In light of this priority, we have established a Microsoft Digital Data Council to help accelerate our companywide AI-powered transformation.

Our data council is a cross-functional team with representation from multiple domains within Microsoft, including Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization; Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA); and Finance.

“By championing robust data governance, literacy, and responsible data practices, our data council is a crucial part of our AI-powered transformation. It turns enterprise data into a strategic capability that fuels predictive insights and intelligent outcomes across the organization.”

Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

Our data council’s mission is to drive transformative business impact by establishing a cohesive data strategy across Microsoft Digital, empowering interconnected analytics and AI at scale. Our vision is to guide our organization toward Frontier Firm maturity through a clear blueprint for high-quality, reliable, AI-ready data delivered on trusted, scalable platforms.

“By championing robust data governance, literacy, and responsible data practices, our data council is a crucial part of our AI-powered transformation,” says Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “It turns enterprise data into a strategic capability that fuels predictive insights and intelligent outcomes across the organization.”

Our evolving data strategy

Over the past two decades, we at Microsoft—along with other large enterprises—have continuously evolved our data strategies in search of the right balance between control and agility. Early approaches were highly decentralized, with different teams owning and managing their own data assets. While this enabled local optimization, it also resulted in inconsistent quality and limited enterprise-wide insight.

Our subsequent shift toward centralized data platforms brought much-needed standardization, security, and scalability. However, as data platforms grew more sophisticated, ownership often drifted away from the business domains closest to the data, slowing responsiveness and diluting accountability.

Today, we and other leading companies are embracing a more balanced, federated approach, often described as a data mesh. Rather than forcing all our data into a single centralized system or allowing unchecked decentralization, the data mesh formalizes domain ownership while embedding governance, quality, and interoperability directly into shared platforms.

With this approach, our domain teams publish data as well-defined, discoverable products, while common standards for security, metadata, and compliance are enforced through automation rather than manual processes. This model preserves enterprise trust and consistency without sacrificing speed or autonomy.

By adopting a data mesh mindset, we can scale analytics and AI more effectively across the organization while still keeping ownership closely connected to the business focus. The result is a system that supports innovation at the edges, strong governance at the core, and seamless collaboration across domains, enabling the transformation of data from a technical asset to a strategic, enterprise-wide capability.

Quality, accessibility, and governance

To scale enterprise data and AI, organizations must first ensure their data is trusted, discoverable, and responsibly governed. At Microsoft Digital, our data strategy is designed to create data foundations that power intelligent applications and effective decision making across the company.

“High-quality, well-governed data is essential to accelerate implementation and adoption of AI tools. Data quality, accessibility, and governance are imperatives for AI systems to function effectively, and recognizing that is propelling our data strategy.”

Miguel Uribe, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

By implementing a data mesh strategy at scale, we aim to unlock valuable data insights and analytics, enabling advanced AI scenarios. Our data council focuses on three core dimensions that make AI-ready data possible:

• Quality: Making sure enterprise data is reliable and complete
• Accessibility: Enabling secure and discoverable access to data
• Governance: Protecting and managing our data responsibly

Together, these dimensions form the foundation for scalable innovation and AI-powered data use. They connect data silos and ensure consistent, high‑quality access across the enterprise—enabling both humans and AI systems to work from the same trusted data foundation. As AI use cases mature, this foundation allows AI agents to retrieve and reason over data through enterprise endpoints, while supporting advanced analytics, data science, and broader technology.

“High-quality, well-governed data is essential to accelerate implementation and adoption of AI tools,” says Miguel Uribe, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital. “Data quality, accessibility, and governance are imperatives for AI systems to function effectively, and recognizing that is propelling our data strategy.”

Quality

AI-ready data is available, complete, accurate, and high-quality. By adopting this standard, our data scientists, engineers, and even our AI agents are better able to locate, process, and govern the information needed to drive our organization and maximize AI efficiencies.

By utilizing Microsoft Purview, our data council can oversee the monitoring of data attributes to ensure fidelity. It also monitors parameters to enforce standards for accuracy and completeness.

Accessibility

Ensuring that our employees get access to the information they need while prioritizing security is a foundational element of our enterprise data strategy. Microsoft Fabric allows us to unify our organization’s siloed data in a single “mesh” that enables advanced analytics, data science, data visualization and other connected scenarios.

Microsoft Purview then gives us the ability to democratize that data responsibly. By implementing a data mesh architecture, our employees can work confidently, unencumbered by siloed or inaccessible data, and with the assurance that the data they’re working with is secure.

The data mesh connects and distributes data products across domains, enabling shared data access and compute while scaling beyond centralized architectures.

Platform services are standardized blueprints that embed security, interoperability, policies, standards, and core capabilities—providing guardrails that enable speed without fragmentation.

Data management zones provide centralized governance capabilities for policy enforcement, lineage, observability, compliance, and enterprise-wide trust.  

Governance

As organizations scale AI capabilities, strong governance becomes essential to ensure security, compliance, and ethical data use. Data governance—which includes establishing data policies, ensuring data privacy and security, and promoting ethical AI usage—is critical, as is compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) regulations, among others.

However, governance is not only a technical capability; it’s also a cultural commitment.

Responsible data use must be embedded into the way teams manage data and build AI solutions. Through Microsoft Purview, we implemented an end-to-end governance framework that automates the discovery, classification, and protection of sensitive data across the enterprise data landscape.

This unified approach allows teams to innovate confidently, knowing that the data powering their insights and AI systems is trusted and protected, as well as responsibly managed.

“AI systems are only as reliable as the data that powers them,” Uribe says. “By investing in trusted and well-managed data, we accelerate not only the adoption of AI tools but our ability to generate meaningful insights and intelligent outcomes.”

The data catalog as the discovery layer

By serving as a common discovery layer for humans and AI, the data catalog ensures that governance translates directly into speed, accuracy, and trust at scale.

A unified data strategy only succeeds if both people and AI systems can consistently find the right data. At Microsoft, this is enabled by our enterprise data catalog, which operationalizes the standards set by our data council. 

For business users, the catalog provides intuitive search, ownership transparency, and trust signals—enabling confident self‑service analytics. For AI agents, the same catalog exposes machine‑readable metadata, allowing agents to programmatically discover canonical datasets, validate schema and freshness, and respect governance constraints.

Our role as Customer Zero

In Microsoft Digital, we operate as Customer Zero for the company’s enterprise solutions, so that our customers don’t have to.

That means we do more than adopt new products early. We deploy them at enterprise-scale, operate them under real‑world constraints, and hold them to the same standards our customers expect. The result is more resilient, ready‑to‑use solutions and a higher quality bar for every enterprise customer we serve.

“When we engage product teams with real telemetry from how data is created, governed, and consumed at scale, we move the conversation from theory to execution. That’s how enterprise readiness becomes real.”

Diego Baccino, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

Our data council embodies this Customer Zero mindset through its Enterprise Readiness initiative. By engaging product engineering as a unified enterprise voice, the council drives strategic conversations that surface operational blockers, influence roadmap prioritization, and ensure new and existing data solutions are truly ready for enterprise use.

These learnings are then shared broadly across Microsoft Digital to accelerate adoption, reduce duplication, and scale proven patterns across teams.

“When we engage product teams with real telemetry from how data is created, governed, and consumed at scale, we move the conversation from theory to execution,” says Diego Baccino, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital and a member of the council. “That’s how enterprise readiness becomes real.”

This work is deeply integrated with our AI Center of Excellence (CoE), where Customer Zero principles are applied to accelerate AI outcomes responsibly. Together, the AI CoE and the data council focus on improving data documentation and quality—foundational capabilities that are required to make AI feasible, trustworthy, and scalable across the enterprise.

By grounding AI innovation in measurable data quality and governance standards, Microsoft Digital ensures that experimentation can safely mature into production‑ready solutions. The partnership between our data council, our AI CoE, and our Responsible AI (RAI) Council is essential to our broader data and AI strategy.

“AI readiness isn’t aspirational—it’s operational,” Baccino says. “By measuring the health of our data, setting clear quality baselines, and using those signals to guide product and platform decisions, we turn data into a strategic asset and AI into a repeatable capability.”

Together, these teams exemplify what it means to be Customer Zero: Transforming enterprise experience into action, governance into acceleration, and data into durable competitive advantage.

Learn more

Read about our AI Center of Excellence.

Advancing our data culture

Our data council plays a pivotal role in advancing the organization transition from data literacy to enterprise data and AI capability. In conjunction with our AI CoE, it creates curricula and sponsors learning pathways, operational practices, and community programs to equip our employees with the skills and mindset required to thrive in a data- and AI-centric world.

While early efforts focused on improving data literacy, our data council ’s mission has evolved to enable data and AI capability at scale together with our AI CoE—where employees not only understand data but can effectively apply it to build, operate, and govern intelligent solutions.

“Our focus is not just teaching our teams about data. It is enabling employees to apply data to create AI-driven outcomes. When teams understand how data powers AI systems, they can make better decisions, design better products, and build more responsible AI experiences.”

Miguel Uribe, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our curriculum includes high-level courses on data concepts, applications, and extensibility of AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as data products like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.

By facilitating AI and data training, offering internally focused data and AI certifications, and internal community engagement, our council ensures that employees develop the capabilities required to responsibly build and operate AI-powered solutions. Achieving data and AI certifications not only promotes career development through improved data literacy, it also enhances the broader data-driven culture within our organization.

“We recognize that AI capability is built when data skills are applied directly to real AI scenarios and business outcomes—not when learning exists in isolation,” Uribe says. “Our focus is not just teaching our teams about data; it is enabling employees to apply data to create AI‑driven outcomes. When teams understand how data powers AI systems, they can make better decisions, design better products, and build more responsible AI experiences.”

Find out more

Learn how a Copilot Expo helped us build interest in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Lessons learned

Our data council was created to develop and execute a cohesive data strategy across Microsoft Digital and to foster a strong data culture within our organization. Over time, several critical lessons have emerged.

Executive sponsorship enables transformation

Executive sponsorship is a key element to ensure implementation and adoption of a data strategy. Our leaders are committed to delivering and sustaining a robust data strategy and culture and have been effective champions of the council’s work.

“Leadership provides support and reinforcement of the council’s mission, as well as guidance and clarity related to diverse organizational priorities,” Baccino says.

Cross-functional collaboration accelerates impact

Our council’s work has also benefited from the diverse representation offered by different disciplines across our organization. Embracing diverse perspectives and understanding various organizational priorities is critical to implementing a successful data strategy and culture in a large and complex organization like Microsoft Digital.

Modern platforms allow for scalable AI productivity

Technology and architecture also play a critical role in enabling enterprise data and AI capability. Platforms like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric provide the governance, discovery, and analytics infrastructure required to create trusted, AI-ready data ecosystems.

Combined with strong leadership support and community engagement, these platforms allow our organization to move beyond isolated data projects toward connected, enterprise-wide intelligence.

As our organization continues to evolve, our data council’s strategic work and valuable insights will be crucial in shaping the future of data-driven decision making and AI transformation at Microsoft.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you contemplate forming a data council to help you manage and scale AI impacts responsibly at your own organization:

• A data mesh strikes the balance enterprises have been chasing. By formalizing domain ownership while enforcing standards through shared platforms, you avoid both chaotic decentralization and slow, over-centralized control.
• Governance is an accelerator when it’s automated and embedded. Using platforms like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric, governance shifts from a manual gatekeeping function to a built‑in capability that enables faster, trusted analytics and AI.
• AI systems are only as strong as their discovery layer. A unified enterprise data catalog allows both people and AI agents to find, trust, and use data consistently—turning standards into operational speed.
• Customer Zero turns theory into enterprise‑ready execution. By operating its own data and AI platforms at scale, Microsoft Digital provides real telemetry and practical feedback that directly shapes product readiness.
• Building AI capability is a cultural effort, not just a technical one. Our data council’s focus on applied learning, certification, and real-world AI scenarios ensures data skills translate into durable business outcomes.
• AI scale exposes the cost of fragmented data ownership. A data council cuts through silos by aligning priorities, resolving tradeoffs, and concentrating investment on the data assets that matter most for AI impact.
• Shared metrics create shared ownership. Publishing data quality and AI‑readiness scores at the leadership level reinforces accountability and positions data as a core enterprise asset.

Try it out

New to Microsoft 365 Copilot? Check it out!

Related links

• Learn more about the councils that are steering AI projects at Microsoft.
• See how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Explore how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• See AI-powered agents in action: 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 Harnessing AI: How a data council is powering our unified data strategy at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

To help us and all enterprises respond to this new opportunity, the company just announced Microsoft Agent 365 at Microsoft Ignite. This product serves as the control plane for AI agents—a new evolution of the existing systems that organizations like ours use to manage people and apps.

“We’re empowering our employees and teams to build agents with guardrails. We have governance structures in place to ensure our internal agents are useful, safe, and properly scoped.”

