amount of fun was had).

“Working efficiently and consistently with Copilot and AI requires ongoing learning, especially as capabilities are continuously evolving. Gamification offers an excellent way to keep colleagues engaged—helping them learn effortlessly while having fun.”

Kirsten Bliefernicht, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

This three-week immersive program offered 80 role-based learning sessions to fast-track Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption. We made gamification a major theme, which made mastering Copilot feel less like work and more like play.

This time, the uptick in adoption and user satisfaction that followed was companywide.

“Working efficiently and consistently with Copilot and AI requires ongoing learning, especially as capabilities are continuously evolving,” says Kirsten Bliefernicht, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “Gamification offers an excellent way to keep colleagues engaged—helping them learn effortlessly while having fun.”

Gamification for locked-in learning

Copilot Expo attendee Ramita Singh experienced the transformative effect of gamification. A senior program manager within the Microsoft Datacenter Supply Strategy and Planning team, she’s also a Copilot Champion and a regular Copilot user.

“The sessions and fun activities, like building my own avatar, inspired me. Since then, I ramped up my Copilot use and my productivity has skyrocketed.”

Ramita Singh, senior program manager, Datacenter Supply Strategy and Planning

Copilot Champions are early adopters and AI enthusiasts who help Microsoft peers learn and use AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot. For her part, Singh joined the Copilot Champs program to gain efficiency and become more productive.

Even as a regular Copilot user, Singh described her use as limited—until Copilot Expo.

“The sessions and fun activities, like building my own avatar, inspired me,” she says. “Since then, I ramped up my Copilot use and my productivity has skyrocketed.”

Levelling up fun supports engagement

Although the term ”gamification” is relatively new, the practice of including game-design elements in training to increase engagement and motivation and reward behavior has been around for centuries.

Research has shown that incorporating fun into training leads to significant gains in engagement and productivity.

“Seeing Copilot create an image or solve a task is exciting. That can motivate someone to learn more about AI.”

Kaz Takayama, business program manager, Microsoft Digital

Using gamification at Copilot Expo redefined the way people learn. We designed games and reward-based challenges. We awarded points and badges to build interest and increase Copilot use at Microsoft. We created a leaderboard to show the standings and add a competitive edge to the learning.

Participants were represented on the leaderboard by the avatars they created during one of the games. This anonymity meant that competitors only recognized their own avatars and position on the leaderboard.

“People are getting tired of mandatory trainings,” says Kaz Takayama, a business program manager within Microsoft Digital in Japan. “Seeing Copilot create an image or solve a task is exciting. That can motivate someone to learn more about AI.”

Copilot Expo featured diverse content designed to appeal to a variety of people, roles, and workflows. Learning sessions were capped at 30 minutes. Sessions were scheduled at accessible times and targeted to specific roles.

“The result is interactive—you see visuals, you hear music, and the creativity surprises you.”

Ju Bu, business program manager, Microsoft Digital

That personalization allowed engineers, communicators, and salespeople, for example, to learn role-specific uses for Copilot, making the learning even more effective.

During Copilot Expo, games were scheduled prior to training sessions to build engagement. Additional gamified activities followed training to reinforce key concepts and encourage the application of Copilot. Attendees earned points for every Copilot-related task they completed.

“We picked these activities because they only require prompts, and people can practice prompts every day,” says Ju Bu, business program manager for Microsoft Digital in Greater China. “The result is interactive—you see visuals, you hear music, and the creativity surprises you.”

From prompts to play: Gamified activities at Copilot Expo

Activity 1: Practice crafting prompts in Copilot to generate polished images and avatars.

Use the following tips:

• Use clear, descriptive language in prompts.
• Specify style, mood, or format (for example, “cartoon avatar” or “introspective and cinematic” versus something vague, like “make something moody”).
• Experiment with variations to compare and refine results.
• Keep prompts concise but detailed enough.

Activity 2: Use a third-party service built on Azure technology to create songs in any chosen musical genre.

Follow these tips:

• Select a genre that matches the mood you want.
• Provide clear input (lyrics, themes, or tone).
• Adjust tempo and instrumentation for variety.
• Share outputs for group feedback and fun.

Activity 3:  Use Copilot to build quick quizzes that reinforce new information.

