Generative AI has captured the world’s attention, and businesses are taking notice.

According to our annual Microsoft Work Trends report, 70% of people would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads.

Capitalizing on this trend will mean the difference between surging ahead or getting left behind, including here at Microsoft, where we were the first enterprise to fully deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“I’m inspired by the transformative power of AI,” says Andrew Osten, general manager of Business Operations and Programs in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “I’ve been impressed with how quickly our employees have put it to work for them.”

He would know. His team is responsible for driving usage and adoption of Copilot and any new features to more than 300,000 employees and vendors across the world.

“Customers are looking to us to share what we’ve learned as the first enterprise to deploy Copilot. Our team has a unique opportunity to help them deploy and get to value as quickly as possible.”

Andrew Osten, general manager, Microsoft Digital

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We provide a blueprint for our customers to follow as Customer Zero for the company, and as such, we’ve created this guide for deploying and adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot that’s based on our experience here at Microsoft.

“Customers are looking to us to share what we’ve learned as the first enterprise to deploy Copilot,” Osten says. “Our team has a unique opportunity to help them deploy and get to value as quickly as possible.”

Are you an IT pro?

View the full version of this deployment and adoption guide here.

Chapter 1: Getting your governance right

Before you even begin your Microsoft 365 Copilot implementation, you’ll want to consider how this tool impacts your data. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) that interact with data and content across your organization and uses information your employees can access to transform user prompts into personalized, relevant, and actionable responses.

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Microsoft 365 Copilot was designed to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. That ensures private or confidential information stays that way.

This chapter outlines the highly robust, best-case scenario we created for Microsoft, but we know not every organization has a fully deployed data governance strategy. If you’re in that position, don’t worry! You can use Restricted SharePoint Search to provide instant value and protection without exposing Copilot to all of your internal SharePoint sites.

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

We’ve developed four data labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Responsible self-service

Enable your employees to create new workspaces like SharePoint sites, ensuring your company data is on your Microsoft 365 tenant. That enables your people to take full advantage of Copilot in ways that align with your organizational data hygiene while you keep your company’s information safe.

Top-down defaults

Label containers for data segmentation by default to ensure your information isn’t overexposed. At Microsoft, we default our container labels to “Confidential\Internal Only.” We use Microsoft Purview to manage this process.

Consistency within containers

Derive file labels from their parent containers. Consistency boosts security and reduces the administrative burden on your employees for labeling every file they create. Copilot will reflect file labels in chat responses so employees know the level of confidentiality of each portion of AI-created responses.

Employee awareness

We train our employees to understand how to handle and label sensitive data. By making your employees active participants in your data hygiene strategy, you increase accuracy and improve your security posture.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices above form a foundation for compliance and security, but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. Here’s how:

Trust, but verify
Empower self-service with sensitivity labels, but verify by checking against data loss prevention standards, then use auto-labeling and quarantining when necessary. We’ve configured Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to detect and control sensitive content automatically.

Expiry and attestation
Put strong lifecycle management protocols in place that require your employees to attest containers to keep them from expiring. We don’t keep items that don’t have an accountable employee or that might not be necessary for our work.

Controlling the flow
Limit oversharing at the source by enabling company-shareable links instead of forcing employees to grant access to large groups. To enforce these behaviors, you can set default link types based on labels through Purview.

Oversharing detection
Even under the best circumstances, accidents happen. When one of our employees does overshare sensitive data, we use Microsoft Graph Data Connect extraction in conjunction with Microsoft Purview to catch and report oversharing.

International compliance: No size fits all

Europe has extra requirements in the form of EU Data Boundary regulations and works councils, organizations that provide employee co-determination on workers’ rights or regulatory issues. Our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment meant we needed to partner closely with our Microsoft works councils to address complex data and privacy implications.

Your experience will vary depending on your industry and where you operate, but we’ve learned that it’s best to work closely with local subsidiaries to ensure you have a complete picture of a region’s regulatory situation. Local insiders are poised to liaise with works councils or other bodies through direct relationships. Start the process early so you can manage feedback cycles effectively and resolve any concerns through configurations that work for your employees.

Learning from our governance, security, and compliance practices

Bring the right people into the conversation

Don’t keep this conversation in the IT sphere alone. Bring in all the relevant security, legal, and compliance professionals.

Build a foundation for automation

Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention has powerful intelligent detection, but it relies on establishing good defaults.

Think about how your employees will use Copilot

Determine the primary use cases. The kinds of collaboration and access employees need will affect your labeling architecture.

Take this opportunity to train employees

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to refresh employee knowledge around data privacy, let this moment be your milestone.

Don’t overwhelm your users

Make labeling easy and intuitive and ensure it isn’t overwhelming.
Employees should have a limited set of choices to keep things simple.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to tackle governance, security, and compliance at your company. It’s based on what we learned deploying Copilot internally here at Microsoft.

• Establish a clear labeling framework that defines classification levels, maps labels to the right policies (such as access control, encryption, DLP, and storage rules), sets container defaults, and ensures employees understand how to apply labels correctly.
• Implement comprehensive data loss prevention controls by configuring Microsoft Purview DLP standards and quarantines, defining lifecycle and attestation processes, and using Microsoft Graph Data Connect to identify and remediate oversharing.
• Engage globally to meet international compliance needs by partnering with local subsidiaries and works councils, addressing regional requirements and concerns, and determining where segmented or region‑specific deployments are necessary.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read our guide to governing Microsoft 365 Copilot. This step-by-step resource, based on our internal experience at Microsoft, will help you adapt your existing governance standards to reflect the new realities of AI.

Further guidance for you

• Conduct the Microsoft 365 Copilot Optimization Assessment to understand your level of AI adoption and chart your course.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

At the time of our deployment, we were the first company to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents at scale, and our implementation team had to choose from different licensing strategies. We’ve learned from experience that it makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the experience and enable the rest of your organization. For us, that looked like:

Phase zero

We provided early access to our Copilot engineering team to test-drive the tool from an insider’s perspective. 

• Product engineers

Phase one

We issued a limited number of on-demand licenses in core scenarios to get validation and feedback for key use cases.

• Sales
• Marketing

Phase two

We extended licenses to teams who needed to understand and support Copilot or provide approval for use.

• Support
• HR
• Legal
• Security
• Works councils

Phase three

We deployed Copilot and started working on adoption across the entire company.

• Advancing in phases, we deployed Copilot to more than 300,000 Microsoft employees and external staff.

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. In Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

We highly recommend defining a phased rollout strategy and structuring your groups accordingly. That creates accountability and gives your IT admins a crucial point of contact for understanding the licensing needs of different groups within your organization.

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

Optimize licensing costs: Create groups that reflect your business needs and goals that align with your respective business sponsors. Sync your licensing status changes with your group membership changes. That way, you can assign the right licenses to the right users and adjust easily if you require frequent changes (e.g., in your early initial validation phase) and avoid paying for licenses you don’t need or use.

Refine admin costs: Group-based licensing enables your admins to assign one or more product licenses to a group. This depends on your rollout strategy and progress—your admins will be able to streamline your group setup at scale, reducing your admin overhead, which is helpful considering all the licenses you likely need to manage.

Enhance compliance and security: This ensures that only authorized users are licensed and have access to resources, enhancing your security and compliance. Your admins can use audit logs and other Microsoft Entra services to monitor and manage your group-based licensing activities.

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “When do I get access?”

You can easily avoid the issue through clear and honest communication. For example, when you alert your initial implementation groups about their Copilot access, you could simultaneously deploy “Coming soon” emails to the rest of your organization. That will help you avoid any confusion while simultaneously generating excitement.

Your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication, especially with organizational leadership, is a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from our implementation

Design for the “who”

When you determine your initial cohorts, base your decisions on which roles have the largest coverage and will provide the most relevant feedback.

Get your groups in place

Be thoughtful about your Microsoft 365 groups and make sure everyone knows who owns them and who’s responsible.

Engage your support team from the start

This is a new technology, so your support teams will receive requests. Ensure they’re ready by giving them early access.

Manage expectations to minimize blowback

Proactively help users understand why they have licenses or don’t. Note that your rollout strategy might be subject to change.

Bring leadership on board early

Executive sponsorship isn’t just useful for adoption. Leaders will also help you identify the key use cases within their organizations.

Product feedback at every level

Encourage feedback for employees in your early implementation phases because that will guide your wider adoption efforts.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to help you with your internal implementation and admin process. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Prepare your organization for Copilot by performing the Microsoft 365 Copilot optimization assessment, defining implementation phases and audience groups, securing leadership sponsorship, and mapping your rollout plan to a clear licensing strategy.
• Onboard users and activate your environment by assembling the right security groups, building an automated licensing workflow, enabling roles for Copilot reports and dashboards, assigning and configuring licenses, and gathering early signals from pilot usage and feedback.
• Drive engagement through targeted communication by analyzing in‑app and qualitative pilot feedback, reviewing usage data, and delivering clear, ongoing communications aligned with your adoption strategy.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn about the councils steering our AI projects here at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft.

Further guidance for you

• Use the Copilot Success Kit to accelerate your implementation with templates, onboarding guides, and technical readiness resources.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to accelerate value

The fact that your employees are excited about trying out Copilot isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management to drive usage and adoption.

To do this effectively, you will need to empower change agents in your organization. These are not part-time roles; they are dedicated resources across your company who are responsible for the change management function, including creation of a deployment and adoption plan, facilitating principled change management practices, communicating and engaging with employees, preparing employee readiness and learning opportunities, and then measuring the success of your deployment across the enterprise. At a high level, your strategy should consist of the following five steps.

Microsoft 365 Copilot change management

How we drove adoption in Microsoft Digital

At Microsoft, we broke our company-wide adoption efforts into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you may benefit from this approach as well. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar. At Microsoft, we did this in four phases:

Get ready

Effective change management requires careful planning. Begin by identifying and then working with company-wide change management leads. Next, identify members of your target cohorts who will support the adoption, including change managers, leadership sponsors, and employee champions.

Champions will be crucial to your adoption by filling several powerful roles:

• Pinpointing key usage scenarios for Copilot based on their cohort’s culture or processes.
• Providing insights that help adoption leaders build out their rollout plans.
• Most importantly, demonstrating the value of Copilot and showing their peers how powerful this tool can be in their day-to-day work.

When champions socialize their tips and tricks, our experience at Microsoft Digital has revealed that it’s best to share specific prompts and the value they provided as a concrete entry point for users. For example, a champion could say, “I saved three hours drafting this sales script in Microsoft Word using this prompt,” then share their Copilot prompt as a place for peers to start.

Works councils also play a key role at this stage. They offer the benefit of local cultural expertise and can help you identify the challenges employees face in their jurisdiction. Even something as simple as understanding proper modes of address helps smooth the road to adoption through effective communication.

Each of these sets of stakeholders has a role to play in leading your own rollout. We recommend using Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption resources to build out your own adoption plan.

Onboard and engage

At Microsoft, we implemented this phase across each adoption cohort. Because every group will have its own champions and leadership sponsors, it’s important to treat each of them as its own organization, with its own unique adoption needs.

In advance of our general rollout, we created “jump-start” communications with links to learning opportunities:

Localized training took the form of Power Hours in different languages and time zones. These training sessions demonstrated key Copilot scenarios across Microsoft 365 apps.

Self-learn assets included user quick-start guides, demo videos, and Microsoft Viva Learning modules to accommodate different learning styles and preferences.

Pre-rollout communications fulfill two needs. First, this messaging is a great opportunity to launch your champion communities. Second, these communications build your employee population’s desire and excitement for their incoming Copilot licenses, then prepare them to hit the ground running when they get access.

After your Copilot licenses are live, your launch-day welcome comms are straightforward. Invite employees to access Copilot and to start experimenting with how it can fit into their work. There are many possible vectors for deploying these communications, but a multi-pronged effort that includes Microsoft Viva Amplify will deliver the maximum impact.

For support in building out your own communication plan, our adoption team has created a user onboarding kit for Copilot. These ready-to-send emails and community posts can help you onboard and engage your users.

Deliver impact

After everyone has access, it’s time to promote Copilot usage and ensure all employees are having the best possible experience and gaining the most value. For our cohorts, employee champions and leadership sponsors were essential levers.

It’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another tool. It introduces a whole new way of working within employees’ trusted apps. At Microsoft, we took great care to encourage employees to adapt a mindset to see it as part of their daily work—not just something they play with when there’s time.

Microsoft Viva Engage, or a similar employee communication platform, is a helpful forum for peer community support. In our case, it provided an organic space for champions to share their expertise and change managers to provide further recommendations and adoption content. For employees who explore best on their own, Copilot Lab provides in-the-flow learning opportunities to build their prompt skills.

Meanwhile, leadership sponsors diversified our communications strategy by deploying and amplifying messaging through executive channels like org-wide emails or Viva Engage Leadership Corner posts.

Extend and optimize

Understanding overall usage patterns and impact is crucial to optimizing usage. Our Microsoft Digital team used a combination of controlled feature rollout (CFR) technology while tracking usage through Microsoft 365 admin center and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. Together, these tools gave us the visibility and tracking we needed to establish and communicate adoption patterns.

Meanwhile, IT admins and user experience success managers can access simple in-app feedback through Microsoft 365 admin center. And to really maximize value, our Microsoft Digital employee experience teams conducted listening sessions and satisfaction surveys.

All these insights are helping us establish a virtuous cycle to drive further value and better adoption for future rollouts, extend usage to new and high-value scenarios, incorporate Copilot into business process transformation, and understand custom line-of-business opportunities.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

Our team in Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Viva to help enable our 300,000-plus global users. Microsoft Viva is an Employee Experience Platform that brings together communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning in one unified solution. Our team used Viva across a range of change management scenarios, including building awareness, communicating with our employees, providing access to readiness and learning resources, and measuring the impact of our deployment.

You can see a few of the specific ways we used Viva to accelerate employee adoption below.

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva

Viva Connections

Sharing key news related to deployment and enablement, generating “buzz,” and tying Copilot to Microsoft culture.

Viva Amplify

Producing and efficiently distributing employee communications to build awareness and excitement.

Viva Learning

Courses and training for our employees on how to maximize value from Copilot, inclusive of building effective prompts.

Viva Engage

Actively engaging employees, providing leader updates, listening to feedback, and enabling Champs community.

Viva Insights

Using the Microsoft 365 Copilot Dashboard beta to identity actionable insights and usage trends.

Viva Pulse

Instant feedback from employees on their Copilot experience to fine-tune our landing and adoption approach.

Viva Glint

Understanding employee sentiment and gauging the overall effectiveness of our Copilot deployment effort.

Learning from our adoption of Copilot

Cascade adoption efforts through localization

Regional differences, priorities, even time zones—they can all block your centralization efforts. Your insider adoption leaders within each adoption cohort can help.

Empower your employee champions with trust

Monitor your user-led adoption communities at the start to provide support. As this community of power users becomes product experts, they’ll take over.

Empower employees as innovators

You’ll be surprised by what your employees dream up. Provide every opportunity for them to share their favorite tips and usage scenarios.