David Johnson, principal program manager architect, Microsoft Digital

Our team—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—is now using Agent 365 to track agents that employees and teams from across the company are building and deploying. We’re also using it to access the dashboard that allow us to manage and govern agents companywide. We plan to utilize the new platform to comprehensively manage our agent workload.

Agent 365 will enable Microsoft Digital to help our employees, teams, and organizations to build and deploy agents safely and effectively, according to David Johnson, principal program manager architect for governance for the organization.

“We’re empowering our employees and teams to build agents with guardrails,” says Johnson, who notes that we have more than 100,000 agents on the Microsoft tenant today. “We have governance structures in place to ensure our internal agents are useful, safe, and properly scoped.”

Agent 365 is the control plane for AI agents and will play a key role in accelerating our journey toward becoming an AI-powered Frontier Firm. Whether your agents are created with Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks, or third-party tools, Agent 365 helps you deploy, organize, and govern them securely.

“Agent 365 delivers unified observability across your entire agent fleet through telemetry, dashboards, and alerts,” says Charles Lamanna, president of Business Apps & Agents for Microsoft. “IT leaders can track every agent being used, built, or brought into the organization, eliminating blind spots and reducing risk.”

Here in Microsoft Digital, we’re planning to use Agent 365 for multiple purposes, including:

• Filtering our agent inventory on specific criteria, such as the type of agent or how it was built
• Enhancing governance-specific actions we can take with agents in areas like ownership and quarantining
• Gaining visibility into trends like agent usage
• Ingesting agent blueprints and defining policy templates

If you are unfamiliar with an agent blueprint, it’s a portable specification for an AI agent’s identity, capabilities, constraints, data access, and lifecycle.

Agent 365 is part of our Frontier Firm organizational blueprint, which we’re using to blend machine intelligence with human judgment to create agents that are AI-operated but human-led.

Boosting governance with Agent 365

Agent 365 maximizes the value of agents while minimizing tenant risk. These are capabilities that play well with the data governance foundation that we’ve already laid here in Microsoft Digital, in which we use data sensitivity labels and data loss prevention controls to govern the data that agents use in our environment.

We incorporated elements of our tenant’s minimum bar for governance into how we secure agents. Those include Microsoft Purview Information Protection, a functional inventory, activity logging, lifecycle management, and the ability to properly isolate agents against crossing data boundaries.

Our intention is always to act as proactively as possible while putting reactive structures in place to catch any issues that arise. After all, this is a new technology, and there are bound to be some surprises. By combining all of these elements, we’ve landed on six core principles for governing agents:

1. We built a data hygiene foundation: This enables you to trust your data estates with which employees build and use agents.
2. 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 that users don’t own.
3. 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.
4. We protect data designated confidential or higher: We contain data flows to tenant mandates and only trust suitable storage destinations for content. This depends on the ability to gate which connectors can work with which particular source data and sensitivity labels.
5. We enable internal teams and organizations with a smooth path to develop agents: This provides them with all of the services and sources they need along a path to release to the company.
6. We honor the enterprise lifecycle: Both user-based and attestation-based lifecycles come into play. We treat agents that individual users own like any other user app, and delete them when the employee leaves the organization. Agents owned by teams have a lifecycle defined by the tenant and tied to attestation, the software development lifecycle, and accountability confirmations.

“We want and need feedback from our own IT team. It will help ensure all our customers are able to move quickly to deploy the platform with speed and safety.”

Charles Lamanna, president, Business Apps & Agents

Customer Zero for Agent 365

In our role as Customer Zero for Microsoft, our team in Microsoft Digital shares our insights on Agent 365 and our suite of agentic AI products with Lamanna and the product team. This makes the products more effective for our customers.

“We want and need feedback from our own IT team,” Lamanna says. “It will help ensure all our customers are able to move quickly to deploy the platform with speed and safety.”

While it’s still early days for Agent 365, the potential for transformative impact is significant.

“I meet with many of our top enterprise customers, and some of their primary questions are around how Microsoft manages agents to prevent sprawl, allows agent enablement against company data, and governs those agents,” Johnson says. “Agent 365 gives us a powerful new tool to manage our agentic estate, ensuring that our agents are delivering the transformative impact we expect while also enabling us to manage and secure our environment more effectively. Enabling self-service agent creation at scale necessitates enterprise observability and governance.” 

We’re excited to share more about our Customer Zero journey with Agent 365 on Inside Track soon.

Key takeaways

Here are five ways you can use Agent 365 to unlock agent observability and management at your company:

• Registry: Get the complete view of all agents in your organization, including agents with agent ID, agents you register yourself, and shadow agents.
• Access control: Bring agents under management and limit their access to only the resources they need. Prevent agents from being compromised with risk-based conditional access policies.
• Visualization: Explore connections between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time to assess their impact on your organization.
• Interoperability: Equip any agent with apps and data to simplify human-agent workflows. Connect them to Work IQ to provide context for the work to onboard them into business processes.
• Security: Protect agents from threats and vulnerabilities, and detect, investigate, and remediate attacks that target agents. Protect data that agents create and use from oversharing, leaks, and risky agent behavior.  

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft Agent 365 at your company.

Related links

• Read the official blog post announcing Microsoft Agent 365.
• Learn how we’re powering agentic AI adoption at Microsoft through our ‘Customer Zero’ story.
• Explore how we’re becoming an AI-first frontier firm in the agentic future.
• See AI-powered agents in action and discover how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with strong governance.
• Discover how we unlocked enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Find out how we powered AI value with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at Microsoft.
• See how our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.
• Learn about our strategy and vision for deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent internally at Microsoft.
• Dive into how we’re reimagining campus support at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.

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 Deploying Microsoft Agent 365: How we’re extending our infrastructure to manage agents at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In short, we’re all-in on agentic AI, and we want to help you get there, too.

“We’ve made a lot of progress deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot since it was released, and we’re now doing the same when it comes to enabling our employees and our teams to build agents that make us more productive,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re Customer Zero at Microsoft, which means we’re the first to deploy and use the technology and services that we sell to our customers. Those learnings give us a unique perspective and story to share with you about the journey we’ve been on with AI and agents.”

We have two collections of agentic AI content that we think will be useful to you.

“When it comes to agents, we’re still at the start. We expect to learn much more as we continue, lessons we’ll share here—stay connected and we’ll continue to share our story with you.” 

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

The first set of stories documents our vision and strategy for agents. They walk you through our experience deploying agentic AI, our work to create tools that enable our employees to dive in, and, through smart governance, empower everyone at Microsoft to be confident and creative with how they use agents while keeping the company safe and secure.

Our second set of stories highlights some of the most interesting and effective agents that our employees, teams, and organizations have built. These stories will not only give you examples of agents that we’ve built, they show how you can go about building  similar agents for your organization based on the collective experience of our employees and teams at Microsoft.

“We hope you find reviewing the journey we’ve been on practical and useful,” Fielder says. “When it comes to agents, we’re still at the start. We expect to learn much more as we continue, lessons we’ll share here—stay connected and we’ll continue to share our story with you.”  

November 13, 2025

Alex Fleck

The agentic future: How we’re becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm at Microsoft

January 30, 2025

Keith Boyd

AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft

Deploying agentic AI at Microsoft

May 15, 2025

Alex Fleck

Riding the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance

Agentic extensibility is expanding the frontier of enterprise AI. By creating agents that surface knowledge, take actions, and even reinvent workflows, people can personalize AI’s power like never before. But how do you move into the agentic future without putting your organization and employees at risk? How do you encourage citizen developers to create agents Read More

Agents we’ve deployed internally at Microsoft

November 13, 2025

David Hirning

Accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent

Microsoft is a huge and complex organization, with more than 200,000 full-time employees working in hundreds of locations around the world. 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. Previously, when our Read More

Key takeaways

We hope that you find our agentic AI stories useful. We wanted to share a mixture of our strategy and vision around enabling our employees to deploy agents, and to share stories that feature some of the most promising agents that our employees and teams have built and deployed.

We also understand that it can feel challenging to know where to start—it was for us. Here are some things we learned along the way that should help you:

• Governing agents is complex, and dependent on the overall AI maturity of your organization. Start slowly to build that maturity before unleashing too many new agents in your environment.
• A strong policy framework is the foundation. Lean on existing app governance policies, then layer agent-specific structures on top.
• Invest in data infrastructure and AI platforms. Building robust data infrastructure ensures your organization is prepared to leverage AI, and supports scalable, innovative, and secure AI-driven solutions.
• Develop a building environment strategy. Decide what scenarios match up with specific environments and make the right environments available to the relevant employees.
• Global regulations around categories like privacy, security, and responsibility provide a good baseline for establishing governance policies. Set relevant teams to work thinking through these regulations and incorporate their insights into your agent governance.
• Foster a culture of creativity and teamwork. Champion an AI-forward culture where innovation and collaboration drive the adoption of agentic AI.
• Develop AI expertise through training and development. As agentic AI transforms workflows and business outcomes across every industry, upskilling will empower your teams to navigate the rapid advances of AI, drive innovation, and ensure your organization stays competitive.
• Align AI initiatives with strategy. Ensuring AI initiatives align with business goals maximizes their impact and positions your organization to succeed in the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI.
• Implement ethical AI practices. You can use Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles as a guide. 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

• Get started with AI agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how to create and publish agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Find out how to create and deploy agents with Microsoft 365 Agents SDK.
• Check out these 12 lessons to get started building AI agents.

The post Powering agentic AI adoption at Microsoft: Our ‘Customer Zero’ story 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.

This story was published to preview a specific event, which has now concluded. We’re leaving it up on our site as a record of the different topics that were covered at this event.

Our team here in Microsoft Digital led the first and largest deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot to date, and now you can hear directly what that experience was like for us.

Stephan Kerametlian, a business program management director here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, led our effort to deploy to our more than 300,000 employees and vendors and now he’s focused on driving internal usage. He will join Karuana Gatimu, the director on the Microsoft 365 Customer Advocacy team on the Copilot product group, in a fireside chat-style discussion of our internal Copilot deployment at the upcoming Microsoft 365 Community Conference.

“Our employees have absolutely been loving Copilot,” Kerametlian says. “We’ve been very focused on building daily habits with Copilot, which have been growing steadily since launch—our people have been responding very well once we show them what they can do with Copilot.”

Sign up for Kerametlian and Gatimu’s Deploying Copilot at Microsoft: Tools and Lessons from Microsoft’s Own Adoption Journey presentation.

Kerametlian will also team up with Microsoft Digital colleague and governance expert David Johnson to participate in a conversation on how we’re transforming the workplace for our neurodivergent employees. Go here to sign up for their Empowering Neurodivergent Employees with Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation.  

In his main presentation, Johnson, a principal PM architect, will walk through how we empower our employees to create and share agents that get the most out of Copilot with good governance, while keeping the company protected, manageable and compliant. Go here to sign up for his How Microsoft Does Tenant Governance in the Age of Copilot session.

“We want our employees to be creative, to try new things, to push the envelope with Copilot and fully leverage our productivity services,” Johnson says. “We also need to protect the company and our employees themselves, building enterprise trust—the way we do that is by giving them guardrails that keep them safe without restricting them.”

Our Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team in Microsoft Digital is working with the Microsoft Teams Rooms and Microsoft Places product groups to make it easier to modernize and transform physical meeting rooms. You can learn more about their work by signing up for their Inside Microsoft: Transforming the Modern Workplace with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Places presentation.

Sam Albert, a principal product manager, and Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager, will walk through how our team is responding to the new flexible work environment with Express Install, an AI-powered affordable way to upgrade your meeting rooms in ways that make you employees feel included in meetings no matter where they join from and how they participate.

Here are more details on each presentation that our Microsoft Digital experts will be giving at the conference—take a look and sign up to the ones you want to attend.

Deploying Copilot at Microsoft: Tools and lessons from our adoption journey

Speakers: Stephan Kerametlian and Karuana Gatimu

Kerametlian leads our global change management and adoption efforts of Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft, which includes more than 300,000 employees and contingent staff. Gatimu is a business architect and productivity expert currently working in the Microsoft 365 Customer Advocacy in Collaborative Apps and Platform group.

Sign up for their presentation: Tools and lessons from deploying Copilot at Microsoft.

More on how we do it at Microsoft

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.
• Are you a CIO? Check out our Copilot deployment and adoption that we created for executives.
• Find out how we’re powering a generational shift in IT at Microsoft with AI.
• Learn how Measuring the impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI at Microsoft.
• Read how we measured the effectiveness of our Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout at Microsoft.

• Check out how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Find out how we used Microsoft 365 Copilot to help us deploy Copilot.
• Learn how we drove Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva.
• Read how we’re partnering with our works councils to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI.
• Check out our top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day.