One popular format is “Two truths and a lie.” Here are the guidelines:

• Keep statements short and focused on Copilot features.
• Mix one false statement with two accurate ones.
• Use real examples to strengthen recall.
• Encourage discussion after revealing the correct answers.

How it worked: Organizers asked Copilot to create a “Two truths and a lie” quiz by setting parameters (topic = Copilot functionality, number of statements = 3, difficulty = easy). Copilot produced the statements, and participants guessed which were true and which was false. For example:

• Copilot can generate meeting minutes → True
• Copilot can change the meeting organizer → False. Copilot cannot alter calendar details like who the organizer is.
• Copilot can provide real-time transcription → True

The power of friendly competition

According to Tomás Rogeiro Brochado de Miranda, a cloud solution architect at Microsoft based out of Portugal, adding an element of competition is a key ingredient for learning.

“Everyone likes a challenge,” he says. “You might hear someone say they don’t like games, but you’ll never hear someone say, I love to lose.”

Singh agrees.

“For a lot of people, learning feels forced when it’s required,” she says. “But when you add a bit of fun, like a competition, it generates more interest in learning new concepts.”

As organizations race to keep pace with AI, Kerametlian reminds us that learning paths and transformation aren’t one-size-fits-all.

“People learn and grow in different ways,” he says. “Gamification is one of the few powerful tools that other organizations should consider leveraging to maximize productivity and the value they get from Copilot.”

Research shows that gamification not only reinforces habit-building but also boosts positive sentiment about a product—two critical factors for driving Copilot adoption.

We would like our people to use and reuse Copilot, and gamification is helping us make that happen.

We’re also creating a fresh experience for those who’ve stepped away from Copilot. As Kneip puts it, “If someone has a bad AI experience, they won’t return—unless they see a peer succeed.”

When respected colleagues share their wins, it sparks curiosity and people give Copilot another shot.

“After they use AI in ways that matter to them, they often become champions,” Kneip says. “We see that type of turnaround every day.”

Lasting impacts

Months after Copilot Expo wrapped, the momentum hasn’t faded. Many participants are still completing Copilot-related tasks and logging points on the leaderboard—proof that competition continues to fuel engagement.

Copilot adoption at Microsoft has surged, and positive sentiment has increased.

“That’s the opportunity our customers have with AI adoption,” Kneip says. “If you give your organization something that’s relevant, peer driven, and real, they’re going to have a much better experience.”

Post-event, Microsoft engineers have turned the Copilot Expo leaderboard into a template that can be adapted and used by internal teams for their own gamified activities.

“First you need to give people access to Copilot, and then it’s about robust change management complemented by gamification, which significantly accelerates adoption and value.”

Stephan Kerametlian, business program management senior director, Microsoft Digital

Gamification activities continue building excitement around Copilot and AI and what’s possible.

The last two years at Microsoft Digital have been about increasing Microsoft 365 Copilotuser engagement, adoption, productivity, and value.

“When it comes to enabling AI transformation, engaging your employees is everything,” Kerametlian says. “First you need to give people access to Copilot, and then it’s about robust change management complemented by gamification, which significantly accelerates adoption and value. The result? Usage grows, enthusiasm soars, and productivity follows.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for using gamification to energize AI adoption at your organization:

• Drive lasting engagement: Gamified activities ignite fun, excitement, and learning that continues well beyond an event.
• Offer experiences: Creative training methods like friendly competition and interactive workshops significantly enhance employee engagement. Engaged employees are more likely to embrace AI tools.
• Foster innovation: Encouraging creative thinking empowers employees to explore AI applications, enhancing their problem-solving capabilities and increasing their productivity.
• Build trust and skills: Peer-led training leverages existing knowledge within teams, making it easier for employees to learn from each other about AI tools.
• Encourage experimentation: A risk-free environment allows employees to experiment with AI tools without fear of failure, which is vital for discovering practical applications.

Try it out

• Start using Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Get step-by-step instructions for creating an engaging Microsoft 365 Copilot training series with our Copilot Virtual Skilling Event Framework.

Related links

• Review our Top 10 things to try first with Microsoft 365 Copilot guide.
• Learn how to get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot with our adoption playbook.
• Check out our Monday morning with Copilot experience.

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