Create excitement, but set expectations

Encourage a healthy mindset around what Copilot can accomplish and where it fits. Don’t overpromise.

Gamify learning to build engagement and experience

Friendly competitions or cooperative challenges like prompt-a-thons generate excitement and invite creativity.

Understand that for many, AI is emotional

Overcome AI hesitancy by encouraging employees to tackle easy tasks with Copilot assistance. That will help minimize reluctance.

Use Microsoft Viva to accelerate time to value

Viva supports user enablement through learning, effective communication, usage tracking, and employee sentiment.

Key takeaways

Use these tips as your guide as you build out and implement your adoption plan. They are based on our own experience internally at Microsoft.

• Prepare your organization for adoption by identifying your adoption lead, building a cross-functional cohort-based team, defining personas and key usage scenarios, establishing communication preferences and success metrics, completing enablement training, and creating a localized communications and asset library.
• Engage your cohorts and activate readiness by deploying targeted onboarding communications, launching champion communities, running live and self-paced learning experiences, and elevating visibility with digital materials that help employees understand how Copilot improves their daily work.
• Drive measurable impact across cohorts by promoting usage through internal channels, reporting on KPIs at planned intervals, gathering employee sentiment through surveys and listening sessions, spotlighting success stories, applying learnings to refine adoption activities, and nurturing champions through deeper technical training.
• Extend and optimize your deployment by exploring new high‑value scenarios, identifying opportunities for business process transformation with agents, Copilot Studio, plugins, and connectors, and sourcing custom line‑of‑business use cases that advance your organization’s Copilot maturity.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we boosted our Copilot adoption with a companywide expo.
• Explore how we created a Center of Excellence to guide our adoption and use of AI.

Further guidance for you

• Access the Copilot scenario library to understand different user needs and opportunities.
• Deepen Copilot engagement through the Microsoft Modern Collaboration Architecture (MOCA).

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to support scenarios. As a result, it’s important to get your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations.

For us in Microsoft Digital, four principles define high-quality support:

Available

Highly available and in-context support should deliver both self-help and assisted experiences wherever and however the user needs it.

Consistent

Coherent and seamless access to support across the entire journey eliminates frustration and keeps the experience consistent.

Contextual

Base your support experience on where the user is and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Personal

Anchor support in a user’s goals and preferences.

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include self-service support options in their rollout communications.

Seven things we learned prepping to support Microsoft 365 Copilot

Preliminary access

Select your initial support specialists. Include people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.

Communication hub

Establish a community space where your support team can connect and collaborate on issues. Invite non-support professionals as needed.

Knowledge base

Start a collaborative document and add learnings. This will eventually evolve into your knowledge base for internal support.

Widen access

Host information sessions with the wider support team and extend access so all relevant support professionals can ramp up.

Rehearse

Conduct role-playing and shadowing sessions so support teams can build practical knowledge and confidence.

Support go-live

Get your support resources and processes ready and push them live in advance of your Copilot deployment. Consider a dry run.

Track

Determine a tracking cadence and gather data on Copilot issues that arise so support teams can identify trending issues and tickets.

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

We’re getting questions about why particular employees don’t have licenses.

Use employee change management communication waves to solve for this issue by alerting employees when they’ll have access to licenses.

Users are coming to us with questions that would be better served by adoption and employee material, and that isn’t our role as support.

Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources.

Teams are looking for integration support. Where do I send them?

Share this list of pre-built connectors to help your users integrate various data sources to Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported.

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

If employees are signed into Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

My organization has concerns about who owns the IP that Copilot generates. Does the Microsoft Customer Copyright Commitment apply to Copilot?

Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.”

What’s the best way to verify the accuracy of the information Copilot provides?

Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to manage your Copilot support efforts. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Enable and align your support team by starting with a core group of support leaders, establishing shared communication spaces and a collaborative knowledge base, expanding access to the full Copilot support team, training them through information sessions and role‑playing exercises, defining escalation paths, and partnering with internal communications to finalize user‑facing support materials.
• Deliver meaningful user impact by signaling support availability across employee communities, publishing a clear and accessible user-facing knowledge base, and standing up self-service automations where appropriate to empower users and reduce friction.
• Optimize and mature your support services by reviewing ongoing support issues and product feedback, and continually refining support workflows to drive efficiency, accuracy, and a better user experience.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read how we’re using AI to transform our Support business at Microsoft. This article shares how our Support team in Microsoft Digital is using AI to overhaul the business from end to end.
• Learn how we deployed the Employee Self-Service Agent here at Microsoft. This blog post shares how we’re using this agent to help our employees with their support needs in the flow of where they work in Copilot.

Further guidance for you

• Follow the Microsoft IT admin guide for Copilot onboarding, enablement, and support resources to ensure a smooth rollout.
• Access the Copilot Success Kit for launch day assets, support templates, and troubleshooting guides.

Chapter 5: Extending Copilot through agents

As organizations and employees have matured with respect to AI, agentic extensibility is expanding the frontiers of this technology. By using and even creating agents that surface knowledge, take actions, and reinvent workflows, employees can personalize AI’s capabilities to fulfill more specific needs.

At Microsoft, our goal has been to provide access and enable agents at appropriate levels for our employees and the company as a whole. To make that happen, we’ve adopted a maturity model for agentic AI deployment. Early phases focus on using Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases will enable our employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Agentic AI at Microsoft

Each of these levels of agentic capability requires different tools to create and depends on different policies to govern. Because retrieval agents don’t require special tooling, we allow employees to create them at will through Copilot Chat and simplified agent builders in Copilot Studio and SharePoint.

For more complex agents intended to meet enterprise needs across lines of business or the company as a whole, our developers use more full-featured tools like Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. For these kinds of agents, we apply the same rigor, reviews, and software development lifecycle (SDL) we use as part of our standard internal app development.

As you explore the different kinds of agents available to your users and decide how and where to enable them, adoption.microsoft.com provides an excellent place to start. It provides three different approaches to creating agents: Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Azure AI Foundry, and Copilot Studio.

All of this choice adds complexity, so maintaining visibility and control over the agents your employees create can be a challenge. As a result, we take a matrixed approach to creating and governing agents based on different parameters. They include the type of agent, how the user creates it, its knowledge sources, the need for custom tooling, sharing and publishing permissions, and more.

Keeping agents safe and effective through good governance

At Microsoft, we incorporated elements of our tenant’s minimum bar for governance into our policies for managing agents. These measures include Microsoft Information Protection, a functional inventory, activity logging, lifecycle management, and the ability to properly isolate agents against crossing data boundaries.

To govern agentic capabilities, we introduced further controls like sharing limits, breadth of knowledge sources, agent metadata, and information about an agent’s behaviors. The result is a proactive approach to governance backstopped by reactive structures that catch any issues.

As you think about governing your own agents, consider the four core principles we’ve established at Microsoft Digital.

We empower employees to create and share simple, low-risk agents

 We provide a safe space and personal flexibility that allows individual employees to experiment without implicating company data or content users don’t own.

We capture and vet sensitive data flows at the enterprise level 

More complex or far-reaching agents owned by teams or lines of business need enterprise documentation to account for external audits or security and privacy validation.

We protect data designated confidential or higher 

We contain data flows to tenant mandates and only trust suitable storage destinations for content.

We honor the enterprise lifecycle 

We treat agents that individual employees own like any other user-created app and delete them when that individual leaves the organization. Agents owned by teams have a lifecycle defined by the tenant and tied to attestation, the SDL, and accountability confirmations.

Once you have your governance policies and procedures in place, you can begin your rollout to users through many of the same strategies and processes we’ve discussed in this guide.

Learning from our experience with agents

Connect with relevant stakeholders

Establish early communication and collaboration with members of your security, legal, compliance, IT, and other teams who can help you define ways to configure Copilot Studio agent builder safely.

Trust and empower

Provide safe spaces with appropriate guardrails for individual employees to experiment with simple agents. Copilot Studio agent builder is a great place to start.

Expand enterprise capabilities

Empower a small number of trusted creators to experiment with more powerful agent-building tools under the close watch of IT, Governance, Security, Privacy, Data, and HR teams. This will reveal gaps in process and policy and inform future reviews.

Solidify labeling and data

Revisit your labeling structures and data flows. It will be important to have these structures in place to support this new agentic environment. Start by learning from our experience governing Copilot at Microsoft.

Extend your review process

Adapt any review processes you already have in place to agents, including security, privacy, and accessibility. Embed those reviews into your publishing workflow for agents operating above the individual level. Consider adding reviews for Responsible AI.

Prevent agent sprawl

Establish a reasonable enterprise lifecycle for agents that includes attestation. That will keep agents from sprawling or remaining in place after employees have left your organization or simply no longer need a particular agent.

Key takeaways

Use these tips to manage your Copilot support efforts. They are based on our experience here at Microsoft.

• Plan and refine your governance approach by aligning with Security, Legal, Compliance, HR, and IT; updating existing governance and labeling policies for agents; defining your review process; building a matrix that maps agent capabilities to governance controls; and determining how your SDL procedures apply to agents.
• Pilot with targeted teams to validate your controls by selecting groups such as Security, HR, and IT; establishing clear feedback and monitoring channels; and iterating on your review and remediation procedures based on insights from early adopters.
• Enable agents responsibly across the organization by ensuring foundational protections like Purview DLP and Microsoft Information Protection are in place, deploying adoption and change‑management communications, enabling simple agent‑builder capabilities for broad users, and unlocking advanced agent development scenarios for IT and line‑of‑business developers.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read about how embracing the agentic future is enabling us to become an AI-first Frontier Firm. This article shares our vision for using agents to transform the workplace.
• Find out more about our deployment of Microsoft Agent 365 at Microsoft. This post shows how we’re using this new platform to manage our agent ecosystem. 

Further guidance for you

• Follow the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents Deployment Blueprint to enable agents at scale with security, governance, and measurement strategies.
• Learn about the Responsible AI policies and practices that we use to guide our use of AI at Microsoft.

Applying our lessons to your own Copilot deployment

Embarking on your Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and agentic extensibility journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that Microsoft Digital has learned from our internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls.

“Deploying Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience.”

Stephan Kerametlian, business program management senior director, Microsoft Digital

By anchoring your work in careful planning and making use of the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

We’ve learned a lot on our journey with Copilot, and we’re happy that we get to share our experiences with you—hopefully they help you on your journey.

“Deploying Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a business program management senior director in Microsoft Digital.

You’re not in this alone. If you’re looking for support or knowledge on any aspect of your deployment, reach out to our customer success team.

Key takeaways

This guide reflects our learnings and the processes we followed during our internal rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot. This last set of tips summarizes the major actions you can take to get started with Copilot at your company. 

• Start with strong governance: Build a clear labeling and data protection strategy before deploying Copilot to safeguard sensitive information and meet compliance needs.
• Pilot, then scale: Roll out Copilot in phases, beginning with pilot groups to gather feedback and refine your approach before expanding companywide.
• Communicate early and often: Proactive communication and leadership sponsorship are essential for managing expectations and driving successful adoption.
• Empower champions: Identify and enable employee champions to share best practices, tips, and real-world scenarios that help others get value from Copilot.
• Invest in training: Provide tailored learning resources and support to help users build confidence and skills with Copilot in their daily workflows.
• Measure and optimize: Track usage, collect feedback, and continuously refine your deployment to maximize impact and uncover new opportunities.
• Plan for support: Set up self-service and human support channels early so employees can get help quickly and keep momentum going.
• Extend with agents: As your organization matures, explore agentic AI to automate workflows and unlock even greater productivity gains.

Key actions

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read our IT playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm in the era of AI.
• Review our five-step AI maturity guide for IT leaders.
• Learn how our IT organization is powering our companywide digital transformation.
• View the full, detailed version of this guide.

Further guidance for you

• Read the Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report.
• Find the best overall Copilot deployment and adoption guidance at adoption.microsoft.com.

Try it out

• Learn how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story, and we’ll get back to you.

The post Microsoft 365 Copilot for executives: Sharing our deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve been on the front lines of this AI-powered revolution, translating vision into reality and reimagining what’s possible for the enterprise.

“We’ve learned so many lessons over the past few years building AI-powered solutions and driving an AI-forward culture. We’re excited to share them with our customers and partners so they can learn from our journey.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

As generative AI leapt into the mainstream with the arrival of models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and transformative tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, the stakes for IT leaders have never been higher.

The challenge isn’t just about deploying the latest AI tools—it’s about architecting a foundation for sustained, responsible, and scalable change across the enterprise.

That’s where this guide comes in. We’re opening a window into our own AI evolution—sharing our hard-won lessons, proven frameworks, and actionable steps that can help you steer your organization from AI exploration to AI acceleration. Whether you’re just beginning your journey or ready to scale enterprise-wide adoption, this guide is built to empower you to make informed decisions, sidestep common pitfalls, and unlock the full promise of AI-driven transformation.

“We’ve learned so many lessons over the past few years building AI-powered solutions and driving an AI-forward culture,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We’re excited to share them with our customers and partners so they can learn from our journey.”

Read on to discover how we moved from AI vision to AI reality here in Microsoft Digital. You’ll learn how you can drive measurable business outcomes while building a culture that’s ready for what’s next.

The five stages of AI-powered transformation

We have led Microsoft through five stages of AI maturity—from initial exploration to becoming an AI-driven enterprise. This has been a three-year journey, and you and your digital leaders will need to be prepared to take time to fully experience each of these stages to truly unlock the potential of AI to transform your enterprise.

What follows is a stage-by-stage summary of how we achieved our transformation, followed by a list of empowering actions you can take to help you on your own journey.

Mapping our journey to AI maturity

Stage 1: Awareness and foundation

Set a bold vision for your AI journey, anchored in clear business outcomes—avoid implementing “AI for AI’s sake.” Engage your executive sponsors early and form an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to foster cross-functional collaboration and empower experimentation. Establish Responsible AI principles alongside your organization’s ethics team and assess your data readiness from the start—remember, “no AI without data.” By building these foundations, you’ll position your teams to confidently launch AI initiatives and drive meaningful transformation.

Target outcomes

A foundational strategy, governance principles, and leadership buy-in to kickstart AI projects.

Learn more

Learn how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.

“At the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence, we’ve learned that combining strong governance, data readiness, and a continuous-improvement mindset transforms AI pilots into enterprise-scale solutions,” says Nitul Pancholi, the AI CoE lead in Microsoft Employee Experience. “This guide distills our three-year journey into clear, actionable steps to accelerate responsible AI adoption, mitigate risk, and drive measurable business impact.”

Stage 2: Active pilots and skill building

To accelerate your AI journey, start by launching targeted pilot projects across diverse areas of your organization—think automated support chatbots or network analytics. Encourage experimentation and leverage hackathons to surface a broad range of ideas. Narrow these down to your most promising initiatives by evaluating business value against implementation effort and focus resources on a select group of high impact “big bets.”

Empower your teams by investing in upskilling: offer discipline-aligned learning paths, issue digital credentials, and celebrate progress to foster a culture of continuous learning and knowledge-sharing. Establish early-stage governance by requiring all pilots to undergo Responsible AI and architectural reviews. By following these steps, you’ll create early momentum, build internal expertise, and identify the AI solutions most likely to drive meaningful impact at scale.