Empowering neurodivergent employees with Copilot

Speakers: Stephan Kerametlian and David Johnson

Kerametlian leads our global change management efforts on Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft, which includes empowering accessibility through generative AI. Johnson is focused on empowering employees of all abilities and roles to be successful.

Sign up for their Empowering neurodivergent employees with Microsoft 365 Copilot​​ session.

More on how we do it at Microsoft

• Find out how we’re shifting left to get accessibility right at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re redesigning the way we work with Generative AI.

• Check out how we and ServiceNow are working together to build more accessible and inclusive experiences.
• Learn how our employees are finding connection in Microsoft Teams.

How Microsoft does tenant governance in the age of Copilot

Speaker: David Johnson

Johnson is responsible for our internal Microsoft 365 and productivity services tenancy strategy, architecture, and governance. He leads how we empower our employees with guardrails and governs our capability onboarding and tenant configuration. Previously he led our internal migration to SharePoint Online and led our internal SharePoint portal and SharePoint governance engineering team.

Sign up for Johnson’s presentation: How we do tenant governance in the age of Copilot.

Watch a video recording of Johnson’s presentation.

More on how we do it at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Find out more on our vision for driving deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.
• Read how we’re managing our enterprise AI extensibility with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

• Find out how we’re extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.
• Learn how we’re empowering employees with the Microsoft Power Platform.

Transforming the modern workplace with Teams Rooms and Places

Speakers: Roy Sherry and Sam Albert

Sherry is part of our team that plans, prioritizes, and budgets the lifecycle refresh of our 14,000 global conference rooms. He uses his continuous improvement background to look for opportunities to drive efficiencies across our room design and deployment process, which is reducing our total cost of ownership and enabling us to refresh and support our conference rooms at scale. Albert leads our team that develops the AV standards across our meeting room portfolio. He manages our internal deployment of Microsoft Teams Rooms and Microsoft Places in our meeting rooms.

Sign up for their Transforming our modern workplace with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Microsoft Places presentation.

More on how we do it at Microsoft

• Learn more about our overall approach to deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re blending our digital and physical workspaces here at Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re transforming our executive boardroom meeting experience.
• Learn how we’re rethinking our large meetings here at Microsoft.

• Find out how we use the Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms meeting room technology offering internally here at Microsoft.
• Read how we use Microsoft Teams Rooms to ensure our employees have quality meeting experiences at home and at work.
• Learn how we’re using the Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered Facilitator feature internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re using Microsoft Places to empower our employees to collaborate more effectively.

Go here to try out Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Learn more about our approach to accessibility as a company.

Try Places with a Microsoft Teams Premium trial.

• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Community Conference and find out how to attend.

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

The post Sharing our Customer Zero story at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

And for good reason—The Hive is where we in Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT organization, create cutting-edge meeting experiences that get rolled into Microsoft Teams Rooms, our video conferencing product in Microsoft Teams.

Until recently, The Hive has been an internal-facing resource where we, with our partners in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group, experimented with ways to improve meeting experiences at Microsoft.

“What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

However, as the work-from-home movement took off and customer interest in what we were doing in The Hive exploded, we made the decision to invite customers into our lab.

“Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager on our Microsoft Digital team at the Hive. “What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

To this end, our team has built a new customer experience at The Hive that features live demonstrations that show customers how to visualize how Microsoft Teams Rooms function in different settings.

Magic laboratory tours

Tours at The Hive are kind of like a meeting technology “speed dating” experience. Rather than just presenting a slide deck, we take a hands-on approach, spinning up a meeting (complete with realistic bot attendees) across a variety of spaces so customers can experience different room sizes, technologies, and scenarios in one walk through the facility. We can even invite their remote colleagues in for an additional point of view.

“We bring customers into The Hive, tour them through, and demonstrate how Microsoft creates cutting-edge meeting experiences in hybrid work environments,” Marzynski says. “And then we share our processes and know-how to help them create their own inclusive hybrid work meeting experiences at their companies.”

The tours are so popular that interest far exceeds our team’s capacity. We’ve also built virtual room tours, where you can go online to see how actual Teams Rooms look and feel around our campuses. “It’s kind of like teleporting around a house you’re interested in on a real estate site,” Marzynski says.

Microsoft Teams Rooms are represented as about a dozen different archetypes ranging from a Focus room for four people to an executive boardroom for over 30 people. These function as design references to inspire and unblock customers.

“Internally, we go super-deep with room specifications down to the last cable and screw required in the room,” Marzynski says. “While we do share those, it can be confusing when facing down a hybrid-work transformation challenge. Archetype thinking helps customers get out the weeds and imagine how to scale out a common room experience across a whole real estate portfolio.”

Ultimately, our team is focused on using The Hive to empower our customers to build their own experiences using Teams Rooms and other Microsoft technologies.

Building innovative hybrid meeting experiences

Interacting with external customers at The Hive has allowed us to more deeply understand our customers and their pain points. Understandably, we learned that customers want to create a welcoming, inclusive hybrid work environment while controlling costs.

Microsoft Teams Rooms archetypes

We’re not just working with expensive, experimental, showy new technologies at The Hive. We have three points of view through which we evaluate our work there: Capability, collaboration, and cost.

Capability refers to what people can accomplish in a meeting space with the right technology. Collaboration alludes to how we take advantage of moments that matter to make collective effort in meetings as seamless and productive as possible, and cost translates as ensuring that we’re driving value and recommending the most durable investments in hybrid work experiences.

With these central ideas in mind, The Hive created an entirely reimagined meeting room that we’re now using across the company—the Signature Teams Room.

Signature is the most evolved embodiment of Microsoft Teams Rooms. It’s designed to provide a fully inclusive and collaborative meeting experience for all attendees, whether they’re joining remotely or in-person. It includes specialized furniture, displays, cameras, and audio devices that are arranged in a way that makes it easier for all attendees to engage with each other.

 “It’s where the engineering of the technology and the design of the furniture and physical environment are fully integrated to create the most hybrid-friendly, inclusive experience possible,” Marzynski says.

One of the key features of a Signature Teams Room is a relocated central focal point for meeting attendees.

In a traditionally laid-out meeting room, the focal point of the meeting tends to be the center of a table, as it has been since meetings were invented. Remote participants tend to be off to the side of the room on a monitor, away from this focal point.

“Remote attendees can feel like observers, rather than participants, in a poorly thought-out traditional design,” Marzynski says. “You’re looking through what feels like a security camera, at a room of people that are sitting around a table, often facing away from you. And the in-room experience suffers as well, since everyone is forced to pay a cognitive tax to simultaneously balance two different types of interactions in two different parts of the room.”

By altering the room’s layout and selecting complementing hardware, Signature Teams Rooms have what is called a “circle of inclusion,” which welcomes in remote attendees and places them at natural eye-gaze points. The result is that hybrid meetings feel more organic than in a traditionally designed room, like sitting around a half-digital, half-physical conversation circle.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable.”

Margie Strite, product marketing manager, Microsoft Teams

All Signature Teams Rooms have the following properties:

• In-person and remote attendees face each other
• Camera is at eye level
• Spatial audio can match a person’s voice to their location
• Remote participants have a clear view of everyone in the room

These seemingly small changes have a huge impact on how meetings are experienced.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable,” says Margie Strite, a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. “Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.”

“Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team

Other small shifts, such as including a content camera aimed at an analog whiteboard for meetings or including digital collaboration devices like the Surface Hub, offer ways to increase engagement between in-person and remote participants.

The exact methods used and specifications for each Signature Teams Room built can vary for each customer and are based on their unique scenarios.

“Our solutions are very individualized,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team at The Hive. “Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

The Hive also concentrates on resourcefulness, deploying meeting rooms that provide excellent hybrid meeting experiences while limiting costs.

Reducing costs while upgrading meeting rooms

The reduction of cost in this work is vital, particularly when building a new meeting room experience can cost as much as building a new house.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible.”

Sam Albert, principal product manager, The Hive

While some organizations might be comfortable spending large amounts of their budget to update and improve meeting rooms, many want to strike a balance between experience and cost-efficiency. This is largely why The Hive focuses on creating individualized solutions with its Signature Teams Rooms.

Most of the time, a lot of energy is put into making the most of what already exists within a room, rather than remodeling everything. There are also new, modular solutions being built within Microsoft.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive. “We’re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes—while driving down cost and complexity.”

A new low-cost, modular approach to deploying room solutions that our experts designed at The Hive bypasses the usual built-in technology and keeps costs down, even when the technology needs to be updated in the future.

“We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

Danielle Chelles-Blair, senior designer, Microsoft Digital

For example, in a large multi-purpose room, this solution features a mobile pod that works with Microsoft Teams Rooms and is equipped with audience-facing cameras, a presenter-tracking camera, and scalable audio. During a meeting room refresh at Microsoft, this modular solution helped cut our cost by 75 percent as compared to how we would traditionally upgrade the same meeting room.

Despite being more cost-effective and less intensive than traditional solutions, the modular solution is still designed to create inclusive hybrid meeting experiences.

“We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented,” says Danielle Chelles-Blair, a senior designer in Microsoft Digital. “We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

In addition to inclusivity and cost savings, for many organizations, the reduced trial-and-error to find effective meeting experience solutions is a marked benefit of turning to The Hive.

“Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs,” Strite says. “The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.”

Key takeaways

If you’re thinking about getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms, here are some tips to guide you:

• Plan your deployment. Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan. This includes identifying the rooms where you want to deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms, selecting the right hardware, and ensuring that your network infrastructure is ready for video conferencing.
• Get familiar with the features. Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. Some of these features include one-touch join, proximity detection, and content sharing. It’s important to get familiar with these features so that you can use them effectively during your meetings.
• Ensure that your devices are up-to-date. To ensure that you have the best possible experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to keep your devices up-to-date. This includes updating the firmware on your cameras, displays, and audio devices.
• Train your users. It’s important to train your users on how to use Microsoft Teams Rooms effectively. This includes teaching them how to join meetings, how to share content, and how to troubleshoot common issues.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Related links

• Go here to see and virtually experience a Signature Teams Room for yourself.
• Read more about signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms.
• Discover how we’re upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Learn how we’re transforming the experience of large hybrid meetings at Microsoft.
• Check out this video interview on deploying signature Microsoft Teams Rooms in our Canadian headquarters.

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 Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

As the company’s IT organization, we at Microsoft Digital realized that advanced AI was going to create opportunities for our employees to increase their reach and impact. We knew we needed to move quickly to help them get ready for the moment.

Our response?

We assembled an ambitious data and AI curriculum through Microsoft Viva Learning that draws from Microsoft Learn and other content sources. This curriculum is now empowering our employees with the skills they need to harness these tools.

It’s all part of our approach to infusing AI into everything we do to support the company. The more successful we are in Microsoft Digital, the better our team can deploy our new AI technologies to the rest of our colleagues across the organization.

“We take a holistic approach. It’s not just about winning with technology—it’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Digital

Infusing AI into Microsoft through a learn-it-all culture

Fully unleashing AI across Microsoft is a bold aspiration that will require plenty of guidance and support from our Microsoft Digital team. It’s both a technology and a people challenge that requires us to have more than IT knowledge to deliver.

“We take a holistic approach,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management in Microsoft Digital. “It’s not just about winning with technology—it’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.”

With our learn-it-all culture and Microsoft Viva Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other content sources at our disposal, a progressive curriculum was the natural choice for upskilling our technical professionals. Microsoft Viva Learning connects content from our organization’s internal learning libraries and third-party learning management systems.

As a result, it makes it easy for our team to develop learning paths with content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and external providers like Pearson.

“As a tech company, we’re always encountering new concepts and new technologies,” says Miguel Uribe, principal product manager lead for Employee Experience Insights in Microsoft Digital. “It’s part of our culture to absorb technology and consume concepts very quickly, and AI is just the latest example.”

Building meaningful AI certifications for Microsoft employees

Our AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE)—the Microsoft Digital team tasked with designing and championing how our organization uses AI—is at the forefront of these efforts. They’re working to standardize how we leverage AI internally.

[Read our story on our CoE here: The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital is responding with an AI Center of Excellence.]

The AI CoE operates according to the principles of AI 4 ALL: Accelerate, learn, and land.

Strategy

Work with product and feature teams to determine what we want to achieve with AI, define business goals, and prioritize the most important implementations and investments.

Architecture

Enable infrastructure, data, services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all AI use cases.

Roadmap

Build and manage implementation plans for AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.

Culture

Foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI among stakeholders.

Responsible AI

Responsible AI serves as the foundation for all our AI-powered solutions and products. The AI CoE prioritizes the company’s responsible AI principles for our AI projects: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.

“Our first priority is creating a common understanding and language around these fairly new topics,” says Humberto Arias, senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The technology changes constantly, so you need to learn continually to keep up.”

Fortunately, enterprising employees within Microsoft have been laying the groundwork for this moment for years. Our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) community had been working on their own time to deepen their knowledge through research and independent certifications.

When generative AI took off at the start of 2023, that community began partnering with the AI CoE and got serious about empowerment. They brought their knowledge. The AI CoE brought their organizational leadership.

“No other organization within Microsoft can provide such a clear picture of what you need for upskilling,” says Urvi Sengar, an AI/ML senior software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “Only our IT organization is functionally diverse enough.”

Their work is a testament to the power of trusting your technology champions to lead change.

“So much is changing that we don’t want to stop at just one static certification. We want to keep the learning going, along with everything new and relevant, so we can take this community forward.”

Urvi Sengar, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital

In previous years, Sengar and her AI/ML community colleagues had already built a learning path focused on Azure AI Fundamentals. They relaunched the course in 2023 to represent the core of our AI certifications.

From there, a diverse group of technical and employee experience professionals collaborated to assemble, create, and structure a series of learning paths to launch our Microsoft Digital employees into the next level of AI expertise. That’s where Microsoft Viva Learning really shines. The platform makes it easy to curate our AI content actively as the technology landscape evolves.

“So much is changing that we don’t want to stop at just one static certification,” Sengar says. “We want to keep the learning going, along with everything new and relevant, so we can take this community forward.”

The result is a granular, multidisciplinary curriculum that gets Microsoft Digital employees leveled up not just to AI literacy, but to AI proficiency.

Innovative AI certifications designed for employee success

Our AI and Data Learning curriculum divides into three distinct learning paths: basic, intermediate, and advanced.

• AI Learning Basic gives beginners a ground-level, conceptual understanding of the technology. It builds familiarity with generative AI and no-code AI tools, as well as more theoretical frameworks and topics like the responsible AI principles, AI ethics, and how to align AI projects with our values.
• AI Learning Intermediate is where things get more functional. Here, employees learn about natural language processing and prompt engineering, as well as several specific AI tools, including ChatGPT, AI Builder in Power Automate, Semantic Kernel (for building AI-based apps), Azure OpenAI generative models, and more.
• AI Learning Advanced goes from function to innovation. This is where employees can dive deeper into working with large language models (LLMs), training neural networks, self-supervised machine learning, and other skills that will help them develop more advanced solutions and automations. Examples include units on Advanced Natural Language Processing with Python and UX for AI.

When employees complete each learning path, they receive a sharable badge. We used Credly, a digital credentialing solution created by Pearson, to design and manage those badges. We can then distribute them to our employees through Credly’s integration with Microsoft Viva Learning.

Microsoft Digital AI certification levels

Curating the curriculum is only one part of the AI CoE’s job. It’s also crucial to promote and socialize these learning opportunities internally. The wider Microsoft Viva employee experience suite takes care of that.

We actively socialize the AI certifications through Microsoft Viva Engage, our employee communication platform, but top-down promotion is only one component of their success. Microsoft Digital employees often share their certifications via LinkedIn or through Viva Engage. As a result, there’s an element of virality that leads even more of our employees to take these courses—even outside Microsoft Digital.

“People are observing the work we do and looking for ways to bring it into their organizations. Even external customers are asking how they can set up their own centers of excellence and what to prioritize.”

Nitul Pancholi, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our teams are clearly excited about their success. The share rate for AI Learning badges is 67 percent, well above Credly’s average of 47 percent.

Beyond Microsoft Digital, lines of business across Microsoft are adapting these certifications for their own needs.

“People are observing the work we do and looking for ways to bring it into their organizations,” says Nitul Pancholi, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, who leads the AI CoE’s culture pillar. “Even external customers are asking how they can set up their own centers of excellence and what to prioritize.”

Freshly empowered AI practitioners, ready for the future

We’re still at the beginning of our internal AI adoption journey. But by raising the baseline of AI knowledge, these certifications ensure our technical professionals are ready to lead the rest of our organization.

“That’s one of the super cool things about Microsoft,” MacDonald says. “We have the playground at our fingertips, and we have the autonomy and opportunity to dream up whatever we want.”

The advent of advanced AI supported by thoughtful empowerment initiatives will only amplify our employees’ ability to experiment with emerging technologies. We’re confident that developing our own AI curriculum will help us work our way into a virtuous cycle of more learning, more creativity, and more business innovation.

Customers with access to Microsoft Viva Learning can start assembling their own AI curriculum, drawing from Microsoft Learn content, their own educational materials, and external providers and learning management systems. By unlocking AI for employees through education, organizations will be better positioned to ride the wave of the next digital revolution.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to consider as you think about launching an AI curriculum at your company:

• Leverage your integrations with tools like Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning.
• Actively curate your courses to keep your curriculum up to date.
• Busy schedules get in the way: Build time for learning into your employees’ days, then support them with curriculum.
• Leverage executive sponsorship, employee champions, and the social aspects of learning.
• Incentivize and recognize progress through gamification, friendly competition, badges, and testimonials.
• Build a diverse enablement team from across different disciplines, seniorities, and technical backgrounds.
• Think about how to segment learners by level of expertise and learning style, then tailor the learning to those segments.

Try it out

Start building your own AI curriculum with Microsoft Viva Learning.

Related links

• Learn how we’re managing our response to the AI revolution internally at Microsoft with an AI Center of Excellence.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover how Microsoft cultivates a culture of learning with Viva Learning.
• Explore creating learn-it-alls at Microsoft with Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub.
• Get more details about our AI Center of Excellence.

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 Embracing emerging technology at Microsoft with new AI certifications appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Since we launched the tool internally here at Microsoft, we’ve learned a few best practices for deploying it easily and making full use of its features. This post shares some of our learnings so you can take advantage of our experience when you activate Copilot for Sales at your organization.

[See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.]

Taking the tedium out of sales tasks

Copilot for Sales maximizes productivity with an AI assistant specifically designed for sellers. Like our other AI-powered tools, it increases productivity and efficiency by providing intelligent digital assistance within Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

The added value of Copilot for Sales is working with Dynamics 365 or Salesforce to access, use, and input customer relationship management (CRM) data. As a result, it eliminates distracting tasks that eat away at their time and get in the way of what they do best—building relationships and solving problems.

“Everything we’ve done in terms of our Dynamics 365 sales platform aims to give time back to sellers so they can invest it into customers,” says Alexandra Jones, senior business program and change manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With AI and copilots, our technology is doing even more to help us reach that goal.”

The sweet spot exists at the intersection of AI-enabled intelligence and CRM integration into the spaces where salespeople operate every day. Within Microsoft Teams, Copilot for Sales delivers real-time call insights, AI-generated meeting summaries, post-call analyses and action items, and more. In Microsoft Outlook, its abilities include crafting contextual email responses, summarizing lengthy threads, and creating Teams Collaboration Spaces associated with accounts and opportunities.

Across both workspaces, Copilot for Sales makes it easier to create, update, or view CRM contacts, opportunities, and other data associated with sales accounts. That mitigates the need for sellers to migrate to a different tool as they conduct the essential business of using or updating their CRM.

“For sellers trying to do their jobs, it’s all about that flow of information within the flow of action,” says Kerry Barrass, director of business programs within Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions. “While the conversation is fresh, the tool distills information down into consumable chunks and actionable items.”

Those features come in handy because sales are complex and require strong coordination across large teams. One of our typical sales accounts involves anywhere from 20 to 50 individual employees, each with a vital role to play. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to get everyone on a call or piece together the narrative underlying email threads.

“When I get copied into an email thread, I used to need a knowledge transfer meeting to get up to speed,” says Emilio Reyes Le Blanc, a technology specialist in Microsoft Sales. “This technology means I can just open an email thread, have Copilot generate a summary, and contextualize my existing relationships from the integrated pane within Outlook.”

Taken together, these features deliver greater contextual understanding, more efficient workflows, and higher data fidelity within our CRM systems.

Our top seven tips for adopting and using Copilot for Sales

Our deployment experience and  of Copilot for Sales have provided some helpful insights. These seven tips should help with your adoption and everyday work with this AI-powered tool.

Seven tips for deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

01

Ride the wave of excitement

02

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

03

Leverage leadership at every level

04

Ensure our underlying data policies are secure

05

Start simple and work up from there

06

Prioritize CRM data resilience

07

Practice effective prompting

Deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally at Microsoft has taught us important lessons that we hope will help you deploy it at your company.

Ride the wave of excitement

Sellers have an eye for value, and when they saw what Copilot for Sales could do, it generated a lot of excitement. The tool’s intuitive features mean that, from a user perspective, it isn’t a complicated solution. As a result, we’ve experienced a substantial organic boost to adoption.

“One day, a magic button popped up in my Outlook and I got a prompt to try Sales Copilot, so I taught myself to use it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “One of the beautiful things about this tool is that its time to value is extraordinary.”

When you’re deploying Copilot for Sales to your own sellers, focus on visibility first. When the excitement takes hold, it will boost adoption among your self-motivated salespeople. Encourage that uptake to score some early champions.

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

Not everyone is a self-driven early adopter—and that’s perfectly alright! Effective change management starts with understanding your audience and the complexities of your sales environment.

We recommend building hero scenarios for each user persona by taking a granular look at their challenges, sales processes, and day-to-day work. Dig into their role descriptions and documentation and ask what they’re trying to accomplish. From there, you can piece together your enablement materials based on what provides value.

Using video For video enablement content, we’ve discovered that the ideal length is 30 seconds to one minute.

Consider different learning formats and modalities as well.

“You want to make readiness consumable and provide options,” Jones says. “Some people want to show up to a demo session, and some people want to watch a video on their own time, so it’s important to offer a variety of pathways to adoption.”

Multimodality that includes courses, demos, written documentation, and more will help your readiness efforts reach the most people with the most impact.

Engage leadership at every level

It’s always important to engage your leaders. That includes both organizational leadership and product champions.

“Advocates and champions are always important, not just for leading from the front,” Barrass says. “You also get more candid feedback by empowering these people to be part of pilot groups.”

Naturally, enthusiastic executive sponsorship is essential, especially with new technology. Not only do leaders provide direction and encouragement for their organizations, but they can also choose to give people space to allocate time and prioritize learning. Cultivate those sponsorships early and actively.

The same goes for employee champions. By running internal pilots targeting key user scenarios, you’ll ensure you receive early feedback to guide product development and a core of users who can help lead adoption across your organization.

Ensure your underlying data policies are secure

Your organization might be cautious about how AI tools interact with their data repositories, so deploying Copilot for Sales is a good opportunity to review your data-loss prevention setup. By ensuring your policies are up to date, you can prevent accidental data loss or exposure.

“Copilot for Sales sits on top of our existing data repositories, so it engages with that data in the same way as any other connected tool,” Jones says. “It’s less about the solution and more about having a robust infrastructure of administrative policies and technologies safeguarding your organization.”

It will be essential to initiate reviews within several key disciplines. Those include HR, legal, security, and the IT team responsible for maintaining and protecting your data estate. Within your sales teams themselves, administrators may have concerns about access. If that’s the case, encourage them to conduct a thorough security and role review.

Guide those conversations using Copilot for Sales’ extensive product documentation.

Start simple and work up from there

For sellers themselves, building trust in a new technology takes time. People might need to work up the confidence to try more intensive or involved features, especially if they’re reticent about AI technology.

“Just start with two or three features that are really going to appeal to people,” Jones says. “Encourage sellers to ask what works best for their role.”

We suggest salespeople start small with meeting and email summarization capabilities. They might not be ready to trust email drafting tools just yet, but when they see how the intelligence works through summarization, they’ll understand how Copilot for Sales engages with information.

After sellers have built up their understanding and confidence around how this tool engages with data, they can experiment with different features that apply to their work.

Prioritize CRM data resilience

Anyone in sales operations will tell you that high data fidelity in your CRM is crucial. Leadership needs to know their institutional data is resilient. Accuracy and completeness ensure up-to-date contact data along with a comprehensive view of relationships across internal and external teams.

All this information helps sales managers make effective decisions, generate accurate forecasts, and properly understand attrition. In other words, the business value of CRM data management is enormous. It’s also prone to disarray because it formerly required salespeople to switch over to the CRM and input information. Copilot for Sales changes all that.

“Historically, the way for this to work is you would write the email, then go to a different window, find the account record, go to the contacts list, create a new one, put in all of the contact’s information, and save it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “But here, I can do all that in one fell swoop.”

If you’re a seller, get used to creating and updating CRM contacts from within Microsoft Teams and Outlook using Copilot for Sales. This feature eliminates the need to re-enter information directly into the CRM and builds healthy habits around data fidelity.

That flow of information works the other way as well. Be sure to use the contact card feature to view summaries of customer information from within Microsoft Outlook and Teams. That ensures you’re working with the most up-to-date data directly from your CRM.