Target outcomes

The first tangible benefits of AI: efficiency gains, time and cost savings, and quality improvements, and an internal talent pool emerging, paving the way to scale successful solutions.

Learn more

Find out how we’re embracing AI at Microsoft with new AI certifications.

Stage 3: Operationalize and govern

To scale and integrate AI solutions across your organization, move beyond pilot projects by deploying AI solutions directly into production and embedding them within core business workflows.

Strengthen your data and AI infrastructure—consider implementing a unified data platform and robust Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) pipelines—to support this transition. Formalize enterprise governance with clearly defined steering teams: empower your AI Center of Excellence to accelerate implementation and establish a Data Council to ensure data quality and “AI-ready” assets and a Responsible AI Office to oversee ethical use and compliance. Encourage collaboration among these groups and designate domain leads to ensure your AI initiatives consistently deliver tangible business value.

By putting these practices in place, you can drive successful scaling and operationalization of AI throughout your enterprise.

Target outcomes

Multiple AI use cases running at enterprise scale under robust oversight with cross-functional alignment on AI objectives and the business value they’re delivering.

Learn more

Read our guide for tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance your company.

Stage 4: Enterprise-wide adoption

To consolidate your gains and achieve AI adoption across the enterprise, make AI a core consideration in every new project and process.

Ask where AI-driven intelligence can deliver real impact, whether by boosting efficiency, enhancing user experiences, or unlocking new business value. Align AI initiatives with your organization’s strategic goals by empowering business leads to synchronize efforts and continuously update your AI roadmap. Cultivate a data-driven culture through ongoing, large-scale training and make AI tools a natural part of everyday work. Establish rigorous impact tracking with clear metrics for value delivered—such as time savings, cost reduction, and quality improvements—and review these outcomes regularly at the leadership level to maintain accountability.

By integrating these practices, you can drive AI adoption throughout your organization and ensure sustained, measurable impact.

“What’s unique about our approach is that every agent is engineered for responsible action. We design agents to operate within enterprise workflows, guided by policy-aware controls, telemetry integration, and human oversight,” says Faisal Nasir, the AI CoE and Data Council lead in Microsoft Employee Experience.

Through the AI Center of Excellence and the Data Council, we ensure agents are grounded in AI-ready data and undergo comprehensive architecture and governance reviews.

“This ensures our AI solutions are not only intelligent, but also accountable, governable, and fully production-ready,” Nasir adds.

Target outcomes

AI is a pillar of your operational strategy, backed by a data-driven culture and continuous monitoring of business impact.

Learn more

Learn how we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.

Stage 5: Transform your business with agentic AI

To drive a lasting AI-powered business transformation, organizations must embed AI into every aspect of their operations and culture.

Start by leveraging the expertise of your AI CoE to foster innovation, drive continuous improvement, and keep your AI initiatives evolving. Use structured mechanisms like a Kaizen funnel to crowdsource, prioritize, and advance ideas that extend the impact of AI across the enterprise.

Strengthen governance to address the advanced challenges of agentic applications, including responsible scaling of generative AI and effective mitigation of AI hallucinations. Focus on refining human-AI collaboration so your teams are empowered to offload routine tasks to AI agents and concentrate on higher-value work.

Another tactic that’s been highly successful in Microsoft Digital is “Fix, Hack, Learn” weeks, where employees are encouraged to identify opportunities to improve our services. Multi-disciplinary teams are empowered to innovate with AI to improve our organizational effectiveness, yielding multiple AI-powered breakthroughs that are already in production.

“In Microsoft Digital, continuous improvement is a driving force behind our AI transformation,” says Don Campbell, principal product manager within Microsoft Digital and member of our AI Center of Excellence. “By embedding it and AI into every layer of our operations, we’re not only optimizing how we work today, but we are also strategically preparing our processes to become agentic tomorrow. This disciplined approach ensures that when we make a process agentic, it’s not just automated—it’s intelligent, secure, and purpose-built to scale across the enterprise.”

Target outcomes

An organization transformed by AI, achieving significant efficiency gains and innovations, and recognized as a leader in enterprise AI adoption.

Learn more

Guiding hands: take a look inside the councils steering AI projects here at Microsoft.

What our experts have to say:

“In Microsoft Digital, continuous improvement is a driving force behind our AI transformation. By embedding it and AI into every layer of our operations, we’re not only optimizing how we work today, but we are also strategically preparing our processes to become agentic tomorrow.”

Don Campbell, principal product manager and CoE member, Microsoft Digital

“At the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence, we’ve learned that combining strong governance, data readiness, and a continuous-improvement mindset transforms AI pilots into enterprise-scale solutions. This guide distills our three-year journey into clear, actionable steps to accelerate responsible AI adoption, mitigate risk, and drive measurable business impact.”

Nitul Pancholi, AI Center of Excellence lead, Microsoft Employee Experience

 “What’s unique about our approach is that every agent is engineered for responsible action. We design agents to operate within enterprise workflows, guided by policy-aware controls, telemetry integration, and human oversight.”

Faisal Nasir, AI CoE and Data Council lead, Microsoft Employee Experience

Enabling success—lessons from our journey as the company’s IT organization

Achieving AI maturity is dependent on a combination of technological, organizational, and cultural factors. These enablers support the successful adoption and integration of AI within the organization.

For IT decision-makers charting the course to enterprise-scale AI, the journey is about far more than technical implementation—it’s about activating the right enablers to unlock both rapid and sustainable business impact.

Successfully scaling AI means orchestrating executive vision, robust governance, responsible innovation, resilient data foundations, and a culture of empowered talent—all working in harmony. Each of these levers is crucial not only for accelerating the path from pilot to production, but also for ensuring that every AI initiative delivers measurable outcomes, mitigates risk, and creates lasting organizational value.

By prioritizing these foundational pillars, IT leaders can fast-track value realization, embed accountability, and transform AI from a promising experiment into a strategic engine for competitive advantage. The following items explore the essential enablers that drive AI maturity at pace and why they matter now more than ever for organizations determined to lead in the age of intelligent transformation.

Seven enablers of enterprise AI transformation

Executive sponsorship and governance

To accelerate AI maturity within your organization, start by securing strong executive sponsorship and establishing clear governance structures. Appoint dedicated AI leaders and form cross-functional teams such as an AI Center of Excellence and supporting councils with well-defined roles and responsibilities. Maintain alignment with your business strategy through regular steering meetings and roadmap reviews. This approach will ensure your AI initiatives remain focused, impactful, and strategically integrated across the enterprise.

Responsible AI by design

To embed ethics and effectively manage risk in every AI project, integrate Responsible AI principles from the outset. Establish a Responsible AI Council or similar oversight group to ensure all solutions are rigorously reviewed for ethical standards before launch. By instituting mandatory Responsible AI assessments, you’ll foster trust, safeguard your organization, and address potential issues proactively—setting a strong foundation for sustainable AI adoption. This not only reduces reputational and regulatory risk, it also enables faster adoption, strengthens stakeholder confidence, and ensures AI initiatives deliver lasting value aligned with your business goals.

Data foundation, architecture reviews, and technical readiness

Treat data as a strategic asset by establishing a unified data strategy—start with a Data Council to catalogue key sources, improve data quality, and implement robust governance and access controls. Build AI-readiness across your enterprise by embedding architecture reviews and design validation into your engineering lifecycle, ensuring every solution is scalable, composable, and compliant by design. Leverage architecture forums to crowdsource feedback, align on technical standards, and promote reusable patterns that accelerate delivery. With secure cloud environments, ML Ops pipelines, and standardized AI platforms in place, your teams will be equipped to develop and scale AI solutions quickly, safely, and consistently.

Talent, skills, and culture

To build an AI-ready workforce and foster a culture of innovation, prioritize company-wide training and upskilling programs that elevate AI literacy at every level. Establish a Center of Excellence and empower “AI champions” within teams to drive adoption and celebrate meaningful impact. Encourage open collaboration—share code, best practices, and project outcomes across your organization—to accelerate learning and scale success. By breaking down silos and enabling employees to experiment with intelligent solutions, you’ll create the environment needed for sustained growth and enterprise-wide transformation. In Microsoft Digital, we are not just training our employees to use AI, we are empowering them to co-create the future of their roles. When employees are empowered to build and govern their own agents, that is when transformation truly scales.

Impact tracking and accountability

To drive meaningful business impact with AI, start by defining clear, measurable success metrics—think hours saved, cost efficiencies, and quality improvements—that can be rolled up into an organizational AI scorecard. Review these outcomes regularly at the leadership level to keep the focus on what matters. For every major AI initiative, assign an accountable owner who champions the solution, communicates the business story, and manages performance reporting.

Foster transparency by consistently comparing targets to actual results and openly sharing lessons learned when goals are missed. By embedding accountability into your rhythm of business, you’ll enable agile decision-making, concentrate your efforts where AI delivers the most value, and nurture a culture of continuous improvement. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve defined an AI value measurement framework with six dimensions of value that you can use as benchmarks to determine the impact of your own investments.

Change management and communication

To drive successful AI adoption, treat it as a people-first transformation—not just a technology deployment. Start by developing robust deployment and adoption plans for your key solutions: invest in training, craft clear communications, and establish dedicated support channels such as FAQs and help desks. Maintain a steady pulse of communication with your stakeholders—consider newsletters, interactive town halls, and a centralized library of AI success stories to celebrate impact and progress. By prioritizing transparency and providing ongoing support, you’ll smooth the path to change, encourage enthusiastic adoption, and sustain momentum throughout your organization.

Continuous improvement, innovation, and partnerships

To drive continuous improvement and innovation with AI, keep a dynamic backlog of opportunities and support each with a clear value case and refresh your pipeline regularly. Adopt structured forums such as continuous improvement and Kaizen events to identify, evaluate, and prioritize new AI use cases that deliver tangible business outcomes. Use a robust prioritization framework to ensure focus on initiatives with the greatest impact.

Identify partner teams who can serve as early adopters and provide feedback to inform your continuing journey. By building a disciplined innovation pipeline and fostering a collaborative ecosystem, you create a foundation for ongoing experimentation, accelerated learning, and sustainable AI innovation across your organization.

Advancing your organization into the frontier of AI

To embrace the next era of AI, it’s time to look beyond traditional automation and prepare your organization for agentic AI frameworks and autonomous, interoperable agents. These advanced systems aren’t just digital assistants—they’re designed to plan, act, and collaborate across workflows with minimal intervention, offering the potential to fundamentally transform how work gets done.

Start by identifying areas where agentic AI can drive real business value. Empower domain experts within your teams to become Agent Leaders—individuals who can design, oversee, and govern agent ecosystems at scale. Align your AI strategy with forward-looking industry insights and best practices—sources like the 2025 Annual Work Trend Index: The Frontier Firm Is Born offer invaluable guidance for responsible AI adoption and organizational transformation.

Recognize that the impact will be significant. Industry analysts such as Gartner predict that by 2028, about a third of enterprise applications will feature agentic AI capabilities and over 15% of daily work decisions will be handled by AI agents.

Evolving from large language models to agents

To get ahead, foster a culture of experimentation. Host hackathons, pilot agentic AI prototypes, and develop governance frameworks that ensure responsible management of these emerging technologies. Treat your AI journey as a continuous process—a growth mindset and incremental progress are key. As AI evolves, so should your practices: be ready to adapt your governance, refine human-AI collaboration, and embrace new paradigms like fully autonomous agents.

Each stage of this journey unlocks new possibilities. Ensure your organization remains at the forefront of AI maturity by committing to continuous improvement and innovation. The future of work isn’t a destination—it’s a dynamic path. Evolve your strategy, cultivate expertise, and enable your teams to thrive in the rapidly advancing digital landscape, powered by AI innovation and continuous improvement.

Key takeaways

To help your organization progress on its AI journey, consider the following strategies:

• Invest in data infrastructure and AI platforms. Building robust data infrastructure ensures your organization is prepared to leverage AI, supporting scalable, innovative, and secure AI-driven solutions.
• Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration. Champion an AI-forward culture where innovation and collaboration drive the adoption of agentic AI.
• Develop AI expertise through training and development. Upskilling your teams empowers them to navigate the rapid advances of AI, drive innovation, and ensure your organization stays competitive as agentic AI transforms workflows and business outcomes across every industry.
• Align AI initiatives with strategic business goals. Ensuring AI initiatives align with business goals maximizes impact and positions your organization to succeed in the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI.
• Implement ethical AI practices based on Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles. Adopting ethical AI practices builds trust, ensures responsible innovation, and prepares your organization to navigate the evolving landscape as AI becomes central to business operations and decision-making.

Try it out

Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Related links

• Learn how we’re using good governance to ride the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Take a look inside the councils steering AI projects here at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Copilot Studio.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Enterprise AI maturity in five steps: Our guide for IT leaders appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Fast forward to 2025, and the employee experience landscape has evolved dramatically, both here at Microsoft and in the world at large.

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages. The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Teams remains the backbone of enterprise collaboration at Microsoft and for millions of information workers globally. But today, it’s AI-powered agents, intelligent experiences, and integrated tools like Microsoft Loop and Pages that are currently transforming how we work together. 

“One of the most exciting things about AI is its potential to enhance collaboration across disciplines, product groups, time zones, and even languages,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “The benefits of these new agentic capabilities have been transformative for Microsoft and our customers.”

At Microsoft, we’ve embraced a new era of collaboration—one where human intelligence is augmented by AI-powered tools and capabilities that vastly improve our productivity and collaborative possibilities across our company. 

Key moments in Microsoft collaboration history

SharePoint

Enterprise content management with document sharing, intranet portals, and workflow automation.

Office 365

Unified cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.                     

Microsoft Teams

Centralized collaboration hub integrating chat, meetings, calls, file sharing, and apps.

Microsoft Viva

Employee experience platform integrating communications, knowledge, learning, and insights.

Microsoft Loop

Real-time co-authoring across apps with portable components, enhancing fluid collaboration.

Copilot Studio

Creation of custom AI copilots using low-code tools, integrating with business data and workflows.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages

AI-powered content creation and knowledge management within Microsoft 365.

SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Copilot are the bookends of a collaboration journey that we have been on internally at Microsoft over the last 25 years.

Collaboration in 2025: A new paradigm 

At Microsoft, Teams is where we collaborate. But now the spotlight is shifting to different experiences that Teams enables, including AI-powered agents.

“(Microsoft Teams) is how we stay connected. It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI.

Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Since the pandemic disrupted the world of work beginning in 2020, we’ve had to adjust to the fact that the modern workplace is no longer defined by an employee’s location or time zone. Instead, it’s defined by context, clarity, and connection. Our company’s internal transformation—powered by new agentic capabilities in Teams—reflects this shift: 

• AI-powered agents like Facilitator guide our meetings by managing our agendas and keeping track of time, and by ensuring inclusive participation by nudging quieter participants.
• Intelligent Recaps integrate seamlessly into Teams, delivering meeting insights that help our employees catch up on what they missed, review key information, and take follow-up actions quickly and effectively. 
• Loop components in Teams chats and meetings allow for dynamic brainstorming, insightful decision making, and easy content creation. 
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Pages provide a flexible canvas for sharing knowledge, updates, and project status in a visually engaging format. 