Practice effective prompting

Prompt creation will become increasingly important as AI tools mature, so it’s worth honing those skills using Copilot for Sales’ email drafting feature. A simple rule to remember is that the more you put in, the more you get out.

“If you have specifics off the bat, like you know you want to schedule a meeting or there are a few key points to express, include those in your prompt,” Jones says. “Be succinct and save your own time, because that’s what the technology is for.”

Prompting is just like any other practice. The more you work at it, the easier it becomes.

The expanding possibilities of AI assistance

Microsoft salespeople have already seen amazing success, and we’re just getting started. Within our sales organization, 12.5K out of 35K sales roles are Copilot for Sales monthly active users—more than a third of the workforce. For a technology in its first year, that’s remarkable progress.

Reyes Le Blanc estimates that he’s saving two hours each month creating contacts in Dynamics 365 and five hours a month reviewing emails. With over 6 million seller emails sent in our first quarter of this fiscal year, the potential for email time savings alone is enormous.

He also finds his meeting notes much more accurate now that Copilot for Sales has his back, especially when it comes to long lists of technologies or technical requirements. It’s the ideal tool for gathering details via the meeting review feature and performing keyword or conversational analyses.

“This is a way to do more with less,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “As a seller, I can’t imagine working without artificial intelligence.”

Considering our average salesperson participates in 17 meetings per week, those efficiencies really add up. As new features and integrations come into play, Copilot for Sales’ horizons will only widen.

Start using AI to streamline your selling experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

• See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover how we’re using Microsoft 365 to bolster our teamwork.
• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales on Microsoft Learn.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Seven things we learned deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed supply chains into the spotlight and revealed just how shaky they can be. If you panic-bought toilet paper or flour in March 2020, you know that a perfect storm formed as customers frantically bought up every item from store shelves just as factories shut their doors, resulting in widespread product shortages and worldwide shipping delays.

Like many companies, Microsoft looked for forward-thinking supply-line solutions as the pandemic’s business challenges began to recede and a new reality set in. One such solution was using the dropship method of shipping goods. In the dropship model, the seller and the supplier work together to send purchased products directly to the customer. Doing so minimizes warehouse expenses for the retailer, adds revenue to the supplier, and gets goods to customers faster for a win-win-win.

Usually, our Customer Zero program shows the inner workings of how Microsoft builds and tests our products before we release them to the public. In this case, we invited an outside company, a large retailer, to test this new logistics system with us.

Streamlining logistics

Prior to our collaboration on dropshipping, this retailer sold our products in its stores or on its website and fulfilled them with inventory from its warehouses. Microsoft would send electronics like laptops, tablets, and Xboxes to the retailer, and they would then send them to customers from whichever of their warehouses was closest to the shopper.

But in the post-pandemic world, customers expect to order online or in-store and receive their merchandise as quickly as possible. The concept was that the large retailer could reach customers more efficiently if it didn’t have to store and ship our products to its customers—we could do it for them faster and for less cost.

For our part at Microsoft, such a partnership would mean we didn’t have to bear the shipping cost entirely on our own or lose potential revenue from stock unavailability. It would also open the door to better integration and partnership with retailers who sell our products. The fact that this made sense for customers as well sealed the deal. We began to tackle the technical and logistical details together on a pilot program with Microsoft Surface tablets.

Collaboration and challenges

As you might imagine, optimizing shipping with a larger retailer calls for plenty of close collaboration. The project was big, and both companies were doing it for the first time, so the stakes were high.

“We were working with a new vendor for a new service that has high visibility across a flagship Microsoft product,” says Sunil Potharaju, a software engineering manager on our Azure Integration Services (AIS) team. “We asked what the challenges and risks were with integrating external systems outside of Microsoft.”

Multiple teams were tapped to solve challenges as they arose, but the AIS team headed the collaboration. Starting in June 2022, we worked across multiple internal and external teams to create requirements, identify challenges, and understand touch points.

Security hurdles

First and foremost, the AIS team had to ensure the security of our systems at Microsoft. That began by pinpointing the various systems and vendors the retailer used. Primary among them was a well-regarded commerce platform that helps large retailers manage their e-commerce.

The AIS team met with the retailer and commerce company to determine the best way to align with one another and identify the points of integration.

“We had multiple sessions with to ensure the commerce platform adhered to our security guidelines and safeguards,” Potharaju says. “Our compliance requirements and authentication methodology had to be followed and implemented on their side, and we needed to understand their systems as well.” 

The hope was that the three companies could successfully collaborate by being transparent with one another.

Integration complexities

Once each company understood the other’s requirements, the three began to map the points of integration. These ranged from the undeniably enormous (authorization and authentication) to the seemingly insignificant (truncating characters to comply with the various systems). 

Because the code has to communicate with whichever system is sending and receiving information at any given moment, the AIS team custom-built translations. For example, Microsoft stores its data in SAP, but SAP accepts only the IDoc format. The commerce platform we’re working with supports many file formats, but not IDoc. Consequently, the AIS team built connections keyed off of the electronic data interchange (EDI) format, the standard for many inventory management systems.

“EDI is a language that lets these organizations speak with each other,” says Neeraj Tripathi, senior product manager for the AIS team, who describes the integration effort as challenging but exciting. “Aligning these different systems was complex. It was a lot of priority management, change management, and coordination. We had to get all parties to understand why this is the right solution, why it’s important, and why they need to work on it.”

Working together internally and externally

In addition to integrating with the large retailer  and commerce company, the AIS team had to get assistance from many other teams within Microsoft.

“We had the SAP team, the supply chain team, the order management team, the capability team, and the channel management team. We got really good help from our team members and fellow stakeholders,” Tripathi says.

The AIS team helped everyone understand the requirements, the customizations we support, and the overall feasibility.

“We ensure that everything is propagated across systems for an end-to-end solution. We have big design sessions that go through everything before we start coding,” Potharaju says. “The touch points, monitoring, alerting, and tracking are all baked into the design in agreement with our counterparts. We determine which team does what and which things need to be done and at which juncture. There are multiple parties involved, so we bring all of them together and find common ground.”

Handshakes all along the way

True expertise lies in making the difficult appear effortless, and that was certainly the case with the AIS team’s integrations for the partnership.

How does it work?

After the customer submits the order to the retailer’s portal, they then push the order to commerce company’s system, which further communicates that data to the Azure Integration Services layer.

This is the first touch point with Microsoft. From there, the AIS platform transforms and standardizes the order into the EDI format. Following that, the information flows into SAP, the software we use for enterprise resource planning. The process reverses when we communicate our inventory to the retailer’s commerce company’s system.

“Previously, we never had any history of sharing the inventory upfront with partners. Because they didn’t have visibility to the inventory, they would preorder and stock,” Potharaju says. “With dropship, we expose our inventory details with partners: which products are available and what are the quantities available.”

In this dropship partnership, the retailer doesn’t need to preorder and stock. The retailer takes the order, handles payments, and sends the order to us at Microsoft. We ship directly from our warehouses to the customer. This streamlined process leads to savings for both companies and increased satisfaction on the part of the consumer. For the retailer, this process not only shoulders the warehouse burden but also helps the company be more agile in response to sometimes volatile supply and demand.

A new model for the supply chain ecosystem

Now that the two companies are sharing data, “our business partners and supply chain partners are thrilled looking at the volumes of transactions post we got,” Potharaju says.

This new way of doing business for both companies has reaped dividends in more ways than one.

“This is a game changer for Microsoft because other products and retailers can be onboarded to it,” Potharaju says. “The overall supply chain ecosystem is changing, and we need to change too.”

Phase one involved only the Microsoft Surface, so the next step is to add more products to the program.

“Other big customers don’t want to store inventory in their warehouses either,” Potharaju says. “Using the EDI format, we can integrate with many other retailers as we expand and scale.”

The AIS team is already hard at work on Phase 2 of the program and is evaluating other larger retailers for similar partnerships.

“We want to take this new model for the supply chain ecosystem—where we send directly from our warehouse rather than sending from our warehouse to the retailer’s warehouse—to other retailers so this becomes the norm,” Tripathi says.

Here are some tips on getting started with dropshipping at your company:

• Dropshipping reduces costs, increases agility, and enhances customer satisfaction for both manufacturers and retailers.
• Successful dropshipping partnerships require collaboration, integration of diverse systems, and coordination across multiple teams.
• Translating data formats and creating seamless communication pathways between disparate systems is a complex but essential aspect of dropshipping implementation.
• Transparent sharing of inventory data and streamlining order fulfillment processes are key benefits of dropshipping models for supply chain partners.

Try out using our AI-powered Microsoft Copilot for Sales platform to simplify your sales.

• Unpack how we’re revolutionizing SAP and ADP connectivity with Microsoft Azure VWAN and VPN.
• Discover how we’re optimizing Microsoft’s SAP environment with Microsoft Azure.
• Explore how we’re using IoT devices to improve our employee experiences.

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

The post Getting products to customers faster with dropshipping at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, giving our employees every opportunity to thrive is critical.

Now, we have a new but familiar tool to help us do that—our very own Microsoft Viva Glint.

We’re using Viva Glint—which replaces LinkedIn Glint—to check in with our more than 190,000 employees, and to respond to their feedback accordingly.

We recently finished migrating our centralized, active employee listening capability to Viva Glint. As part of that, we moved our employee sentiment survey programs onto the platform, including our flagship Employee Signals program, our lifecycle surveys, and a key manager feedback survey.

We use Employee Signals to survey our employees twice per year. Our leaders, managers, and HR practitioners use the feedback to improve our work environment, to identify our strengths and improvement opportunities, and ultimately, to help our employees thrive more at work (which to us means helping them feel energized and empowered to do meaningful work).

“Employee Signals is our flagship channel for listening to our employees,” says Dante Myers, a director on the HR Business Insights (HRBI) Employee Listening team. “It’s how we mobilize our entire company to ensure all our employees can thrive.”

In July 2023, LinkedIn Glint officially became Microsoft Viva Glint as part of our Employee Experience Platform. LinkedIn Glint was a leader in the employee feedback category with a robust people-science methodology. Shifting its capabilities to Viva Glint strengthens the insights and recommendations we can deliver to our customers. With this transition, we’re rebuilding and strengthening the product, making it better adhere to our security standards while improving its reporting and admin experiences and its integration with other Microsoft products.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft, it was important for us to migrate to Viva Glint so we could start taking advantage of these enhancements when we send out our Employee Signals surveys and to improve our listening systems overall. In this story, we’ll share how we achieved this technical migration, the benefits we gained, the challenges we faced, and what learnings we can pass on to other companies that want to make the same move.

“Viva Glint helps our managers understand insights at scale,” Myers says. “They can use it to ask questions and to dive into comments that their employees have left for them.”

A boost from Viva Glint

Moving to Viva Glint has given us many advantages, including access to the power of Copilot in Viva Glint, which helps our leaders, managers and HR partners easily understand, interpret, and act on feedback we get from our employees.

Here are just a few of the benefits we’ve gained from Viva Glint and its seamless integration with Copilot and other Microsoft Viva tools:

• Faster analysis: Our employee surveys give us thousands of powerful written insights that used to require heavy amounts of manual review and analysis. Now we’re using Copilot in Viva Glint to instantly analyze these results, saving us weeks of time and increasing the ability of our leaders to draw out useful insights. Almost 5,000 of our managers used Copilot in Viva Glint after our most recent Employee Signals to dig into their results and understand employee comments.
• Deeper understanding: Our employee surveys are a great way to understand our employee sentiment, but that’s not the whole story. How our people work, collaborate, and spend their time also impacts their engagement and productivity. We used Viva Insights alongside Viva Glint to understand how our people work in meetings, after hours, during focus time, and in other specific scenarios.
• Personal growth and development tools: Viva Glint will soon come with 360 surveys that leaders and managers can use for personal growth and development (the targeted release date is August 2024). These 360s were previously a separate product with LinkedIn Glint and are now included in Viva Glint.
• Advanced admin capabilities: Better and more controls in Viva Glint means we can change our ongoing survey programs as needed. Some of these new capabilities include better data ownership, question-level permissions, display logic questions, and self-serve raw data exports.
• Enhanced security and privacy: Our company runs on trust and security. With the move to Viva Glint, we now have a higher level of security as the product is built on Microsoft 365 compliance standards offering enterprise-grade security, trust, privacy, and accessibility.
• Ongoing product innovation: Features like Copilot in Viva Glint are just the beginning of the innovation we’re excited for in Viva Glint. Future improvements and integrations with other Microsoft products like Viva Insights will give us more opportunities to better understand our employees, take action, and drive impact.

It’s all about giving you more tools to listen to and respond to the feedback your employees give you.

“Viva Glint provides a foundation for measuring employee satisfaction and sentiment,” says Nate Zimmer, a senior product manager on the Unified Employee Experience team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With the behavioral telemetry of Viva Insights, we can now see broad work patterns and combine that with the employee sentiment data from Viva Glint.”

Benefits of moving to Viva Glint

Ongoing investment and innovation, including Copilot

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Viva Glint is critical to Microsoft Viva with new features and enhancements on the roadmap with Copilot in Viva Glint for comment summarization included

Employee Lifecycle surveys included for all for all Viva Glint customers

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Viva Glint combines both Engage and Employee Lifecycle products into one platform for all customers

More impact with other Viva apps

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Get a holistic view of the employee experience with Insights and Pulse.

Integrations with other Viva apps and Microsoft products drive more insights and action taking

Enhanced security and accessibility

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Built on Microsoft 365 compliance and standards offering enterprise-grade security, trust, and accessibility standards

Experience the benefits of Viva Glint, a platform that provides insights into your organization’s health and helps improve employee engagement and satisfaction.

Migration approach

We accelerated our migration from LinkedIn Glint to Viva Glint so that we could take advantage of the new functionality in private preview and thoroughly test our migration tools and processes for our customers. We learned a lot from being one of the first companies to migrate, and our experience and feedback has been incorporated into the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

We drove our migration with a tight partnership across our Viva Glint migration team, our Viva Glint product group, HRBI Employee Listening team, and Microsoft Digital group (our internal IT organization and experts on our internal privacy, security, and Microsoft 365 usage).

“It was important that we engaged our global tenant admins early in the migration process as they had necessary tasks in Microsoft 365 to complete for the migration,” says Erica Shepard, a senior program manager on the HR Business Insights team. “It’s recommended to engage with them four to six weeks in advance.”

Our migration involved migrating four years of survey data for over 190,000 employees. In addition to our twice-annual Employee Signals, we have lifecycle surveys that are administered daily. We planned our migration window to minimize the impact on our survey programs, giving ourselves six weeks to plan and four weeks post migration before starting to program our next survey cycle. We completed numerous pre-migration tasks to prepare, including exporting reports for post-migration validation. These preparation tasks are outlined in our Migration Toolkit.

We opted not to communicate to managers and employees that we were migrating because the impact to them would be minimal, we estimated that our system would only be offline for two days. Our engineering team did extensive development and testing on our migration tools to make sure we would be fully ready to migrate our external customers in a timely, secure, and quality manner. This effort paid off for us—we were able to complete our data migration in one day and our validations in one additional day. After that, our instance of Viva Glint was fully functional with all our data migrated, which allowed our managers to start using Viva Glint two days after our migration started.

“The migration exceeded my expectations,” Shepard says. “It was completed faster than expected and we encountered zero data-quality issues.”

Post migration, we identified a couple of challenges that we worked with our Viva Glint migration team to resolve. These were mostly resolved with user education and making some system changes. One issue involved emails not being generated and sent, which impacted our ability to send survey invitations. We discovered a custom LinkedIn Glint template that didn’t match the email template in Viva Glint—after we deleted the LinkedIn Glint template, the system reverted to the default Viva Glint email template and the issue was resolved. This solution has been added to our Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

Another challenge we encountered was related to our survey content. While the survey content migrated, we needed to re-program our survey invitation and reminder mails because the Viva Glint email formatting didn’t allow hyperlinks, markdown syntax, or paragraphs. To solve this, we needed to get creative and adjust our approach—we shortened our overall email text to one paragraph and included vanity URLs as text strings.

Additionally, the product team resolved an issue with the Microsoft logo not downloading in the emails—we use the logo to ensure our emails didn’t look like spam to our employees. The product team also resolved an intermittent access issue where users couldn’t sign in, which was an issue related to an expired token. When we launched our reporting portal, we discovered that our customized resources didn’t migrate, and we needed to re-create them on a tight timeline. This learning has been shared with the Migration team and our solutions are now part of our Migration Toolkit.

Administering our first survey cycle

With our migration to Viva Glint complete, we pivoted to the April cycle of our Employee Signals and Manager and Leader Signals (the latter is our survey where our employees provide feedback about their managers and skip managers). We planned our migration so that we had two months to test our survey builds on Viva Glint, which gave us time to work through the above challenges with the product team.

Overall, we’re very pleased with our successful first survey cycle on Viva Glint, even with the few bumps, especially because we were able to delight our managers by launching our results portal with Copilot in Viva Glint enabled for comment summarization.

Lessons learned

Reflecting on our migration, we were extra careful and planned to revert back to LinkedIn Glint if needed. While this approach helped us plan for a potential similar experience for customers, we don’t think customers need to go that far.

“Identifying your migration window and following the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit will make your migration straightforward and easy to complete,” Shepard says.

The experience our employees and managers have with Viva Glint is very similar to what they experienced with LinkedIn Glint, so we didn’t do a lot of change management with the launch. We highlighted the Copilot functionality with managers when we released results. We focused our readiness efforts on making sure our admins were familiar with their new experience in Viva Glint and supporting them through the first survey cycle.

“Give yourself time post migration to explore Viva Glint and review your platform configurations, so you are set up for a smooth survey administration,” Shepard says.

We suggest migrating at least four weeks before you need to launch a big program. This allows time for you as a company admin to validate using a test program, to learn about the expanded admin experience, and to understand the new settings. The Microsoft Learn content and the Viva Glint badge program (see links below) are both great ways to do this.

Here are some suggestions for your own migration to Viva Glint:

• Accelerate your migration to Viva Glint to experience the improved employee engagement platform and participate in private previews of exciting new features. You can view the latest product roadmap updates to see what’s coming next.
• Contact the Viva Glint Hotline team or your Viva Glint Customer Experience PM to discuss your migration timeline and get guidance and support throughout the process.
• Use the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit to identify deliverables and key partners and develop your project plan for a smooth migration.
• Proactively engage your IT partners who are experts in Microsoft 365, security, and privacy to complete the necessary deliverables for migration.
• For Viva Glint company admins, review the Microsoft Learn content and the Viva Glint badge program content to learn about new features available in Viva Glint.

Check out how you can get started with Microsoft Viva Glint.

• Watch how Phillips 66 used Copilot in Viva Glint to summarize 14,000 employee comments in 15 seconds.
• Unpack the benefits of migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode.
• Explore our readiness guide on how Microsoft Viva enables business transformation.
• Learn how we’re transforming our internal communications with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage.

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

The post Enhancing employee listening at Microsoft with Viva Glint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

It takes a coordinated effort that includes executive sponsorship, education, engagement, measurement, and more. When you deploy a next-generation AI technology like Microsoft 365 Copilot that introduces whole new ways of working, getting that process right is especially important.

Fortunately, Microsoft Viva provides a powerful suite of tools that are well-suited to support our internal Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption.

[Discover how Microsoft Viva can serve as a business transformation engine for your organization with our Readiness Guide.]

New ways of working demand a modern approach to adoption

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an entirely new concept in workplace technology. Still, some adoption principles hold true no matter the tool you’re adopting.

“For any adoption strategy, the first thing we look at is the behavioral change we’re really trying to drive,” says David Laves, a director of business programs in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re looking for the key messages and value-added scenarios that will really stoke excitement for our users.”

From there, we strategize the vectors that will be most effective.

It starts with an assessment that identifies the key parameters of the change. That includes several questions. Who’s impacted? How extensive is the change? What are the barriers? What are the benefits? And most importantly, what’s in it for the individual user?

“It can be a challenge to get access to our entire user base because of competing priorities,” says Kevin Wooldridge, a senior director of Experiences and Devices in Microsoft Digital. “Everyone has their own business goals and metrics they need to hit, and they need to know how Copilot will specifically improve their lives.”

The sheer size of our Copilot adoption efforts—early this year we completed a company-wide rollout stretching across all 300,000 Microsoft employees and vendors—meant that any change management efforts needed to operate at a massive scale while accounting for a phased approach that included pilot programs and organization-by-organization activations.

“Take the Greater China region as an example,” says Kai Cheng, business program manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Digital. “We have around 19,000 employees and vendors in our region, working across thirteen different organizations, so communication is always a big challenge for us.”

Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva

Our approach to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot focuses on three main objectives:

• Raise awareness and educate: We’re helping our employees build critical AI skills, learn about Copilot capabilities, and inform them about the elements of AI and other Copilot experiences they can start using today.
• Drive excitement and user engagement: We’re building excitement and confidence in employees’ ability to use Copilot by offering specific scenarios to help them understand responsible and effective AI use.
• Encourage feedback and track adoption: We’re gathering feedback and monitoring progress through both self-reporting and monitoring tools to understand opportunities for further growth.

Microsoft Viva provides ample opportunities to approach these goals across multiple apps. Two different aspects of the suite deliver a powerful advantage for change management at scale. First, Viva’s multimodality accommodates a diverse range of employee preferences for communication and engagement. Second, it offers opportunities for decentralized sponsorship and peer-to-peer support, giving organizational leaders and employee champions the chance to drive role-specific value for their colleagues.

“Copilot is a very new technology,” Cheng says. “As an employee, all the people you work with are experimenting at the same time, so it’s very easy for us to use Viva to build a social learning culture where people can grow together.”

We execute against our adoption goals by working according to Prosci’s ADKAR method, which breaks down into the five iterative stages of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Different Viva apps have different roles in that model.

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption 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 Copilot Dashboard 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.

Viva Amplify

A robust communication strategy includes both centralized, company-wide messaging and executive sponsorship. Leadership from within individual business groups, regional subsidiaries, and teams offers employees a familiar, trusted voice and tailors adoption efforts to specific organizational priorities and ways of working.

Viva Amplify is the ideal tool for these kinds of communications. Internally, we use it to distribute turnkey assets executive sponsors can use to promote awareness and desire.

“With Viva Amplify, we can run campaigns using templates,” Wooldridge says. “So, we save lots of productivity time for executives and their managers because we’ve created pre-packaged communications they can adapt to their organizations’ needs.”

This approach has been so effective internally that we’ve created a Copilot Deployment Kit for our customers to use in Viva Amplify. It provides a pre-built campaign, a brief to outline of the overall strategy, and tools for reporting and measuring success.

Viva Learning

Building knowledge and ability are crucial, and Viva Learning is our workhorse app for equipping employees with Copilot know-how. It’s especially useful for employees who prefer self-directed, asynchronous, or gamified learning over facilitated training. It was an essential inclusion in our initial readiness communications, giving employees an early look at Copilot capabilities and providing preliminary skilling opportunities.

“Viva Learning made it possible to pick and choose the most frequently viewed or used learning assets across several different categories,” says Ju Bu, business program manager for Microsoft Digital in our Greater China Region. “For example, you can pull together pieces about working with content in Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook, and package that material into a unified learning path.”

The ability in Viva Learning to both create instructional modules and pull them in from different sources made assembling a Copilot learning path straightforward and easy to adapt as the technology grew. Out of that internal experience, we constructed the Microsoft Copilot Academy, now available to our customers.

Viva Engage

Of all the apps in the suite, Viva Engage has been the most impactful by far. It taps into the peer-to-peer support and role-based specificity that employees need for Copilot to drive value in their individual work. Like Viva Learning, it enhances employees’ knowledge and ability, just with a more relational, community-driven touch. It also ignites desire by showcasing how power users are saving time and maximizing productivity through AI.

For our Copilot adoption efforts, we leaned on our Copilot Champs Community—a dedicated group of more than 7,000 early adopters, AI enthusiasts, and peer leaders. Through community posts, ongoing conversations, and self-driven knowledge sharing in Viva Engage, their efforts turned into a powerful organic groundswell, with employees sharing prompts and advice on their own.

Viva Engage also gets to the heart of role-specific value. It enables peers who understand their colleagues’ work to share specific content with them that will help them do their jobs. It also eliminates bottlenecks associated with more broad-based communication models—for example, deploying centralized adoption communications to change cohorts containing thousands of employees and receiving overwhelming email responses.

“Between Viva Amplify and Viva Engage, these multiple touchpoints help employees tailor adoption content to their preferences,” Bu says. “It puts them at the center of our efforts because they can pick and choose the vectors that are most applicable to them.”

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

Keeping our finger on the pulse of the user experience helps us reinforce usage and address any issues. Viva Glint and Viva Pulse help us uncover qualitative insights from employees through questionnaires and surveys.

Viva Glint provides change leaders with organization-wide, dashboard-based insights and analytics rooted in people science. Meanwhile, Viva Pulse provides opportunities for more rapid and localized feedback at the manager level.

“Any business transformation is a process of experimentation,” Laves says. “Glint and Pulse are our most powerful tools for capturing feedback to see how those experiments are progressing.”

Throughout our Copilot adoption process, we discovered which kinds of data are most valuable for transformation specialists and managers. Through those efforts, we assembled the Microsoft Copilot Impact survey templates for both Viva Pulse and Viva Glint.

These templates helped our internal teams gather user insights, opportunities for employee empowerment, Copilot’s impact on day-to-day work, and success stories. If you’re unsure of which qualitative data is most important or how to gather it, they’re a fantastic place to start.