Teams remains the connective tissue that binds us together even as we have shifted into this new AI-powered world.

“It’s how we stay connected,” says Sara Bush, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital, noting that much of our work today is powered by new Microsoft 365 Copilot and other AI capabilities that have been rolled into Teams. “It’s what brings our people, our content, and workflows together in this age of AI. It continues to redefine how we plan, meet, decide, and drive impact internally here at Microsoft.”  

Agents in action: Copilot Studio accelerates enterprise AI

Teams is our cornerstone for collaboration but we use many other tools as well, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, our Power Platform-based stage for building, deploying, and managing enterprise level AI agents. These agents have moved beyond simple chatbots— they’re enabling our employees to rapidly build and deploy intelligent systems that can operate on behalf of individuals, teams, and entire organizations, revolutionizing the way we work.

Copilot Studio capabilities include: 

• Custom and autonomous agents that complete tasks, answer questions, and escalate work items based on enterprise data and context. 
• Multi-agent orchestration, where agents collaborate across systems. For example, a data agent retrieves insights from Fabric, a Microsoft 365 agent drafts documents, and an Azure AI agent schedules meetings—all orchestrated toward a single successful business outcome.
• Agent flows and templates that streamline structured tasks like IT support, recruitment, compliance checks, and contract reviews. 
• Governance and security built into the Power Platform admin center, enabling safe deployment and lifecycle management at scale. 

Microsoft employees have already used Copilot Studio to build agents that automate tasks as disparate as reconciling balance sheets, triaging support tickets, and simulating sales training conversations. These agents are embedded directly into Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat—meeting our employees where they work. 

Unlocking knowledge with Agent Builder in SharePoint

To further democratize AI, Microsoft has empowered employees to build retrieval agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint. These agents are designed to surface relevant information from organizational knowledge bases, making them ideal for onboarding, training, and cross-team collaboration.

By putting agent creation in the hands of employees, we’re empowering our employees to scale their knowledge access and reduce friction in their everyday work.

AI-powered collaboration scenarios across the enterprise

In a complex organization like Microsoft, collaboration takes many forms—and AI is increasingly embedded in each one. Beyond meetings and documents, here are some other common scenarios where AI is enhancing how we work together:

Cross-team knowledge discovery: Microsoft 365 Copilot helps our employees find relevant documents, conversations, and experts across silos. We use semantic search and retrieval agents to surface answers to common questions, like “How can I find a mentor?” or “Who has worked on generative AI pilots in the manufacturing sector?”

Change management: We use Copilot to draft adoption plans, to anticipate blockers, help with our localization of resources, to prepare readiness assets, and to evaluate the effectiveness of our campaigns.

Communications: AI assists our communications professionals with draft messaging, sentiment analysis, and suggests optimal timing and formats for announcements.

New employee onboarding: AI-powered agents create adaptive onboarding paths for our new employees, answering their real-time questions and recommending mentors and resources based on their goals and activity.

Customer and partner collaboration: Our sellers use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to seamlessly integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales, draft communications, and coordinate their partner engagements across geographies and business units.

Engineering teams: Our product managers and software engineers are using Loop components to co-author specs and track decisions in real time, reducing email churn and version confusion. 

Across all disciplineswe’re seeing employees use Copilot Pages to refine AI-generated ideas and help accelerate ideation, creativity, and solution delivery.  These scenarios demonstrate how AI is becoming a trusted partner across Microsoft—we’re using it to amplify our human capabilities, reduce friction, and unlock new levels of productivity.

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear—embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”

Matt Hempey, partner group product manager, Microsoft Digital

The future of collaboration

Our agentic journey here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across Microsoft is ongoing, and our goal is to ensure that our employees—and by extension, the employees of our customer—are the most productive in the world. To enable that vision, we’re working hard to: 

• Integrate and extend AI across Teams and our entire collaboration stack 
• Integrate Loop and Pages more deeply into everyday workflows and provide the awareness and training necessary for our employees to incorporate these new tools into their workflows
• Empower employees to build and deploy their own agents with Copilot Studio and SharePoint

“For organizations looking to transform their own collaboration culture, the path is clear,” says Matt Hempey, partner group product manager. “Embrace AI and empower your people with agentic capabilities, and, at the organizational level, build on an enterprise collaboration platform that scales, like Microsoft Teams.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming collaboration at your organization using Microsoft Teams and our agentic Microsoft tools:

• Teams offers an expansive canvas for driving the future of work. Don’t just use the basic features; explore the many ways that AI and agents can accelerate teamwork and improve outcomes directly within Teams.
• The easiest way to unlock the power of AI is by using Agent Builder in SharePoint. Enable your employees to leverage your enterprise knowledge by training information retrieval agents that can accelerate onboarding, unlock hidden knowledge, and enhance cross-team collaboration.
• Copilot Studio is the Microsoft low-code solution for building, deploying, governing, and managing AI agents. Empower your employees with the tools to build their own agents, which they can then use directly within Teams to supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Generative AI in the enterprise is still new. Give your employees the tools they need to succeed, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, and support their growth and development by encouraging usage and providing role-based training to accelerate time-to-value.

Try it out

• Learn more about how Microsoft Teams can transform the way your organization communicates.  
• Join the Microsoft Teams public preview program to get early access to the latest features.

Related links

• Check out different ways to use Copilot in Teams.
• Learn how we’re embracing this ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Read more about the advantages of Intelligent Recaps in Microsoft Teams Premium.
• Explore how we’re using good governance to ride the wave of agents washing over Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re transforming meetings at Microsoft with the Facilitator feature in Teams.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Reimagining how we collaborate with Microsoft Teams and AI agents appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital stories

The rate of change in IT is accelerating at a blistering pace. AI-powered capabilities like Microsoft 365 Copilot have enabled a new era of employee productivity. Today, agentic capabilities are supercharging IT like never before. As IT leaders, we are living in extraordinary times.

But change can be destabilizing, even during normal times for the most confident and sure-footed IT teams. That’s why our commitment at Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to act as Customer Zero for our company and our customers has never been more important.

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption. We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Matt Hempey, partner product manager, Microsoft Digital

If we can navigate this era of generational change, powered by AI with confidence, and provide a clear blueprint for our customers to follow, we will truly live up to Microsoft’s mission to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

“We need to shepherd the company through this era of AI disruption,” says Matt Hempey, partner product manager in Microsoft Digital. “We’re working to transform all of Microsoft into an AI-first workplace, sharing our insights with customers so they can follow our lead.”

Like the advent of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, AI is having a transformative effect on information technology—and the risks and opportunities are potentially even greater than those earlier breakthroughs. In Microsoft Digital, our role as Customer Zero has become more critical than ever. We serve as Microsoft’s first and best customer for each of our groundbreaking technologies, ensuring that they’re enterprise and world-ready.

An evolving approach

Being Customer Zero means a deep partnership between our IT organization and our company’s product engineering teams to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative products, and both listen to and act on the insights we gather from our employees and customers. We work closely together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our experiences and takeaways.

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change. But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

But just like changes in the tech industry caused Microsoft to embrace an agile approach to software development, the advent of AI compels us to reimagine our role as Customer Zero. Since the first version of this article was published three years ago, our approach in Microsoft Digital has changed. Today, our focus is on helping our employees to harness the transformative power of AI to reimagine the world of work.

Customer Zero evolution

“In Microsoft Digital, we’re well aware that the only constant is change,” says Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “But the last 12 months have shown that our old models are no match for the wave of change we’re seeing at Microsoft. We have to adapt our approach.”

Our philosophy has shifted from envisioning new experiences to a wholesale reimagining of the workplace. We’re moving beyond deploying, governing, and building solutions to a world where we empower our employees to define and deploy agentic capabilities that dramatically increase their productivity.

While we still deploy, govern, and operate our productivity tenants in secure and compliant ways, we also focus on defining guardrails that enable our employees to maximize their productivity and creativity. And we continue to be the voice of the organization’s own digital transformation, with an intentional focus on how AI is helping us transform our enterprise from the inside out.

Envisioning the future

When we began our Customer Zero journey, our charter was to envision transformative employee experiences. With advances in AI and the advent of Microsoft 365 Copilot, our ambition has moved beyond experiences to consider entire workflows, as well as the agentic workplace of the future. Here are some of our plans:

• We engage with our employees and customers around the world to better understand their needs, then work with product engineering to co-develop AI-powered solutions.
• We anticipate and address product requirements that our large enterprise customers will have as they pursue agentic workflows, based on our experience reimagining business, operational, and technological processes at Microsoft.
• We leverage our insights gained from managing a vast array of IT services at Microsoft—including network, infrastructure, devices, and end-user services—to design and build new AI-powered capabilities, then ensure they meet the needs of our employees.
• We evaluate and improve our processes using continuous improvement techniques to ensure they’re ready for an agentic future.

{Learn more about Microsoft Digital’s IT journey and how it’s enabled AI transformation at Microsoft.}

Empowering our employees

While Microsoft Digital still builds, deploys, and drives adoption of new employee capabilities, our posture has shifted from employee enablement to employee empowerment. Some examples of how we’re empowering our employees include:

• Within our productivity tenants, we create whatever digital assets and containers they need to be productive. That could be a new SharePoint site, Teams group, Power BI workspace, agent, or even an Azure subscription. The key is that the new tool or asset is in our tenant, which means its lifecycle can be securely managed, enabling productivity while also helping to cut down on shadow IT.
• Our employees can create agents using Agent Builder in SharePoint or Copilot Studio. These AI-powered agents are helping our teams achieve new levels of productivity, and future capabilities are only going to accelerate that trend.
• We’ve nurtured and empowered a Copilot champions community at Microsoft that stands at nearly 10,000 employees. These enthusiastic champions are helping to shape the future of AI at the company, as they build new AI-powered experiences while sharing their knowledge and excitement with their peers. Their expertise and passion augment our ability to drive change in the enterprise, with role-based champions helping to supercharge AI-powered transformation across Microsoft.

{Learn how we’re driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot with our Champs community.}

Defining the guardrails

In an era of agentic transformation, simply deploying, operating, and managing our services is no longer enough. To support employee empowerment, we need to define appropriate guardrails to maintain a secure and compliant environment while also enabling innovation. We do that by:

• Applying controls to ensure that users and apps don’t gain access to privileged information.
• Keeping employees from creating agents that violate company policies.
• Balancing between the freedom for employees to share their creations and the need to prevent agent sprawl.
• Delineating which agents are authoritative and safe for enterprise functions.
• Maintaining an inventory of agents to provide lifecycle management.

These guardrails keep our environment safe and secure while simultaneously allowing our employees to define the future of AI-powered productivity.

{Discover how we’re governing AI here at Microsoft.}

Creating the AI-powered IT blueprint

Transformation with AI is hard work, but thankfully our Microsoft Digital team is actively working to share insights from our own transformational experience. We do that in person, through our global network of Experience Centers. We do it virtually, through hundreds of virtual customer engagements each year. And we do it right here on Inside Track, where we share detailed guides, stories, and other artifacts designed to accelerate your own AI-powered digital transformation.

Our commitment is to not only share our IT blueprint, but also to listen to our customers so we can amplify your insights to improve Microsoft enterprise products and services.

“In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Digital

Customer Zero: A mentality and a promise

Microsoft Digital continues to evolve, and our approach as Customer Zero is key to that evolution. We obsess over applications of AI to ensure that our employees are the most productive in the world. As a customer, you can have even greater confidence in our AI-powered solutions since we’ve already deployed and tested them at a global enterprise scale.

“We’ve become an increasingly strategic contributor to Microsoft’s product offerings, especially in this era of AI,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “In our Customer Zero capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring AI-powered experiences to life. Everything we do as Customer Zero helps Microsoft serve as the showcase for AI-powered digital transformation.”

The next chapter of our Customer Zero journey is the most exciting yet. As we continue to learn, we’ll share more stories from the front lines of AI-powered digital transformation here on Inside Track.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you contemplate your own organization’s transformational journey with AI:

• The pace of change in IT is faster than it’s ever been. As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital is focused on co-developing, deploying, governing, and driving adoption of new services, and sharing our IT blueprint so you can learn from our experience.
• Shepherding your company through AI-driven disruption is essential in a complex and rapidly evolving technology environment. Define your own vision for an agentic future and share it with your employees so they understand how they’ll need to learn and grow to support it.
• Empowering your employees while implementing the right guardrails is an effective strategy to maximize the benefits of AI-driven transformation, powered by employee innovation.

Try it out

Ready to enable your own AI-powered transformation? Sign up for a free trial of Copilot Studio and take your first steps toward an agentic future. 

Related links

• Trace the history of digital transformation at Microsoft.
• Learn how our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.
• Find out how we’re approaching change management with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• See how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Inside Microsoft: Being Customer Zero in an AI-powered world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital stories

The 2020s have been a tumultuous decade for employees globally. Starting with the COVID-19 pandemic that upended workplace norms and expectations in 2020, then quickly followed by the generative AI revolution in 2022, we’re living through a time of unprecedented workplace change. From flexible work to the advent of generative AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, forward-looking companies are seizing the moment to accelerate digital transformation like never before, with engaged employees using AI-powered tools to create a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Employee engagement is a global challenge

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the experts at Gallup saw that employee engagement—defined as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace—was extremely low. In fact, in 2009 only 12% of employees globally indicated that they were engaged at work. While that number steadily improved over the next 15 years, by 2024 only 21% of employees globally indicated they were engaged in their workplace. (Gallup, 2025)

Interestingly, the numbers are not uniform globally. At one end of the spectrum, in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, 31% of employees indicate they are engaged in work. At the other end of the spectrum, only 13% of European workers indicate they are engaged. (Gallup, 2025)

No matter where a region falls on this spectrum, it’s not very promising for companies who want to attract, retain, and develop the best employees. Data indicates that engaged employees are one of the best predictors of economic success:

In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across all of Microsoft, our goal is to ensure our employees feel engaged at work by providing the digital tools, access to information, and personal connections that enable them to live our culture no matter where they are in the world. 

{Read Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report.}

AI is fundamentally changing the world of work

While flexible work created new challenges for employee engagement, generative AI tools have created unprecedented opportunities to increase employee productivity and positively impact engagement in the workplace.

Each year, the team at Microsoft WorkLab generates a report called the “Work Trends Index.” This annual survey of over 20,000 knowledge workers globally illuminates challenges and opportunities as companies pursue strategies to harness the power of AI in the enterprise.

A few data points from past surveys that are particularly resonant:

Aligned to these insights, digital leaders need to consider three things:

Enterprise AI solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot are optimized to help employees discover enterprise knowledge that was previously hidden in various SharePoint libraries, Teams Channels, and OneDrive for business repositories. Copilot can reason across your entire Microsoft 365 estate instantly to help employees find the information, answers, and connections needed to quickly address business opportunities and challenges.

While employees are starting to actively use generative AI at work, if they don’t have access to a solution that’s grounded and secured in your enterprise data, your confidential or proprietary data could be at risk. This is especially true when you consider that most employees are new to this and may not have the training or knowledge necessary to navigate the risks of AI in the enterprise.

Burned out employees are not engaged employees. AI-powered solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot make it easy for employees to reason across their Outlook inbox, Teams Channels and Groups, Viva Engage posts and more, to quickly identify the information that’s important to them. While the volume of activity in the enterprise will likely only increase, the ability to manage information more effectively is now in the hands of employees – especially those who are trained to effectively harness AI.

How has Microsoft adapted?

Times of change demand strong vision and action, and Microsoft emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever. Reflecting on that success, Microsoft Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Coleman enumerated several reasons. Among them:

• A strong corporate culture that helped to counteract chaos.
• A focus on management excellence.
• An inclusive work environment that enables all employees to thrive.
• And critically—a recognition that the digital employee experience is as important as the in-person experience.

Prior to the pandemic, the digital employee experience wouldn’t have been high on the list of key enablers for many executives. After witnessing the power and flexibility of our digital tools during the pandemic to keep our employees connected, productive, and thriving, it became clear to us that a modernized digital employee experience had to become a key tenet of our workplace strategy.

Formula for success

Right as we found our footing post-pandemic, the next big disruptor landed: generative AI and our industry leading productivity tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. The digital employee experience, enhanced by the power of AI, is now more important than ever. As we in the company’s IT organization look to the next decade of employee productivity and enterprise growth, our formula for success is simple:

1. Create a physical and digital environment where our employees are engaged, energized, empowered, and invested in their work.
2. Continue to give our employees the very best productivity tools in the world, powered by Microsoft 365 and made exponentially more powerful by AI-powered tools like Copilot.
3. Combining these forces leads to facilitate a high-performance work culture, enabling us to achieve sustainable business outcomes while generating a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Your company can use the same formula to achieve the same competitive advantage. At Microsoft, we make that vision real by focusing on the three critical dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces and facilities, and culture.

Focusing on our employee experience

Digital capabilities

We keep employees productive and out environment safe and secure, no matter where employees are or how they connect. AI is defragmenting the employee experience.

Physical spaces

We partner with Global Workplace Services to imagine & deploy capabilities that support an inclusive approach to productivity.

Culture

A strong partnership with HR ensures our digital employee experience enables our aspirational culture, regardless of an employee’s physical location.

Digital capabilities

In Microsoft Digital, our mission is to power, protect and transform the digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. Simplifying the employee experience has long been a goal of our team. We want Microsoft employees to be the most engaged, efficient, and productive in the industry.

Our vision is to revolutionize the employee experience at Microsoft, using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to “defragment” the many tools, websites, and applications Microsoft employees need to interact with to complete their jobs. By using Copilot as our “UI for AI”, Microsoft Digital is using Copilot to:

• Providing contextual support in the flow of work.
• Reducing the number of sites and apps an employee must remember.
• Enabling seamless collaboration globally.

In addition to AI, our team here in Microsoft Digital continues to accelerate collaboration through enhancements to Microsoft Teams and Teams Rooms, enables employee innovation with the Power Platform, and delivers a world-class employee experience powered by Microsoft Viva. Read on to learn how.

Accelerating productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to turn your employees’ words into some of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet—all within the flow of work. It works alongside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to provide real-time intelligent assistance.

At Microsoft, we began deploying Copilot to our own employees back in November of 2023, and by March of 2024 all our employees and vendors globally had access, making Microsoft the first enterprise to deploy Copilot at global enterprise scale.

A key lesson we’ve learned is that enterprise AI is a significant cultural and technological change that shouldn’t be underestimated. Consider that knowledge workers have been trained to interact with systems and data using the graphical user interface for over 40 years. The magic of Copilot is that it upends that human-computer interaction paradigm, bringing the power of natural language interaction to employees to find information or answers, to augment their creativity, or to accelerate workflows.

But those skills are new for nearly every employee on the planet, which is why you need to focus on skilling and reinforcement to help employees to maximize the potential value of generative AI in the enterprise. Help your employees to jumpstart their skilling journey by carefully selecting training paths—both virtual and instructor-led—to accelerate their productivity journey with Copilot. Microsoft offers some great free training programs to help your employees build the skills necessary to maximize the value of Copilot. 

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a six-step process for unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot based on these lessons that you can apply in your own enterprise. Being deliberate as you deploy, understanding employee pain points, measuring the before and after, and focusing on the developing of AI skills, you can accelerate and prove the value of Copilot in your environment, as well as recapture value so you can pursue new business opportunities or challenges.

{Read our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.}

Empowering our employees with agents and Copilot Studio

In Microsoft Digital, we are embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of employees who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

For example, our Employee Self-Service (ESS) agents have already demonstrated the power of agents to simplify and improve the employee experience at Microsoft.

• Using ESS, employees were 36% more likely to solve their own IT support issues.
• Similarly, employees were 42% more likely to answer their own HR questions.
• Employees were 18% more satisfied using ESS to address their issues than traditional support methods.

As we continue our journey with AI-powered agents, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Phases of maturity

Each step on our agentic journey marks a significant leap forward in capability, with both opportunities and risks for our leaders.

Employee learning and skilling are key to unlocking the value in each phase of agentic maturity.  

• Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-ready AI-powered like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. Becoming accustomed to AI in the enterprise and learning how to prompt AI for effective results is the key to unlocking value in later phases.
• Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
• Knowledge and actions. Powered by built-in connectors in Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience.
• Workflow reinvention. Human-led, agent operated teams perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end workflows, enabling employees to focus on the highest value work while agents take care of repetitive tasks.

Emerging industry standards and open protocols including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, and NLWeb are enabling an agentic powered future where human-led, agent operated teams will take employee productivity to new heights.

We’re making progress on each type of agent here at Microsoft:

• Microsoft was the first company in the world to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale. Every employee at Microsoft now has an AI-powered assistant to enhance their productivity.
• Every employee at Microsoft also has the tools and support to build simple Retrieval agents that are trained using knowledge stored in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive for Business.
• Our engineering teams are using Copilot Studio to create Agents that can retrieve information then act on it, using built-in connectors in Copilot Studio to enable actions.
• And with the advent of new industry protocols, we’re just beginning to enable fully autonomous end-to-end workflows powered by Agents.

{Learn how we’re governing our use of agents at Microsoft.}

AI-powered meetings with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams benefits from Copilot integration as well, enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.

We’re continuing to retrofit conference rooms to utilize the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities, and we’ll keep partnering with the Microsoft Teams product group to push the envelope with innovative new capabilities that take advantage of investments in hardware, software, and physical space to create immersive and inclusive environments. Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms at a global scale while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.

{Check out our Microsoft Teams Rooms meeting guide.}

Empowering our citizen developers

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have many more employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to business success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Citizen developers use no-code/low-code solutions to accelerate digital transformation of their workstreams. At Microsoft, the technologies that comprise the Microsoft Power Platform empower anyone in the company to transform our employee experience. After all, who’s the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s not normally someone in a central IT team—it’s the employee who is closest to the problem or opportunity.

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion infographic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before. Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to accelerate digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

Microsoft Power BI

A collection of software services, apps and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Microsoft Power Apps

A suite of apps, services, and connectors that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

With Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365. or SQL Server)

Microsoft Power Automate

Enables you to automate business processes quickly and easily, with support for over 500 data sources or using any publicly available API.

Microsoft Virtual Agents

Lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

{Learn how we’re empowering our employees with the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft.}

Physical spaces and facilities

Having the best digital experiences means very little if you don’t have the right physical space or hardware to maximize potential for your employees to collaborate when they’re in the office.

For us, Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) and our Microsoft Digital team represent the company’s “front door.” The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing.

While Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leaders and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses, when both functions are aligned on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible. A few examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences include:

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
• Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, find a parking spot, or book a conference room or workspace.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of our employee experience. By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation for innovation that will help our employees thrive.

{Learn how we’re accelerating our global real estate transformation.}

Culture

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he made lasting and powerful changes to our company culture. Our early culture was extremely competitive, and people often succeeded by showcasing their own individual work and achievements. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has undergone significant change, starting at the top. He instilled in us that, to stay relevant, we needed to find the courage to change our culture and embrace a growth mindset.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture and it all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Attributes of our aspirational culture include:

• Embracing learning and curiosity. Instead of being “know-it-alls” we need to be “learn-it-alls.”
• Trying new things and not being afraid to fail.
• Obsessing over what matters to our customers.
• Being diverse and inclusive in everything we do.
• Operating as “One Microsoft”.
• Making a difference in the lives of each other, our customers, and the world around us.

Satya made it clear that our aspire-to culture was key to our future business success, and the ensuing decade was one of the most successful in the history of Microsoft.

But how do you bring culture to life digitally, especially in a global company that has embraced flexible work? The answer was to build an employee experience platform that allowed our employees to live our culture, no matter where they were in the world.

Supercharging our culture with Microsoft Viva

The Microsoft Viva Suite delivers an integrated employee experience platform that empowers people and teams to thrive by bringing together communications, knowledge, learning, goals, and insights directly into the flow of work. Built on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Viva helps organizations foster a culture of engagement and performance by providing personalized, data-driven experiences that support employee well-being, growth, and productivity. Viva enables leaders to align business outcomes with employee success, making it a strategic investment in both people and performance.

The various modules and capabilities in the Viva Suite enable Microsoft employees to experience and participate in our culture digitally. Each module supports different dimensions of Microsoft’s “aspire-to” culture, with the Viva Suite collectively serving as the underpinning of our shift to growth mindset.

The Viva Suite is comprised of numerous modules, including:

Viva Connections

Delivers a secure, customizable gateway to internal communications and resources, seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Teams to enhance employee engagement without adding new infrastructure.

Viva Insights

Provides privacy-protected, data-driven insights that help improve productivity and well-being while ensuring compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

Viva Learning

Centralizes learning content from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and third-party providers into Teams, simplifying deployment and governance of upskilling initiatives.

Viva Amplify

Empowers corporate communicators to manage multi-channel campaigns with analytics and targeting, all within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.

Viva Engage

Fosters community and connection through social experiences in Teams, with enterprise-grade compliance and identity management built in.

Viva Pulse

Enables managers to gather real-time team feedback securely, with built-in templates and analytics that respect data privacy and organizational policies.

Each of these tools helps to bring our culture to life while simultaneously providing our employees with best-in-class, AI-enhanced tools that foster and enhance collaboration in the enterprise.

{Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.}

Adopting new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change managementto ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve learned that even the most useful, intuitive technologies will not see widespread adoption and usage without a deliberate and sustained change management effort.

Our Microsoft Digital organization is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve learned that effective change management requires careful planning, and localized change efforts are crucial to maximizing the impact of our digital investments. Our change management efforts take inspiration from the Microsoft 365 Adoption Framework as well as Prosci’s ADKAR model, which progresses through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

As you’re considering your approach to change in this era of AI and flexible work, we suggest reviewing our Copilot deployment and adoption guide, which details our learnings in four chapters with useful checklists and best practices you can apply in your own enterprise. Microsoft also publishes free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of AI—or any other digital investment.

{Learn how we’re driving the future of work: How we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.}

Thriving in an AI-powered world

The world of work has changed dramatically with the advent of flexible work and generative AI.

Flexible work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re oceans apart.

Copilot and agentic AI have the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness like never before. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition. Focus on skilling and learning to ensure your employees are getting value from AI-powered tools.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings in Microsoft Digital as we continue to define the future of work, powered by AI.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming your employee experience:

• Focusing on the three critical elements of your employee experience—digital capabilities, facilities, and organizational culture—will enable your enterprise to thrive.
• Empowering “citizen developers” with the Microsoft Power Platform can supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Ensuring effective change management will accelerate value from your investments in AI-powered digital transformation.
• Automating tasks with agents will unlock employee productivity, allowing you to expand operations and take on new challenges.

Try it out

• Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot and to create your own agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how we’re digitally transforming Microsoft.
• Check out five key things we learned serving as the company’s IT organization for 50 years.
• Find out more about our Zero Trust security model.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post The future of work is here: Transforming our employee experience with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In Microsoft Digital, the organization’s IT department, we get to share our internal learnings deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft with many enterprise customers. During in-person briefings, I often remind customers that Copilot is still quite new, and that it upends years of human-computer interaction patterns. For over 40 years, we’ve trained knowledge workers to memorize patterns in the GUI to support their productivity. With Copilot, you can literally type anything as a prompt to support your productivity. It’s still a very new paradigm, and we’re all still figuring it out.

More than anything, our customers want to know how we measure and define the value of Copilot at Microsoft, both in terms of increased employee productivity and cost savings. After all, Copilot represents a significant investment for most customers, and leaders want to have confidence that it will yield sufficient return on investment to justify the cost.

So, how do you prove the value of AI-powered tools in the enterprise?

There are six steps I share with customers that I think are critical, based on empirical evidence we’ve gathered in Microsoft Digital. Our key learning? We didn’t instrument all the arduous business, operational, and technical processes that slow us down and impact effectiveness before our deployment so we could easily prove the value of AI after our deployment.

Capturing the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot

1. Before you deploy, talk to people on the frontlines who are doing the work in your organization. These should be managers or influential individual contributors, not executives or mid-level managers who are abstracted away from the work (although they can be useful to identify the right SMEs to talk to). For each role, identify three to five day-to-day pain points that could benefit from generative AI. Those could be operational, business, or technological processes, all of which can be improved by thoughtful applications of AI. This phase provides a great chance to use Six Sigma skills or other continuous improvement methodologies to evaluate your processes to identify waste and then consider how a combination of continuous improvement and AI could make them more efficient.
2. Once identified, instrument and measure each of the processes to get baseline data on the average time it takes to complete them. Then the hard work begins—you need to think deeply about how AI could make those processes better in consultation with those role owners. This could be through defining a series of stepwise prompts that take away the toil. It could be through further AI-powered automation to make steps go away. It could be applications of AI that validate outputs to ensure that rework is minimized.
3. Concurrent with your investigation into ways that AI can improve productivity and reduce toil, you need to invest in enterprise AI skilling, ideally by role. The fact is, engineers are going to use AI differently than operations staff who are going to use AI differently than sales and marketing. Yes, there are common skills for each, but the best training is tailored to the role, grounded in the experience of using generative AI to address common challenges or opportunities that they’re likely to experience in their day-to-day work. Importantly, help your employees to understand the “frontiers” of current AI models, since you can get into trouble if you move across that jagged line outside the current Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT4) frontier.

A best practice is to gate access to generative AI by requiring employees to engage in both general and role-specific training prior to their provisioning to ensure they immediately unlock value in their work.