Viva Insights

Effective adoption relies on robust measurement. When you combine qualitative and quantitative data, you get powerful results.

“What we try to do is marry what the user says through qualitative feedback with what they do through usage data and other metrics,” Laves says. “If users say they’re having pain, we want to see how that affects usage.”

Viva Insights enables this kind of visibility for both company-wide change leaders and more localized managers. At Microsoft, we’ve mostly used this tool to track usage across different apps like Word or Outlook. From there, we can return to Glint and Pulse to dig deeper into what’s happening.

Our internal efforts helped inform the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard powered by Viva Insights. This out-of-the-box feature provides privacy-protected data throughout every stage of your Copilot transformation journey and can help you understand its impact across meetings, email, chat, documents, search, and more.

Getting meta: Using Copilot to help us use Viva to drive Copilot adoption

Bringing Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot together has been a potent combination for us.

“Microsoft Viva is a powerful tool for fueling Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption,” says Kirk Koenigsbauer, chief operating officer of the Microsoft Experiences and Devices Group. “It gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people’s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you’re getting the return on investment you want.”

Getting a little meta with our Copilot adoption efforts, our change management professionals have been able to use Copilot in Viva to boost their Copilot adoption efforts.

Our team frequently leans on Copilot for help writing Viva Amplify and Viva Engage posts. Its translation abilities also make it much easier to disseminate communications to different disciplines or regions on a global scale

Writing support is just the beginning.

The skill of Copilot as an assistant with intelligent access to company data and repositories makes searching and summarization a breeze. In Viva Learning, change leaders can ask Copilot for tailored content suggestions. And when reviewing Viva Glint and Viva Pulse results, Copilot can pick out common themes or trends to help researchers understand usage and feedback more easily.

“Utilizing Copilot within Viva Engage helps employees uplevel their communications and increase their reach and impact. It encourages those who are more reluctant to post as now they have Copilot to help,” says Tanya Roberts, a PM in Microsoft Digital. “Some people don’t gravitate toward engagement forums, so bringing Copilot in to brainstorm different ways of activating employees is a real help.”

As a result, the engagement level within our Viva Engage Copilot Community has increased, and as such, is subsequently increasing the adoption of Copilot by embracing Copilot throughout Microsoft 365.

Different aspects of Microsoft Viva will be best suited for different employees, but the most important lesson has been that it isn’t just an HR or employee engagement suite. It’s a way to meet people where they work to drive organizational goals in the modality that works best for them.

The results for our Copilot adoption have been incredibly powerful. During a one-month Microsoft Viva campaign in the Greater China Region, we saw usage expand by as much as 20%. And that’s just one portion of our global workforce.

“If you’re really serious about Copilot usage in your company and environment, Viva is a powerful tool for accelerating adoption,” Koenigsbauer says. “It gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people’s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you’re getting the return on investment you want.”

Here are some tips on how to get started with using Microsoft Viva to help you deploy and drive adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot:

• If you’re rolling Copilot out to your audience, consider the hero scenarios that will work best for their roles, then provide thought starters.
• This is as much a cultural change as it is a technical change. It’s important to work in partnership with HR and organizational leaders who understand their team culture, what they value, and their best communication channels.
• Be sure you have readiness material prepared. When people start getting their licenses, they’ll be able to access learning opportunities and informational content so they can hit the ground running.
• Take the opportunity to connect with employees genuinely by capturing two-way feedback around where the value is, where the opportunities are, and what blockers people are experiencing.
• Take advantage of a diversified channel communication strategy as much as possible. It provides multiple touchpoints for employees to help land your change.

Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

• Check out our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide.
• Read how Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot internally.
• Discover how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot with the help of—you guessed it—Copilot.

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

The post Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But how do you zero in on the scenarios and use cases that matter most to individual employees?

At Microsoft Digital, our company’s IT organization, we’re helping our employees get the most value out of this powerful new tool by identifying the roles where AI assistance can drive the most upfront impact, then developing hero scenarios to help them start using Copilot. The result is our Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook, a functional framework that helps teams discover ways that specific roles can adopt Copilot into their work and drive value.

When we started rolling Microsoft 365 Copilot out across the company, our priority in Microsoft Digital was giving as many employees as possible the chance to explore this exciting new tool. In a sense, we gave everyone the keys to the car and invited them to drive AI’s open road.

It resulted in a lot of exploration, increased usage, and some very eager early adopters. To help as many people get up to speed with Copilot as possible, we focused our initial adoption efforts on a common professional persona: the modern information worker.

“This is the beginning of an entirely new meta-skill,” says Don Campbell, a senior director on Microsoft Digital’s Employee Experience Success team. “People are thinking through new habits and ways of working as they learn what Copilot is capable of enabling.”

Because of the excitement around AI, uptake was rapid and enthusiastic. Our next step was building on that initial surge of adoption and experimentation to drive more profound, targeted impact.

Actioning inspiration: Building a pathway to hero scenarios

As Microsoft 365 Copilot usage began to mature across the company, we saw opportunities to build on this momentum by presenting more contextual applications for AI. Within Microsoft Digital, we decided to create a standardized process for defining Copilot hero scenarios in roles where initial applications of AI could have the greatest impact. Concrete scenarios would resonate with those professionals by addressing real-world challenges they face every day, saving them time and bandwidth.

Ultimately, we had one goal: accelerating time to value for Copilot users.

“We wanted to explore how we could make Copilot more real to the individual,” Campbell says. “They’re asking how they can use this in ways that are specific to their role, in their function, in their organization.”

We identified five main objectives to help us get there:

• Understand the top responsibilities, challenges, needs, and wants of priority roles.
• Articulate and communicate hero scenarios for those roles and depict ways for Copilot to enable their work.
• Outline blockers and accelerators for Copilot adoption and hero scenarios. 
• Generate feedback for product groups to improve Copilot.
• Share playbook outputs with our product marketing group and post them in our Copilot Prompt Gallery to contribute value for external users.

“From the beginning, we set out to articulate our objectives and our deliverables, then worked back from there,” says Heather Layne, a director of program management on the Employee Experience Success team in Microsoft Digital. “When it came to research, we relied on our EX Studio for step-by-step guidance on purposeful engagement.”

That process unfolded in a layered approach. First, we identified the Microsoft organizations that were best positioned to receive our support. Thanks to strong interest and a robust cohort of early adopters, sales, HR, and finance were excellent candidates for our first efforts.

From there, we worked with stakeholders and AI adoption teams within each of those organizations to prioritize roles according to a rubric of criteria. Those criteria focused on enthusiasm for adoption, readiness for the next level of engagement, the number of people represented by that role within their organization, and Copilot’s applicability for their work—especially for repetitive, context-rich, or communication-intensive tasks.

“In HR, for example, we ensured there was complete thinking regarding a reimagination of our business functional architecture,” says Christopher Fernandez, corporate vice president in HR. “We identified key roles and corresponding workflows that could directly benefit from Microsoft 365 Copilot by removing mundane and repetitive tasks and providing insight to creative solutions needed to deliver business value.”

After we identified those roles, we moved into focus-group sessions with 10 to 20 participants, all selected because they had been actively using Copilot and could provide practical ideas and suggestions. It was an opportunity to tap into willing talent and let our leaders lead.

The output of those sessions came down to three hero scenarios per role, each with six steps and six Copilot prompts to propel those processes forward, as well as the relevant Microsoft tools where the prompts would apply. We also ensure these scenarios align with the company’s Responsible AI principles.

For example, our Finance team identified operations manager as a priority role. One of its key scenarios included managing contracts, and it demonstrates how prompts come together across several apps to create a process bolstered and streamlined by automation.

Finance operations | Contract management

“That output then served as an input in a few different places,” Campbell says. “We evangelized it out to the organization itself to help drive ideation, adoption, and usage, to our product marketing group for customer scenarios, and to our Copilot Lab to provide freely available examples of prompts.”

As a result, we’ve been able to boost Copilot adoption and usage across Microsoft, providing specific, concrete opportunities for people to apply this new way of working to their roles.

Crafting your own Microsoft 365 Copilot hero scenarios

This process has the benefit of being structurally simple, modular, and repeatable—so much so that we’ve made it freely available to any organization that’s using Microsoft 365 Copilot in the form of our Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook. Whether you’re adopting Copilot across your entire organization, a department, a business group, or a team, we strongly encourage you to work through this exercise.

“We want organizations to know that there are opportunities to keep this process controlled and standardized,” Layne says. “By aligning with rubrics and setting up standard practices, you know you’re not just putting in time to create something that isn’t helpful or impactful.”

Our playbook walks adoption leaders through a four-stage process that includes readiness, engagement, delivering an output, and sharing results with employees. To accelerate time to value, we’ve designed the process implementation across three weeks.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook

By following the playbook through all four phases, you can do what we’ve done at Microsoft: understanding what those in priority roles need to be successful, articulating hero scenarios tailored to their work, and sharing the outputs with your organization to accelerate time to value for Copilot users.

Phase 1: Ready

This phase will help your organization, department, or team prepare for the process. It involves aligning with leadership and sponsors who will be accountable for driving Copilot value within their organization. It’s also where you’ll select the priority roles, draft outlines of those roles so you can clarify your understanding of their needs and wants, and seek out feedback from leaders, managers, and subject matter experts.

Phase 2: Engage

Engaging with employees delivers the core value of this exercise. In the engagement phase, you’ll identify participants from your priority roles who demonstrate enthusiasm and early aptitude with Copilot. From there, you choose an engagement approach that might include in-person group sessions, virtual Microsoft Whiteboard sessions, one-on-one interviews, Microsoft 365 Loop collaboration, or whatever modality works best, then communicate the process to participants and conduct your engagement.

Phase 3: Deliver

Ideating hero scenarios is how you discover value. The delivery phase defines that value and organizes it into a useful, consumable format. It starts with reviewing and analyzing the outcomes of your sessions to gain insights and identify themes. Now is the time to document your hero scenarios and the value they add, as well as blockers and accelerators. Finally, you’ll provide your output: a comprehensive deck that includes your priority roles, hero scenarios, next steps, and more.

Phase 4: Share

The final phase of this process involves socializing your scenarios across your team or organization to realize value. If you’re part of a large organization, it’s helpful to radiate these outputs beyond the target group as an opportunity for further Copilot momentum. This stage includes diving deeper into blockers and accelerators that can help your organization as a whole speed time to value.

“So much of adoption comes down to the question of ‘What’s in it for me?’” says Liz Friedman, a senior director of HR AI Transformation. “The ability to answer that question at the role level, at the level of fidelity that really resonates with what employees actually do, creates a strong bridge between the realm of possibility and day-to-day reality.”

Capturing the limitless value of AI

The shift to AI is about more than productivity. It’s about new ways of working and new ways of being.

Thanks to the modular nature of this framework, teams across Microsoft can now apply this process to their own professional needs. As time goes on, the goal is for different organizations and roles to uncover robust and efficient ways of working.

“With Copilot, we’re building new skillsets, but also new habits,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “That takes experimentation and learning, but the payoff is transformative.”

By learning from our experience and working through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook, your organization can execute best practices that will make the most of your AI investment, deliver value faster, manage change effectively, and scale across your organization.

Access the Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook here.

Here are some tips for getting started with developing persona-specific scenarios for priority roles at your company:

• Build strong organizational partnerships and add this process into AI efforts that teams already have underway. Identify the key AI leaders and champions on those teams.
• This process is additive and iterative, so don’t be married to the playbook. Start with the framework, then allow it to grow around organic efforts.
• Frame your scenarios around business processes, then layer on the technology.
• Validate your results through active communication, especially after you’ve socialized your hero scenarios. That ensures you sort the signal from the noise and capture even greater value moving forward.
• For your working groups, make sure you choose teams and people who have good engagement with the tool, especially enthusiasts and early adopters. This also gives people the chance to learn from each other and build on their colleagues’ ideas.
• Have a game plan about where to go next, in terms of sharing and piloting. Include follow-ups and baselines so these outputs don’t just sit on the shelf.
• Get multiple perspectives. No role is exactly the same, even if the job title is. Bringing people who do similar work together and hearing commonalities and differences is very helpful and provides an opportunity to benefit from a diversity of perspectives.

New to Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started today and see what’s possible.

• Learn more about deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot with the help of—you guessed it—Copilot.
• See how we’re enabling meaningful AI adoption with a Microsoft 365 Copilot Expo.
• Check out how we’re empowering our employees with AI while keeping the company secure.

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

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

Very practically, this shift is playing a pivotal role in how we are and will continue to support our more than 221,000 employees across 180 countries and regions, many of whom are working remotely. Our need to enable our people to successfully work and connect from where they are remains paramount.