4. After you’ve trained your employees and given them the skills to succeed with generative AI in the enterprise, begin your deployment in earnest. We recommend deploying in cohorts by role, focusing on employees who will immediately see the greatest benefit. At Microsoft, we started with our sales team and then gradually deployed to the remaining employee population over the course of several months. This enabled us to scale up our skilling programs, governance strategies, and support function in anticipation of increased volumes.
5. Post deployment, give it a few weeks, then go back to those same processes you identified in the first step and measure the average time savings. If time savings aren’t as significant as you hoped, go back to process evaluation and employee skilling to continue to refine your approach. This whole process is intentionally iterative—you’re not likely to get it exactly right on the first attempt. But if that process that used to take 30 minutes can now be completed in 15 due to a series of useful, structured prompts, you’ve obviously made a big difference that will save a lot of time when extrapolated across an entire fiscal year. And after you’ve built the muscle, go back to the different role leaders and find another batch of processes that could be improved with a combination of continuous improvement techniques and AI. There’s really no limit to the scope of ways you can positively impact your employees if you maintain a sharp focus on continually improving their experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
6. The final step: reclaim the value from those productivity savings and apply it to new business challenges or opportunities. Let’s be clear—most enterprises aren’t investing in Copilot solely to give their people time back. We’re all trying to do more with less, enabling our people to be more productive to generate more value for the company. In this crucial final phase, you need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how you’ll use the found savings from steps 1–5. If your people are saving, on average, 2 hours per week, how will they use that time? There are innumerable ways you could take advantage of these savings. The key is to be thoughtful and to maximize the value, so it aligns with your team and your company’s ambition. Codify new employee and team commitments based on the demonstrated time savings to unlock the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot in the enterprise.

There you have it—you now know how to quantify the value of your generative AI investments in the enterprise so you can recapture value and drive more business impact, thanks to the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can also dive deeper into this topic by taking a look at this framework that our organization put together to measure the impact Copilot is having on the company.

As you can see from the preceding image, it’s important to surround this process with structured change management and ongoing skilling. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve learned that even the most useful, intuitive technologies like M365 Copilot won’t see widespread adoption and usage without a deliberate and sustained change management effort that’s localized to meet the needs of a global audience.

In our case, that meant cultivating and supporting a community of Copilot champions, who have become the backbone of our global change management strategy. The community is now 7,000 strong, and those Copilot enthusiasts even have their own Viva Engage forum where they answer employee questions and share useful prompts.

Unfortunately, just doing AI skilling once won’t be enough. The pace of change with generative AI is simply too great to do it once and then move on. Building an AI-forward culture takes time, and continuous opportunities to learn and improve skills are one of the best ways to help your employees build the AI habit.

And hot off the presses, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center now has a great new “AI Adoption Score” that can help you see—by cohort—how well people are actually building that habit. Using Copilot three times per week in any way is enough to build an AI-focused workforce, enabling your company to unlock the value of AI in the enterprise.

The promise of generative AI is significant, and there’s no doubt that you’ll see qualitative benefits in your organization even if you don’t instrument every process. But in an era of tight IT budgets, having the quantitative data necessary to calculate the ROI of your investments in Copilot or any other enterprise-grade generative AI solution will make it far more likely that you’ll get financial support from your executive team to deploy and succeed at scale.

Here are some key steps you can take to measure your own Copilot deployment:

• Start at the beginning. Work with influential individual contributors and frontline managers to identify operational, business, and technological pain points, then measure those processes to understand their impact. Carefully consider how AI could accelerate each of those processes, through structured prompts, workflow automation, and other techniques.
• Generative AI skilling is not a one-time event—it’s an ongoing investment in your people to help them seize this generational opportunity with AI. Beyond general Copilot skills, consider how role-based training could help you accelerate the aptitude of specific employee groups in your organization.
• After you identify time savings, be thoughtful in applying that reclaimed capacity to new business opportunities or challenges. The point isn’t to just save time or lower costs—it’s to unlock productivity so your employees can do more with less and create new opportunities for your business to thrive.

Give Microsoft 365 Copilot a try.

• Discover our framework for measuring the impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re transforming Microsoft’s enterprise IT infrastructure with AI.
• Discover ways our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.
• Find out how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Engage with our experts!

Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request a virtual engagement on this topic with experts from our Microsoft Digital team.

The digital transformation of Microsoft spans the entire personal computing revolution, from the days of DOS and early Windows desktops, through our journey to the Azure cloud, to our modern engineering era highlighted by the rise of AI.

Today, the company has grown into a global organization with more than 220,000 employees. They all rely on us in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—to provide the tools, technologies, and solutions that empower them to accomplish more every day.

The need for digital transformation

The history of information technology is one of constant evolution, and the pace of change has never felt greater than it does right now. The AI capabilities and other groundbreaking innovations unveiled in the last few years show the potential to radically transform our world and change the way we think about and operate all IT services.

When the world pivoted to remote online work and collaboration because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was just one example of how digital transformation doesn’t always happen in a straight line or on a predictable schedule. Our company’s history of shaping and adapting its IT organization to the latest challenges faced by employees and partners is no different; marked by bold decisions and strategic shifts that reflect our ever-changing world.

Mapping our IT journey

Today, Microsoft Digital is the team that powers, protects, and transforms the digital employee experience across all devices, applications, and hybrid infrastructure at the company. Using our deep knowledge and experience in enterprise IT, we’re pivoting to help lead the company’s AI transformation while enabling our customers to take advantage of this generational opportunity to reshape their businesses and IT operations.

To understand where we’re going, it helps to take a look at where we’ve been. This article explores the details of the major eras of our IT history, and the shifts to examine the trendlines and technological innovations that are shaping Microsoft Digital today.

On-Premises IT era (founding to 2009)

It’s useful to break the history of our IT operations into different eras. For the first three decades or so from its founding in 1975, Microsoft operated with on-premises IT systems. This era was characterized by the setup, operation, and maintenance of onsite physical technology—servers, datacenters, and other hardware infrastructure.

During this time, IT roles were narrowly defined. IT team members functioned primarily as “order-takers,” with limited influence over strategic decisions.

Because funding was inconsistent, our IT organization had limited growth opportunities and relied on vendors for development work. Gaps were filled in with “shadow IT” efforts, where other internal teams would procure their own hardware without formal IT approval or standards.

We established security as an early priority for the company. Co-founder Bill Gates launched the Trustworthy Computing initiative more than two decades ago, an effort emphasizing the importance of security, privacy, and reliability across Microsoft products and services both internally and externally.

Our On-Premises IT era established the foundation that would become crucial to the company’s future digital transformations.

All in on the cloud: The Cloud and Culture era (2010-2018)

Cloud computing marked the next significant shift in the history of digital transformation at Microsoft. This transition, which began in 2010 under the leadership of CEO Steve Ballmer, signaled a major break with the previous era of physical IT infrastructure and an important step toward today’s distributed-computing world.

The launch of the cloud computing solution then known as Windows Azure heralded this new era, as we transitioned away from an IT philosophy focused on the Windows desktop client toward a more platform-agnostic view. Cloud computing infrastructure offered extensive advantages for the customer and for our own IT networks. (Azure was one of the earliest examples of our Customer Zero philosophy, a linchpin concept that continues to drive innovation here at Microsoft Digital.)

We started our journey by moving productivity workloads (Exchange and SharePoint) to the cloud. Then, we shifted new development to Azure and optimized modern applications to run in the cloud. We also moved existing applications targeted for migration to virtual machines. Today, 98.5% of our IT systems supporting employees run on Azure.

Cultural transformation

Another important shift during this era was the profound cultural transformation at Microsoft sparked by new CEO Satya Nadella, who rose to the top job at the company in 2014. (Nadella had previously run the Microsoft cloud computing and enterprise group, so he was already steeped in the idea of transformational change at the company.)

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture. It all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Before Nadella’s ascension, Microsoft had long been known for its extremely competitive, “know-it-all” culture. Employees succeeded by showcasing their own individual achievements and how their accomplishments exceeded their peers.

Nadella changed this ethos by championing a growth mindset, encouraging employees to be “learn-it-alls” rather than “know-it-alls.” The shift included placing new importance on how employees contributed to the success of others, a value that was incorporated into individual performance reviews. Nadella made this transformation his personal mission and directed leadership to propagate the new philosophy at all levels across the organization.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture,” Nadella says. “It all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Some of the key principles that made up this new culture had a direct impact on our ongoing digital transformation journey. These included:

• Being willing to try new things and being unafraid to fail fast
• Obsessing over what matters to customers
• Seeking collaboration across teams rather than working in silos
• Making a difference in the world

The combination of the shift to cloud computing infrastructure and overhauling the company culture helped set the stage for the major technological innovations to come.

A new vision: The Modern Engineering era (2018-2023)

For years, IT at Microsoft had been order takers, doing what the business requested with limited ability to impact strategic priorities. That changed as we shifted to become a modern engineering organization. With support from our executive leadership, IT was elevated to primary engineering function at Microsoft. Rather than simply taking orders, the team was empowered to lead with a strong vision for the future on information technology. In fact, leading with vision is the primary hallmark of our Modern Engineering era. As we moved into this new era, we needed a clearly articulated view of our goals as an IT organization and the resources needed to achieve them.

Aligning our goals with the larger company vision pushes us beyond our day-to-day work and comfortable routines and enables us to deliver high-value work for the company. Every group within Microsoft Digital has its own clear, targeted vision grounded in what our customers need and the larger goals of the organization.

Role transformation

After the transition from the old model of traditional IT to cloud computing was fully underway, we tackled the next challenge: adapting the IT roles in our engineering organization to this new paradigm.

The Modern Engineering era

Operating an engineering organization in a cloud environment meant new roles, new skills, and a new mindset. With no need to manage hardware or server space, our modern IT professionals often worked more closely with business groups, which required higher-level strategic business chops. There was an increased emphasis on DevOps skills, Agile program management, and user-centric design principles.

In many cases, we were able to help our employees gain the skills required to work in this new environment—a product of the company’s emphasis on continuous learning and a growth mindset. At the same time, we looked for new hires who had these newer network-engineering skills and would be able to work alongside existing team members, helping them adapt to their new roles.

User-centric, coherent design

Our design philosophy puts the user—an employee or guest—at the heart of every decision we make at Microsoft Digital. This helps us align all facility services (both physical and digital) with the needs of our people and our company culture.

The goal of this approach is to make tasks that might have previously caused friction in an employee’s day simpler and easier. Instead of dealing with disconnected systems, user-centric design introduces consistent and logical flow between services. This makes it easier for people to access services, learn how to use them, and then put them to good use.

Microsoft also embraces coherent design across all our products. A similar look and feel, along with familiar usage patterns, accelerates employee usage and adoption. 

Embracing work-from-anywhere capability

During the pandemic, when our workforce was still fully remote, our organization was already starting to think about what the new hybrid workplace would look like when people started returning to the office. We identified three key dimensions of the employee experience:

• Physical spaces: We partner with Global Workplace Services to create spaces that support an inclusive approach to hybrid productivity.
• Digital capabilities: We keep employees productive and the environment safe and secure no matter where they’re located or how they connect.
• Culture: A strong partnership with HR ensures the digital employee experience connects with and embodies our aspirational company culture.

Customer Zero at Microsoft

Customer Zero

Our term for employee obsession with Microsoft products is “Customer Zero.” At Microsoft Digital we take pride in being the first customer for a wide variety of Microsoft products and services, obsessing over our own employee experience in order to create products that enable every person on the planet to be more productive.

Being Customer Zero means forging a deep partnership between our IT organization and product engineering groups to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative solutions, and then listen to and act on insights gathered from our employees. We work together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our insights.

{Read about how we’re improving our employee experience through our Customer Zero focus.}

Managing shadow IT with a culture of trust

Shadow IT is the unknown and unmanaged set of applications, services, and infrastructure that are developed and managed outside standard IT policies. Shadow IT typically crops up when engineering teams are unable to support the needs of non-engineering partners, a situation that could arise from a lack of available engineering capacity or the need for specialized domain solutions. 

While earlier eras of our IT history focused on trying to prevent shadow IT, we are now concentrating on managing it. We use Azure best practices to optimize shadow IT and Microsoft 365 governance policies to ensure that our corporate security, privacy, and accessibility standards are being met.

{Learn how optimizing our Microsoft Azure usage is helping us manage our Shadow IT.}

The AI era (2023 to present)

The latest chapter in the history of our organization’s digital transformation is defined by the integration of AI into all our operations. AI is revolutionizing how Microsoft approaches IT and business processes, driving efficiency and innovation across the board.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless. We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

In the last several years, we’ve demonstrated our commitment to completely rethinking every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience to the network, infrastructure and devices that enable employee productivity, our AI-focused investments provide a solid foundation for the innovations that are coming fast.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Employee Experience at Microsoft. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

As we look at the future of Microsoft Digital, we’re focusing on three high-level priorities: security, service fundamentals, and corporate functions growth. We’ll work to excel in all three areas with the help of our industry-leading AI tools and technologies.

“Our mission is to power and protect Microsoft, and that starts with an unwavering commitment to the Secure Future Initiative.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Securing our future

Security is our highest priority at Microsoft Digital. Spearheaded by Nadella, the Secure Future Initiative brings together every part of Microsoft to ensure the highest level of cybersecurity protection across the company in all our products. 

“Prioritizing security above all else is critical to our company’s future,” Nadella says. “Every task we take on—from a line of code to a customer or partner process—is an opportunity to help bolster our own security and that of our entire ecosystem. If you’re faced with a tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security.”

The Secure Future Initiative is built on three core principles: Secure by design, secure by default, and secure operations. As the company’s IT organization, we work relentlessly to fulfill the key pillars of the Secure Future initiative across all our systems, including:

• Safeguarding identities and secrets
• Protecting tenants and isolating production systems
• Securing networks and engineering systems
• Enhancing threat detection
• Expediting response and remediation

“Our mission is to power and protect Microsoft, and that starts with an unwavering commitment to the Secure Future Initiative,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital.

Secure Future Initiative | Microsoft

Transforming and securing our network and infrastructure

We’re focused on using AI to infuse data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure and network operations. This allows us to optimize network operations and increase security while simultaneously improving outcomes.

Examples include:

• Network observability and governance: Ensuring data accuracy, eliminating non-compliant hardware and software, and real-time updates
• Securing endpoints: Device management, asset management, and patching
• Zero Trust networking: Isolating device classes and limiting attacker’s movements across the network
• Network access: Azure VPN, identity management, and Secure Access Workstation (SAW) infrastructure security

{Learn more about implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft.}

Device management

We manage a vast network of more than 1 million interconnected employee devices, including more than 264,000 Windows devices. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources, generating more than 12,000 support tickets weekly.

To manage this enormous set of devices, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities that span the entire device lifecycle. These include:

• Integrated employee device procurement
• AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting
• Advanced insights and data-driven device administration
• Device security and vulnerability management
• Remote worker device experience
• Meeting rooms and calling

{Check out how we’re rethinking device management internally at Microsoft with AI.}

Foundations: Service fundamentals

The second pillar of our three major Microsoft Digital priorities is to maintain the highest standards of service fundamentals. These are the essential capabilities and practices that enable us to deliver reliable, secure, and compliant services. Adhering to the highest standards of service fundamentals ensures that our organization continues to play a critical role in running the company’s business, enabling innovation, agility, and resilience in a fast-changing and competitive environment.

Solid foundations

We’ll accomplish this by focusing on the following areas: 

• Compliance: In addition to regulatory compliance, where we’ll align with the requirements of all global jurisdictions that apply to us, we’ll continue to improve our security posture by deploying all patches and new releases as required. 
• Privacy: We’ll maintain privacy controls in accordance with company policies and complete privacy reviews as appropriate. This priority will assume even greater significance as we develop new AI capabilities. 
• Accessibility: We’ll continue investing in making our services accessible to all users. This includes using the latest accessibility tools and trainings, following all Microsoft standards, and conducting accessibility testing.
• Resilience: We’ll ensure the resilience of our services through sound service excellence practices that minimize business impact due to service outages. These include safe change management to minimize disruptions due to code or configuration changes, automated certification management, and best-in-class incident management. 
• Engineering fundamentals: In addition to our ongoing focus on adopting AI capabilities that enable more efficient and higher-quality development of solutions, we’ll continue to follow best practices for securing code repositories, software supply chains, build and release pipelines, and dev and test environments.
• Tenant management: With the help of AI, we’re building a coherent asset management solution across Microsoft 365 and Power Platform to serve both admins and users. We’ll prioritize securing the tenant, limiting reach and access, and applying zero trust principles to make our systems secure by default.

Defragmenting our employee experience

Our vision is to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where users can access employee data, tools, and insights from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees. It delivers personalized experiences that empower us all to work smarter, faster and happier—unleashing the innovation and collaboration necessary for our success.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Digital

One of the key ways we’re doing this is with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which functions as a “UI for AI” across our employee services and tools. An example is our Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI-driven tool that helps employees more efficiently find context-specific answers to their questions using natural-language queries.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management in Microsoft Digital. “It delivers personalized experiences that empower us all to work smarter, faster and happier—unleashing the innovation and collaboration necessary for our success.”

To achieve our vision, we’re building a workplace where AI defragments the employee experience by:

• Providing contextual support in the flow of work.
• Reducing the number of sites and apps an employee must remember.
• Using Microsoft 365 Copilot as the “UI for AI,” making it simple for employees to find information, to take action, and even to fully automate certain repeatable tasks.

Tenant management

We manage one of the most complex tenants anywhere. Governance today is a somewhat fragmented experience, with no clear mechanism for IT to safely enable self-service asset creation for sites, Teams, groups, Power Apps, and so on. These unmanaged assets increase the risk of over-sharing sensitive data and compromise the health and security of our IT environment.

In the world of AI, security through obscurity is no longer a viable option. This means data hygiene, permission management, and data protection are essential to providing trustworthy AI tools that don’t overexpose sensitive content, while still providing quality responses.

{Read about one way we’re improving security by protecting elevated-privilege accounts at Microsoft.}

Transforming our support experience

We’re using generative AI to transform the way our employees interact with our support services. IT issues will be either auto-remediated or resolved remotely and instantly through conversational, personalized, and contextualized solutions, often without agent intervention.

We’ll accomplish this with a focus on the following:

• User experience: Self-help will use Copilot for Helpdesk (a declarative agent tool) to provide personalized, accurate, and cost-effective issue resolution. Notably, a seamless transition to human agents can occur even while the user stays within Copilot.
• Agent experience: Operational efficiency and automation powered by Copilot for Service will be integrated into the Service Operations Workspace. The service includes chat and incident summarization that recommends next-best actions and drafts contextual answers to queries.

{Find out how we’re modernizing our internal Help Desk experience with ServiceNow.}

Corporate functions growth

Our third major priority in Microsoft Digital is to improve how we support the company’s corporate functions organizations, including HR, legal, and building services.

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. From saving valuable time for our legal professionals, to optimizing building occupancy, to helping our HR professionals support employees in the hybrid workplace, we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful.”

Patrice Pelland, partner engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

This is a particular challenge, as all these teams are being asked to do more with less today; Microsoft can no longer afford to grow operational costs at the same rate as in the past.

AI will play a fundamental role in transforming the business workflows of our corporate functions partners while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making. It will revolutionize the way they operate by automating repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks.

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate,” says Patrice Pelland, a partner engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “From saving valuable time for our legal professionals, to optimizing building occupancy, to helping our HR professionals support employees in the hybrid workplace, we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful.”

Some of the corporate functions areas that we hope to grow by taking advantage of AI capabilities and related increased efficiencies include:

• Human Resources: We’ll advance the mission of the company’s HR organization by using AI-driven workflow scenarios such as enhanced communications support and intelligent recruiting throughout the candidate experience.

{Learn more about how we boosted HR services with our new Employee Self-Service Agent.}

• Legal: Our vision for integrating AI into Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) includes more discoverable legal findings, better corporate document management with the Docufy platform, enhanced engagement with Microsoft Philanthropies, and accelerated support for business-critical functions such as immigration, contracting, and insider trading compliance.

{Read how AI is revolutionizing the way we support corporate functions at Microsoft.}

• Global Workplace Services: In supporting the technology needs for more than 570 company buildings worldwide, we are poised to use AI and related innovations to implement cost savings in the areas of workspace management, facilities management, and financial systems for GWS operations.

{Find out more about using AI to enhance flexible work at Microsoft.}

• Travel and expense: Our plan is to work for near elimination of the traditional expense reporting process through AI-based and touchless experiences, driving simplification and productivity gains.

{Check out how OneExpense transformed our employee expense reporting.}

A catalyst for change and growth

Microsoft’s digital transformation is a story of evolutionary change, resilience, and adaptation across multiple eras of information technology. From our origins as a traditional IT organization to becoming a modern engineering organization focused on driving AI-powered innovation, we in Microsoft Digital remain a catalyst for change within the company and our industry.

With our insights borne of customer and employee obsession, we’re committed to streamlining IT operations while prioritizing security, revolutionizing user services, and facilitating corporate functions growth and development. All with the overarching goal of making Microsoft employees everywhere more productive while showing our customers and partners what’s possible as we move forward together into the future of IT.

“We’ve been through many eras of IT at Microsoft, and I’m so excited to lead Microsoft Digital during this era of AI,” D’Hers says. “The future of IT has never been so exciting!”

Key takeaways

Our IT digital transformation story offers valuable lessons for organizations in the midst of their own IT journey. They include:

• Be vision-led: A clear, articulated vision is crucial for driving transformation.
• Foster a growth mindset: Encourage continuous learning and adaptability among employees (a “learn-it-all” culture).
• Invest in people: Upskill and reskill your workforce to keep pace with technological advancements and emphasize diversity of skills and experience.
• Insist on security: Prioritize security in all aspects of operations to safeguard data and maintain trust.
• Focus on collaboration and partnership: Create successful hybrid work environments to foster strong partnerships across functions.
• Seek continuous improvement: Learn from the past and use those lessons to shape the future.
• Embrace AI: Take advantage of AI tools and technologies to drive efficiency, innovation, and security.

Try it out

Visit our Microsoft Digital Inside Track website to learn more about how we’re transforming the way we do IT at Microsoft.

Related links

• Read about how we’re becoming a Frontier Firm through the power of AI at Microsoft.
• Discover how we boosted employee support with the new Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how we power agentic AI adoption internally with our Customer Zero approach.
• Access our guide for executives that walks through how to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.
• Check out the ways we’re reshaping Microsoft with continuous improvement and AI..  

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Digitally transforming Microsoft: Our IT journey appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Today marks a significant milestone in our journey to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said when he announced the product. “With Copilot, we are bringing the power of next-generation AI to the tools millions of people use every day.”

Fast forward to now and there’s no doubt that Copilot is revolutionizing employee productivity here at Microsoft and elsewhere. It’s also clear that the pace of innovation is only increasing, and AI-powered agents, integrated with Copilot, are poised to help enterprises all over the world fulfill the promise of AI.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft corporate vice president for AI at Work, reflected on this paradigm shift during his keynote address at Microsoft Ignite. “Agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous.”

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy. This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager, Employee Experience

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, the feeling of excitement that we felt that day was palpable.

“It was exciting to hear about the vision for an ‘agentic world,’ where a rich tapestry of AI agents, including personal agents, business process agents, and cross-organizational agents, work together to enhance productivity and collaboration,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal PM architect manager for Employee Experience at Microsoft.

The opportunity that agents present is massive; they will become our personal assistants.

“AI-powered agents can automate or assist with time-consuming tasks like document creation, email or meeting summarization, and creating presentations or reports, saving precious time and energy,” Krishnamurthy says. “This will enable our employees to focus on more innovative and engaging work.”

The ways that AI agents will impact our daily activities—both personally and professionally—is limitless.

“Agents will be able to do things like tell me what time I should leave for work based on traffic, help me navigate which way to go, help me find parking, and help me set up my day so I know what’s most important to work on,” says Amy Rosenkranz, a principal program manager also working on agents in Microsoft Digital. “I’ve been excited about these scenarios for a long time, anticipating how AI can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives. And now it’s here.”

In Microsoft Digital, we’re embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of people who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

Enabling an agent-powered Microsoft

It’s important to acknowledge that adopting AI in the enterprise is a journey. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows. Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Copilot enterprise deployment phases

Use these principles to guide you as you move through the two phases.  

1. Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-grade AI solution like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. At Microsoft, we’ve deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to all of the more than 300,000 employees and vendors at the company, providing everyone with an AI-powered assistant to enhance their daily productivity.
2. Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
3. Knowledge and actions. Powered by Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience. While these agents take a little more time to build, they offer significantly more utility in the enterprise. Copilot Studio provides a robust library of first- and third-party connectors that make it easy to incorporate actions across enterprise platforms.
4. Workflow reinvention. Employees manage and train a constellation of agents that perform fully autonomous actions. Note that the ability to create fully autonomous agents is currently in public preview. “The best way to think about these agents are just as your teammates,” Nadella said at Microsoft Ignite.

It’s important to note that these steps can take time.

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at global enterprise scale and developing proper governance practices to help our employees maximize the potential of AI has required patience as we create locally relevant change-management campaigns tailored to individual countries, roles, and other factors.

“The better your data—including back-end data—and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Later phases require more advanced tools, appropriate tenant governance, and collaboration between departments to ensure appropriate and responsible uses of AI. Additionally, our AI Center of Excellence has been instrumental in helping to build an AI-forward culture through training activities, knowledge sharing, and other activities to accelerate our growth as an organization.

Data quality and tenant governance are also important considerations for unlocking the value of agents in your enterprise.

“The better your data—including back-end data—and the better that data is set up to interact with AI, the better the responses are going to be,” Rosenkranz says.

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve adopted standards and policies that help us ensure that our agents are trained on high quality, accurate AI-ready data. AI-ready data for enterprise agents is data that’s clean, well-governed, and accessible through scalable pipelines. It integrates principles of data standardization, privacy compliance, and federated governance to enable seamless interoperability and actionable insight. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization and allows us to develop effective agents.

But we’ve also been deliberate in building tools that make it easy to build and deploy agents in the enterprise. In fact, our design-first mindset, facilitated through architectural reviews, is enabling us to design and deploy agentic architectures that are resilient, secure, cost-effective, high-performance, and operationally sound. This structured approach ensures that AI agents deliver transformative value while aligning with organizational goals and maintaining trust.

{Learn how we’re transforming our data culture with AI-ready data.}

Bringing agents to life at Microsoft

While everyone at Microsoft already has access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, we’ve been cautious in deploying Copilot Studio, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, to all of our employees. Copilot Studio uses the same low-code connector model as the Power Platform to provide over 1,400 first- and third-party services that can drive employee actions. The same principles that we apply to the Power Platform—“employee empowerment with guardrails”—are being used to safely bring agents to life at Microsoft.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build. Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

“Anyone at Microsoft can build agents to help them through mundane tasks, such as a writing assistant to help write better content, or to strategize with them on important areas like their career. However, these agents are available only to the person who created them,” Krishnamurthy says. “Agents that need to scale enterprise-wide are worked on by the respective engineering teams in collaboration with business partners.”

While the power in these “knowledge-only” or retrieval agents is significant, we in Microsoft Digital must balance employee innovation against some of the risks of agentic AI. Security and privacy controls are important for all applications, and even more so for those that incorporate AI.

“Sometimes we mysticize these agents as things that take a lot of effort to build,” Nadella said at Ignite. “Our vision is that it should be as simple as creating a Word doc or a PowerPoint slide.”

Additionally, understanding and incorporating our responsible AI principles in all aspects of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is critical.

“A robust governance process and controls should be adhered to when building these AI agents through the entire SDL, starting with designing, building, deploying and monitoring agents after they’re deployed,” Krishnamurthy says.

Some practices we’re using within Microsoft Digital to keep our employees safe include:  

1. Security. We have established standards for data classification, policies on handling confidential information, and other security measures to protect data from unauthorized access, misuse, and disclosures. Microsoft Purview provides these foundational capabilities, including data labeling, rights management, and data loss prevention at Microsoft. 
2. Privacy. At Microsoft, we have established privacy compliance measures to ensure that personal data is protected, including adhering to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. We also conduct regular privacy assessments for all applications, especially AI-powered agents.
3. Regulatory. It’s important to conduct regulatory compliance assessments to ensure that agents and extensions are meeting legal standards. Our legal and compliance teams are carefully monitoring AI regulations like NY 144 and the EU AI Act. Understanding and incorporating applicable guidelines, regulations, and laws into assessments is critical.

As Peter Parker famously learned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The same holds true with AI agents in the enterprise space. While agents are an incredibly powerful tool that nearly anyone can take advantage of to improve their productivity, being mindful of security, privacy, and regulatory issues is essential to the responsible deployment of agentic AI in the enterprise.

{Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft are empowered through good governance with the Power Platform.}

Enabling employee self-service

In Microsoft Digital, we’re building AI-powered agents to support common employee scenarios, such as IT support, HR queries, and campus-related needs. The Employee Self-Service Agent seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 Copilot and helps to defragment the employee experience by providing a single place for employees to seek help with their most common pain points. With Copilot Studio, this agentic experience helps employees quickly retrieve relevant information and resolve their issues while also enabling them to take further action, such as opening a support ticket or submitting a request for time off.

Other capabilities include:

• An out-of-the-box experience that facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted responses where necessary, decreasing search time and lowering frustration levels.
• Additional configuration reduces costs and accelerates time to value for HR functions, IT workflows, and campus needs.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Copilot

This agent is available for use by all our employees and contingent staff. It’s also being used by some of our partners and customers in a private preview and will become available to all Microsoft customers soon.

The future of IT

While we’re at the very beginning of this agentic journey at Microsoft, the pace of change has been and will continue to be incredibly swift as new capabilities emerge and autonomous agents become more common.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile. Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful.”