Adopting cloud networking isn’t simply moving network resources from the data center to the cloud—we’re transforming the way we think about networking altogether. It’s about creating a new way to approach our connectivity and the business it supports.

– Raghavendran Venkatraman, principal cloud network engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

And how are we doing all of this?

We’re not going far—we’re using our own suite of Microsoft Azure network products.

“Adopting cloud networking isn’t simply moving network resources from the data center to the cloud—we’re transforming the way we think about networking altogether,” says Raghavendran Venkatraman, a principal cloud network engineering manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “It’s about creating a new way to approach our connectivity and the business it supports.”

Venkatraman’s team has been using Microsoft Azure to push cloud networking to the forefront of the company’s business strategy, where it’s being used as a tool to drive business agility and innovation, not just connect points on a network.

And cloud networking is evolving rapidly.

“Everything is dynamic,” says Tom McCleery, a principal group cloud networking engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “Implementing cloud networking doesn’t involve waiting for new hardware to get deployed. Almost all aspects of the network are software controlled, and we manage our cloud network environment more like a software development project than a hardware management project.”

“This isn’t about improving networking,” McCleery says. “It’s about fundamentally redefining it and then blowing the top off what was possible with traditional networking. It’s a completely different game. We can create a more complex and capable network environment than you could ever realistically put together with hardware alone, and we can do it in minutes for a network environment that would have taken months or even years to deploy in the past.”

– Tom McCleery, a principal group cloud networking engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

Software-defined networking (SDN) and infrastructure as code (IaC) have been instrumental in redefining how we approach networking. Infrastructure as code is the fundamental principle underlying our entire cloud networking infrastructure. Using IaC, we can develop and implement a descriptive model that defines and deploys network components and determines how the components work together. IaC allows us to create and manage a massive network infrastructure with reusable, flexible, and rapid code deployments.

“This isn’t about improving networking,” McCleery says. “It’s about fundamentally redefining it and then blowing the top off what was possible with traditional networking. It’s a completely different game. We can create a more complex and capable network environment than you could ever realistically put together with hardware alone, and we can do it in minutes for a network environment that would have taken months or even years to deploy in the past.”

We’re approaching network development and deployment with a new perspective. Agility is the key.

Our network engineers have embraced the ability to almost instantly create network environments using IaC methods. Test environments that accurately mirror their production counterparts can be created in moments and decommissioned just as quickly, saving time, money, and effort for everyone involved.

Enabling innovation with modern cloud networking practices

It’s not just about quick deployment; it’s about agility across all aspects of network management. The software-defined networking model allows for rapid provisioning of network resources, automated management, accurate, real-time monitoring, and advanced security features that adapt to the ever-changing threat landscape.

We use Microsoft Azure DevOps, a source control system using Git, to track and manage our IaC templates, modules, and associated parameter files. With Azure DevOps, we can maintain a history of changes, collaborate within teams, and easily roll back to previous versions if necessary.

Using SDN in Azure, we are achieving unprecedented microservice-like agility at a cloud scale. This approach allows us to experiment and refine our network infrastructure configurations as code, enhancing our ability to innovate swiftly and efficiently. By integrating CI/CD practices, we have transformed our network into a truly elastic and dynamic system, capable of adapting seamlessly to our evolving needs.

– Ragini Singh, a principal group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

We’ve implemented automated testing to create safeguards and tests to validate the correctness and functionality of our cloud network code before deployment.

We’re using configuration management to automate the configuration and provisioning of cloud network objects and services within our cloud network infrastructure. These tools make defining and enforcing desired configurations and deployment patterns easy to ensure consistency across different network environments.

“Using SDN in Azure, we are achieving unprecedented microservice-like agility at a cloud scale,” says Ragini Singh, a principal group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital. “This approach allows us to experiment and refine our network infrastructure configurations as code, enhancing our ability to innovate swiftly and efficiently. By integrating CI/CD practices, we have transformed our network into a truly elastic and dynamic system, capable of adapting seamlessly to our evolving needs.”

Continuous integration (CI) pipelines automate the deployment process for our IaC-based cloud network infrastructure. When the infrastructure code passes all validation and tests. The CI pipeline triggers the deployment process automatically.

We’ve implemented robust monitoring and observability practices for deploying and managing our deployments. Monitoring and observability are helping us to ensure that our CI builds are successful, detect issues promptly, and maintain the health of our development process.

By following these steps and using continuous integration and development (CI/CD) practices, we can build, test, and deploy our cloud network infrastructure in a controlled and automated manner, creating a better employee experience by ensuring faster delivery, increased stability, and more effortless scalability.

Fast-tracking cloud networking development with Microsoft Azure

Our network engineering teams use Microsoft Azure to enable an agile deployment and management environment with instant global reach. The Azure network backbone provides instant reach to more than 60 regions worldwide with more than 165,000 miles of fiber optic and undersea cable systems.

Azure Virtual WAN has been instrumental in our recent global cloud networking transformation. We’re using Azure Virtual WAN to provide high-performance networking across our global presence, enabling reliable and security-focused connectivity for all Microsoft employees, wherever they are.

– Raghavendran Venkatraman, principal cloud network engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re using this vast global network to create instant benefits for our employees and business through innovative uses of Microsoft Azure cloud networking components.

“Azure Virtual WAN has been instrumental in our recent global cloud networking transformation,” says Venkatraman, highlighting one of the Azure products currently pushing the boundaries of our cloud networking capabilities. “We’re using Azure Virtual WAN to provide high-performance networking across our global presence, enabling reliable and security-focused connectivity for all Microsoft employees, wherever they are.”

Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN simplifies large-scale branch connectivity and provides optimized and automated connectivity between on-premises workloads across multiple regions and Azure resources. It Integrates various connectivity options, including Azure VPN and Azure ExpressRoute. Azure VWAN enables us to facilitate centralized management and global and branch connectivity monitoring, enhancing the overall network management experience.

Azure Virtual WAN is one of several Azure cloud networking components that are enabling our transformation.

Microsoft Azure Firewall is a fully stateful firewall, providing network-level protection for our applications. We use Azure Firewall to inspect and filter traffic between different Azure Virtual Networks and on-premises networks. It provides application-level filtering capabilities to allow or deny traffic based on rules.

Microsoft Azure VPN enables secure communication between remote users, on-premises networks, and Azure resources over the public internet. Our remote users or branch offices can use Azure VPN to connect to Azure and on-premises resources securely using VPN tunnels. Azure VPN Integrates with Azure Firewall to inspect and filter VPN traffic for security purposes.

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides a dedicated, private connection to Azure from our on-premises data centers, bypassing the public internet. ExpressRoute offers higher reliability, lower latency, and increased security compared to traditional internet-based connections. Integration with Azure Firewall ensures that traffic coming over ExpressRoute is inspected and filtered for security and compliance.

Microsoft Azure NAT Gateway enables outbound connectivity for resources traversing a virtual WAN environment or a virtual network, allowing access to the internet or other external services. Azure NAT Gateway is very useful for scenarios where internal resources need to initiate outbound connections. We use integration with Azure Firewall to control and monitor outbound traffic from Azure NAT Gateways to on-premises and Azure-based networks.

Enabling agility across the cloud networking environment

Together, these Azure products help create an agile, robust, scalable, and secure network architecture that allows us to fulfill several common scenarios that occur across our cloud network:

• Secure internet access. We deploy Azure Firewall to inspect and filter outbound internet traffic from on-premises networks and Azure resources while NAT Gateway facilitates the actual outbound connectivity.
• Hybrid connectivity. We use Azure VPN and Azure ExpressRoute to create a hybrid network architecture, allowing secure communication between on-premises and Azure resources.
• Centralized management. We use Azure Virtual WAN for centralized management and connectivity optimization. Azure Virtual WAN enables us to connect multiple regions, on-premises resources, Azure resources, and branch offices seamlessly.
• Localized network edges to improve regional performance. We’re increasing our use of the Azure global network as our primary global backbone. Using the Azure global network, we’ve enhanced regional network performance for many Microsoft employees and office locations by moving the network edge closer to our globally distributed employees.

Recently improved connectivity to our Microsoft Johannesburg location provides a compelling case study of how we’re using Azure to improve our networking posture and performance radically.

The solution relocates the internet edge for Johannesburg to the South Africa North region datacenter in South Africa, using Azure Firewall, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Connection Monitor, and Azure VWAN. We’ve also evolved our DNS resolution strategy to a hybrid solution that hosts DNS services in Azure, which increases our scalability and resiliency on DNS resolution services for Johannesburg users. We’ve deployed the entire solution adhering to our infrastructure as code strategy, creating a flexible network infrastructure that can adapt and scale to evolving demands on the VWAN.

This transformation has been built by the hard work and ingenuity of our network engineers, who have adopted a new way of thinking about how our network functions.

– Tom McCleery, a principal group cloud networking engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

By relocating the network edge to the South Africa region in Azure instead of our data center edge in London and Dublin, connection latency from Johannesburg to other public endpoints in South Africa has dropped from 170 milliseconds to 1.3 milliseconds.

McCleery notes that the changes have been cultural as much as they’ve been technical.

“We’ve been operating our network the same way for more than 20 years,” he says. “This transformation has been built by the hard work and ingenuity of our network engineers, who have adopted a new way of thinking about how our network functions. It’s been a huge shift for them, and much of our innovation has come from a unique perspective or simply questioning how things have always been done. It’s the perspective that we will learn something every time we sit down and talk about this stuff together. With each deployment and iteration, we learn so much and come out of it even better equipped for the next project or problem.”

Succeeding and innovating as Customer Zero

The transformation of our cloud networking environment is a collaborative effort. Being Customer Zero at Microsoft means we’re using our own products and services to optimize our network performance, security, and scalability. By doing so, we pave the way for other customers to benefit from the same solutions and best practices.

One of the key advantages of being Customer Zero for the company is having a close partnership with the Azure engineering teams, who have provided feedback, support, and guidance throughout our transformation. We’ve been able to test new features and capabilities in real-world scenarios, identify and resolve issues quickly, and provide valuable insights for future enhancements.

For example, we were the first adopters of Azure Virtual WAN. Our deployment experiences helped shape the growth of the product and helped the Azure Virtual WAN product team understand how they could improve the user experience, the monitoring tools, and the automation capabilities.

Another benefit of being Customer Zero is accessing the latest innovations and technologies that Azure cloud networking offers. The Azure global network and products that support it give Microsoft Digital—just like any other Microsoft customer—access to an enterprise-scale platform on which we can optimize our network traffic, routing, security, and resilience.

Being Customer Zero also means being a leader and an industry advocate for Azure cloud networking. We can share the learnings and best practices gained from our network transformation journey with other Microsoft customers considering or undergoing similar changes. We’re advocates and innovators, demonstrating how Azure cloud networking can help customers achieve their business goals, such as enabling hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, supporting remote work and collaboration, and accelerating digital transformation.

Looking forward

One of our key focus areas is the continued adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning within our cloud network infrastructure. These technologies will enable Microsoft Digital to predict and prevent potential issues and optimize network performance proactively.

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing will also influence our cloud networking strategy. Azure’s IoT and edge services will allow for the deployment of network resources closer to the data source, reducing latency and enhancing the user experience.

The possibilities with Azure are endless. We’re just scratching the surface of what we can achieve. We aim to continue pushing the boundaries of cloud networking, making it more intelligent, automated, and even more aligned with our business objectives.

– Raghavendran Venkatraman, principal cloud network engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

As we continue to transform and adapt our global cloud networking environment, we remain committed to being Customer Zero for Azure cloud networking, expanding our network footprint, adopting new network services, and enhancing network automation and intelligence. By doing so, we aim to deliver a world-class network experience for our customers, partners, and employees.

Venkatraman sees a bright future for Microsoft’s cloud networking.

“The possibilities with Azure are endless. We’re just scratching the surface of what we can achieve. We aim to continue pushing the boundaries of cloud networking, making it more intelligent, automated, and even more aligned with our business objectives.”

Consider the following takeaways to help your organization begin or continue its cloud networking journey:

• Embrace cloud networking for business agility. Adopting cloud networking transforms the approach to connectivity, driving business agility and innovation.
• Use software-defined networking. Use infrastructure as code to deploy and manage a flexible and scalable network infrastructure rapidly.
• Innovate with Azure Virtual WAN. Use Azure Virtual WAN for high-performance, secure, and reliable global connectivity.
• Automate for efficiency. Implement automated testing and configuration management to streamline network management and deployment.
• Monitor for success. Apply robust monitoring and observability practices to maintain the health of the network infrastructure.

Get started by learning how to deploy Azure VWAN with routing intent and routing policies.

• Learn from how we moved our network to the cloud.
• Unpack how we are modernizing our cloud networking infrastructure with a DevOps mindset.
• Discover how we’re enabling effortless cloud infrastructure management with MyWorkspace and Microsoft Azure.

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