Amy Rosenkranz, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

In Microsoft Digital, we see a world where agentic AI will unlock productivity and creativity. This new world will empower our employees to train their own agentic teams, which can then handle routine day-to-day operational tasks so that they can focus on the higher-value work only humans can do. Some of the ways we’re exploring applying agents within Microsoft Digital include:

• Autonomous agents that can detect, report, remediate, and monitor network security and connectivity issues
• Autonomous agents that streamline and simplify business and operational processes, enabling our employees to focus on the higher value work that only humans can do
• Autonomous agents that anticipate your needs during travel, clearing your calendar, reconciling schedule conflicts, and even helping with things like reserving a car or mitigating flight delays
• Autonomous agents that help our global workplace services team to manage their facilities more effectively, reducing carbon emissions while maximizing workplace occupancy
• Autonomous agents that anticipate device issues, apply patches, continuously monitor device health and security, and keep our infrastructure and devices secure and reliable

While the advent of generative AI in the enterprise has been a boon to employees and has given organizations like Microsoft a competitive advantage, fully autonomous agents, powered by Copilot Studio, will give our employees an even greater edge in the highly competitive global marketplace for products, ideas, and solutions.

“We are at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft—and I’ve been here awhile,” Rosenkranz says. “Agents are already incredibly powerful, and they’re only going to get more powerful. More ‘Wow’ moments are coming.”

We invite you to seize this generational opportunity that AI agents present to provide more “Wow” moments for your own employees.

Key takeaways

Here are principles to think about as you consider experimenting with agents at your company:

• Agents are the next wave of AI innovation, enabling your employees to retrieve information, act, or even fully automate business processes and operations.
• While agents are powerful and simple to create, be mindful of security, privacy, responsible AI, and compliance requirements to ensure that your agents aren’t creating unnecessary business risks.
• There are several ways to build no-code and low-code agents for personal or enterprise-wide use, including Agent Builder in SharePoint, creating agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, and using Copilot Studio.
• AI-ready data is essential to unlock the power of agents in the enterprise. Like other AI systems, the responses and actions of your agents are only as good as the data they were trained on.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

Related links

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Discover how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re keeping our network infrastructure healthy at Microsoft with an employee-built AI agent.
• Check out how the Employee Self-Service Agent is transforming our approach to employee assistance.
• Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT journey at Microsoft

The rapid advance of AI is enabling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience, to the network, infrastructure and devices that power our employee productivity, everything is evolving quickly.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

In this article, we describe some of the ways we’re already using AI, as well as new investments we’re making to accelerate our own AI-powered transformation—and to inspire yours.

{Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.Discover how we’re improving our Employee Experience as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.}

Resilient and secure infrastructure powered by AI

Reliable and secure access to corporate resources is paramount—especially at a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on a foundation of network connectivity to seamlessly access the tools and services they rely on every day. Harnessing the power of AI to ensure our employees stay productive and our network remains resilient and secure is one of our top investment areas in Microsoft Digital.

“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”

One way we’ll do that is by infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, comply with standards and security policy, reduce operator effort and errors, and efficiently respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Investments in software defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are already improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance. We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to drive continuous operational improvements. We’ve used data from past incidents to train an AI model that will help our network engineers to reduce the time needed to mitigate infrastructure incidents with the goal of reducing or eliminating network outages and increasing employee productivity.

Securing the Microsoft network and other endpoints is critical to AI and Machine Learning (ML) are among our best tools to enhance the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network and hosting environments.

While Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we’ll use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the burden on IT admins to classify and assign networks manually. We’ve implemented consistent access controls for wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. We’re also building AI and ML capabilities to automate our security workflows, including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and remediation.

A vast network of interconnected devices running many different operating systems relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources. To better manage them, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities spanning the entire device lifecycle.

AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a key investment area. We’ll use AI and ML to schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, prolong device lifespans, and ensure employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors. We’ll also use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems. We aim to help IT administrators be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.

{Learn how we’re moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Discover How AI will impact the future of security.}

Employee experiences enhanced with AI

AI enables possibilities to simplify the employee experience in unprecedented ways. Our vision in Microsoft Digital is to use AI to simplify the employee experience by providing a single endpoint for most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI seamlessly integrates into our employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems they must learn and navigate. We’re working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where our employees can access critical data, tools, and insights, all from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower our employees to work smarter, faster and happier.”

With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric, to meet people in the flow of their work.

Navigating with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Copilot Chat will support a range of different employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role. We’ll connect different Copilot features and our internal data to Copilot Chat and reduce the time to get answers or insights by more than half. Our employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Copilot Chat will become a primary entry point for many workflows.

Generative AI will also change how our employees experience support services. We aim to increase employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.

{Learn more about how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft Digital is reinventing employee productivity in the hybrid workplace.}

AI-powered transformation powered by good governance

We’re working to strike the right balance with AI—we want to use it to transform the way we work and to empower our employees while also protecting the company. To get this right, we’re laser focused on adopting the right governance measures.

“We’re going to be one of the first organizations to really get our hands on the whole breadth of AI capabilities,” says Matt Hempey, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It will be our job to ensure we have good, sensible policies for eliminating unnecessary risks and compliance issues.”

Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can be a challenge. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups increase the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment. AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us to detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.

High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is another key to our AI-led transformation. We’re establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, with assigned data owners to supervise them. We’re using tools to measure data quality and produce a quality score, enhancing confidence and trust among users so they can be confident using the data in AI scenarios.

However, high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance.We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants, and we’ve experienced the complexities of governance at global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, are our priority, so that we as a company can keep innovating without risking security or reputational damage. Using tools like Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, sensitivity, and lifecycle of data for AI, focusing on discovery, classification, and protection. Our goal is to safely handle sensitive data, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.

{Discover how Microsoft Digital is governing its key productivity tenants to support AI. Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.}

Transforming our approach to IT

In Microsoft Digital, we’re committed to innovating with AI to revolutionize our employee experience and to rethink IT management, work that we’ll power through consistent governance practices and high-quality enterprise data.

“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.

As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we’ll push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation for our employees and for our customers. Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI. We’re excited to continue sharing our insights from our journey of AI-powered transformation with our customers and partners.

Here are some learnings that we hope will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat can increase employee productivity by making information easier to find and by reducing or eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks, which will enable your employees to focus on higher value work.
• Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so you can use your data to support AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services. Microsoft Purview offers a great solution to protect your sensitive enterprise data.
• We’ll be using the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will improve the experience for our customers as well.

Get started with Azure AI.

• What is Azure OpenAI Service?
• Learn about Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our employee experience as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.

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Microsoft Viva Connections is our gateway to our employee experience. It’s a hub from which our employees can move through the many different parts of their work experience throughout their day. It’s their single place to connect with news, conversations, and resources from across the organization, personalized for each employee through AI and organizational information.

With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization, at every level that applies to them.

—Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Human Resources

A unified experience is at the core of Microsoft Viva Connections. We use it to consolidate resource access across a huge array of company resources and touchpoints, including SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Graph, and other Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Stream.

We want it to be the first place our employees go to get informed about the company and their work at Microsoft.

“Microsoft Viva provides an experience for our employees that goes where they go; it’s like their mobile office—everything is right there in Viva, whether they’re learning at work, communicating with others or getting insights about how their team is doing,” says Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva in Microsoft Human Resources. “With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization at every level that applies to them.”

Kaplan highlights the way Microsoft Viva Connections has ingrained itself into the everyday employee experience at Microsoft.

“Viva Connections puts the employee at the center and provides the information and tools that are most important to them. It has access to building location information, and I can see which food trucks are nearby for lunch,” Kaplan says. “I can start a maintenance request for something like the air conditioning not working correctly. I can contact TechLink to troubleshoot a technical issue I’m having. It’s all right there, accessible from the Viva Connections Dashboard.”

The Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard is the primary portal into what’s happening in an employee’s day and in the organization. It provides a centralized location to find and act on company tasks and specific action items for their job. The dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It’s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections app within the Teams mobile experience or to the employee’s desktop.

The feed aggregates news and conversations into a single place where they can stay on top of everything they need to know. It delivers updates with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. The feed enables you to efficiently reuse and aggregate existing news items and posts from SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, and Microsoft Stream resources.

The resources page consolidates resources for users across the digital workplace, including resources on other platforms and sites using a familiar SharePoint-like navigation.

Building on our history of employee focus

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small and midsize customers.

As the company’s IT organization, Microsoft Digital has been deeply invested in the employee experience for years. Our involvement in Microsoft Viva Connections began several years ago when we developed MyHub, an internal app for Microsoft employees that enables them to connect to the Microsoft culture and mission.

We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company.

—Kirkland Barrett, principal group product manager, Unified Employee Experience

Kirkland Barrett is the principal group product manager for Unified Employee Experience in MDEE. His team was responsible for the creation and deployment of MyHub to Microsoft employees more than four years ago. A team was created with members who tackled the project from their various perspectives—program management, engineering, design, and research.

“When we began, our leadership was championing this employee-focused approach to how we do things as an organization,” Barrett says. “So we set out to deeply understand and invest in improving the employee experience.”

The vision for MyHub was bringing everything that our employees want and need to do.

“We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company,” Barrett says.

There were many different apps and touchpoints for those experiences before MyHub. Barrett’s team wanted to put them in a single, employee-focused app. They put employees at the center. A big part of that was reevaluating the many design teams, delivery channels, and interaction methods that were used to create interaction with Microsoft employees.

“We had a fragmented and disconnected set of tools and interfaces before MyHub,” Barrett says. “The experience was inconsistent for our employees, and it was often hard to find the tools in the first place.”

Out of this vision for a connected and unified employee experience came MyHub, a mobile app that Microsoft employees adopted rapidly and used extensively across the organization. As MyHub grew and matured and added functionality, momentum for the app grew, and it became a mainstay for Microsoft employees to interact with each other and the organization in dozens of ways.

Microsoft Viva Connections has become the next evolution of MyHub, but extended for the rest of the world. As Customer Zero for Viva Connections, we have a unique opportunity to not only inform product development but to contribute to the evolution of one of our key projects, MyHub, as it transforms to fulfill the needs of Microsoft’s external customers. It’s a perfect example of how our own internal challenges and innovative responses are directly relevant to our customers and lead to Microsoft creating better products.

The co-development process between the Microsoft Viva Connections product team and our MyHub engineers in Microsoft Digital is one of the most integrated and cooperative examples of Customer Zero engineering at Microsoft. MyHub was designed and built for Microsoft, so many of the features and capabilities were created specifically for the Microsoft context.

How we do business, what’s important to our organization, how we treat our employees––all of these went into the design and development of MyHub, which meant that we could precisely focus on feature design and providing a unified experience at Microsoft. Microsoft Human Resources (HR) was a big partner in helping us understand the employee experience and what we wanted to accomplish holistically.

While these factors helped us design a product unique to Microsoft, it also helped our engineering and HR teams understand what made Microsoft unique. When the Microsoft Viva Connections team began development, using MyHub as a starting point, we had a clear idea of which parts of the MyHub experience would work well for the general public and which parts didn’t need to make the jump from MyHub into Viva Connections.

Microsoft Digital, the MyHub team, and Microsoft HR have provided feedback and assistance based on the four years of experience working in the employee experience space. Our collaborative effort with the Microsoft Viva Connections design team helped us adopt design features like notifications, naming, organization, taxonomy, and adoption.

We’ve also contributed to many improvements and new features in Viva Connections, including:

• Performance enhancements
• Best practices, such as domain isolation, caching, and shared library features
• Accessibility and reliability improvements
• Camera integration and image upload capability
• Location support
• Feedback mechanisms and enhanced metadata

As development continues, our MyHub engineering team is providing important feedback to the product group on the experiences our employees have with Microsoft Viva Connections. We have moved all the MyHub employee experiences we planned for, and our Microsoft employees are using Viva Connections for their daily needs.

Implementing Microsoft Viva Connections

Microsoft Viva Connections empowers and engages Microsoft employees at the frontline of their flexible work experience, connecting them to the mission of the organization, each other, and the tools they need most. Here are a few examples of how Viva Connections is influencing the employee experience at Microsoft:

• In Viva Connections, we have an adaptive card for training. Learning is core to our culture and the primary component of our growth mindset. The training card surfaces training opportunities and obligations for each employee, encouraging them to learn, build skills, and improve their abilities.
• We use Viva Connections to provide basic but valuable information to our employees, like details about their compensation and benefits. Our employees can access a card that provides current and historical information about their pay stubs, deductions, and other pay details. These are provided within the context of the cards, rather than forcing employees to sign in to a separate payroll system and use another interface to get that information.
• Our employees can connect directly to Digital TechLink, our integrated technical support system. In Viva Connections, employees can initiate a help request, communicate with support, and track the progress of any requests they have in process.

Moving from a custom solution to a commercially available product has simplified the way we support the employee experience at Microsoft. Working with a custom app that we had to manage and deploy to hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe created an entire level of process for design, development, source control, and deployment. This included tasks like maintaining versioning, publishing to app stores, and managing access for employees.

With Microsoft Viva Connections, we no longer need to manage the app—just use it. It’s already available across the app stores our employees use, and that entire level of process and effort has been removed from our teams, allowing us to focus on the employee experience and on implementing Viva Connections in the best way possible for Microsoft.

We realize many benefits from using Microsoft Viva Connections to unify our employee experience. Some of the most important implementation benefits include:

• The organization can tailor the experience for targeted employee groups, such as frontline workers or people in specific regions or roles.
• We can add custom components that enrich the employee experience, using no-code configurations or powerful developer frameworks.
• We can integrate investments you’ve already made in partner solutions from leaders like Workday and ServiceNow.
• Microsoft Viva Connections and its experiences take advantage of the investments we’ve already made in Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft Teams. It’s backed by security, compliance, and identity controls that enable us to build an employee experience you can trust.

We’re continuing to engage our employees with Microsoft Viva Connections, providing them with a unified employee experience at Microsoft. We’re also working as Customer Zero with the Viva Connections design team to build experiences into Viva Connections that benefit Microsoft customers, including day planning, compensation and benefits tools, more approval workflows for invoices, expenses, and vacation time, and many other scenarios.

We’re also working with the design team to include new capabilities, including dynamic language support, additional Microsoft 365 sources for the Feed, allowing multiple instances per tenant, and adding additional interactivity for dashboard cards.

As Customer Zero, we’re sharing our employee experiences with customers to accelerate their adoption of Microsoft Viva Connections. We’re working with the Microsoft Viva development teams to innovate, influence, and pressure test the Microsoft Viva platform, moving it forward to create employee experiences that empower our customers.

The user experience framework that we’ve built and loaded into our Microsoft Viva Connections experience is open source and now available in Git Hub so customers can use it to help them develop similar experiences for their employees.

We’re enhancing the accessibility both of the deployment of Microsoft Viva Connections and of the product itself. We’re also adding employee and customer listening capabilities to the product, which will allow us to use the feedback to improve the experience for everyone.

Sign up for a trial version of Microsoft Viva.

• Learn more about Microsoft Viva Connections.
• See how we’re evolving our culture internally with Microsoft Viva.
• Check out our guide to supercharging your business transformation with Microsoft Viva.
• Discover how we approach being Customer Zero at Microsoft in an AI-powered world.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

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