Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters

What this guide contains

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft

Welcome to the new era of productivity

Generative AI has captured the world’s attention, and businesses are taking notice. According to our Work Trends Annual Report, 70% of people would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads.

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

Meet Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

According to our Work Trends annual report, our employees and external customers who got early access found Copilot very useful:

Organizations like ours that are unlocking AI assistance within employees’ everyday workflow are poised to gain a distinct advantage in terms of productivity, engagement, and innovation.

“We’re using it to reduce our IT expenses and to enhance our productivity,” D’Hers says. “We’re also excited by its potential to create a lasting competitive advantage for us here at Microsoft and for our customers.”

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We also provide a blueprint for our customers to follow, and as such, have created this guide for deploying and adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“The contents of this guide are based on the lessons we’ve learned deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot,” D’Hers says. “The tips and ideas you’ll read here will help you accelerate your own time to value with Copilot so you can realize the same benefits as our employees.”

Chapter 1: Getting governance right

Maintaining privacy, security, and compliance while respecting regulatory frameworks

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

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Our colleagues on the product side designed Microsoft 365 Copilot to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. By implementing effective sensitivity labeling practices, you can rest assured that anything you intend to remain private or confidential will stay that way.

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

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

Throughout our internal governance efforts within Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed four labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices we outlined above form a foundation for compliance and security, but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. That’s a core principle of Zero Trust.

International compliance: No size fits all

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

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

Learning from Microsoft’s governance, security, and compliance practices

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

Building a strategy for licensing, administration, and rolling Microsoft 365 Copilot out to different groups within your organization

Implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot isn’t as easy as just turning on licenses and alerting your users. It takes organizational partnerships, early assessments of your concrete business needs, and careful planning.

Design for the “who”

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new concept in business software. At the time of our implementation, we were the first company to roll it out anywhere in the world, and our Microsoft Digital implementation team had to choose from countless ways to approach a licensing strategy—different mechanisms of licensing, automation, management, and more. Regardless of your overall approach, we’ve learned from experience that it almost always makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the tool and enable the rest of your organization.

For us, that looked like this:

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. Fortunately, if your organization uses Microsoft 365, you’ll already have access to most of the apparatus you need. The inherent flexibility of Microsoft 365 licensing means you can easily adjust your licensing strategy as you progress based on scale, organization changes, or any other factors.

At Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include tailor-made subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

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

From Microsoft Digital’s implementation experience, there are three main benefits to using groups:

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI tools, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “Where’s my license?” It was a key learning for our Microsoft Digital implementation team.

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

In the end, what’s most important is building a strategy around who should have access to Copilot, at what phase, and how you can effectively communicate that information. In addition to leadership sponsorship being especially important in later phases of adoption, it’s also crucial here as a way of identifying who should be part of pilots and subsequent cohorts. Leaders can help communicate those decisions.

The bottom line is that your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication—especially with organizational leadership—will be a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from our implementation

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to capture value

Effective adoption: From readiness to empowerment

The fact that your employees are excited to try out a powerful new technology platform isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management efforts to drive Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption.

That way, you can be sure to get your employees onboard at the right time in the ways that you want—the idea is to give them freedom be themselves with proper guardrails.

Consider breaking your company-wide adoption into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar.

Effective change management needs careful planning. Our adoption efforts took inspiration from the Microsoft Engagement Framework, which we’ve developed specially for driving adoption of our products. If you’re an adoption specialist or change manager, you might notice similarities with Prosci’s ADKAR model, which progresses through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

Whichever framework you choose, the techniques we use here at Microsoft will apply. Either way, the process starts with your people.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

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

We’re using Microsoft Viva to power employee adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot here at Microsoft.

Targeted, tailored adoption efforts

Throughout our adoption and optimization efforts, we discovered two things: certain roles find Copilot especially helpful, and those roles benefit from more tailor-made, scenario-based adoption support.

Consider these examples:

• A human resources professional might use Copilot to create job descriptions by prompting it to suggest essential skills, qualifications, and responsibilities for a prospective role.
• A salesperson could ask Copilot to generate a table comparing their company’s flagship product with a competitor’s to address customer questions more efficiently.
• A finance professional might prompt Copilot to review and summarize a new contract to reduce the time it takes to search for key data.

Any single approach would never be adequate to address every different discipline and use case. So, we built a process that Microsoft’s internal departments and our customers can use to construct their own role-based scenarios based on their individual teams’ unique needs. The result was our Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook.

We designed this playbook to help adoption professionals accomplish the following objectives:

1. Understand the top responsibilities, challenges, needs, and wants of prioritized roles.
2. Articulate and communicate hero scenarios by clearly depicting how Copilot can enable them.
3. Share deliverables that include roles, scenarios, and prompts with the wider organization to drive awareness, adoption, engagement, and value.

Through internal testing and scenario crafting, we developed a four-part framework for creating, delivering, and socializing hero scenarios across any organization. These are the steps you can follow to create Copilot support content for adoption efforts tailored to specific roles.

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 is the key to uncovering Copilot’s core value. In this phase, you’ll identify participants from your priority roles who demonstrate enthusiasm and early aptitude with the tool. From there, you can choose an approach, which 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. Whatever you choose, the final step in this phase is conducting your employee engagements to document existing and aspirational Copilot usage scenarios.
 
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.

This Microsoft 365 Copilot Hero Scenario Playbook is now available for our customers to help fine-tune their own adoptions. Download the Microsoft 365 Copilot Key Scenario Playbook here.

Learning from Microsoft’s adoption of Copilot

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

Setting support up for success

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels—especially if they have concerns with a new technology. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to your support apparatus.

As a result, it’s important to give your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations. For Microsoft Digital, that included members of our internal support teams who help Microsoft employees when they run into technical issues, as well as our Customer Experience and Support team that engages with external customers to troubleshoot problems with new Microsoft products. We also invited subject matter experts for Microsoft 365 apps featuring Copilot experiences, including Teams, Outlook, and more.

A small group of users across both internal and external support teams, as well as our Microsoft 365 subject matter experts, gained access at first, and we encouraged them to experiment and try to break features. This was a crucial learning phase for Microsoft Digital, because it surfaced interesting issues that wouldn’t come up if our teams didn’t have access and an opportunity to experiment.

Building insights and product experience was step one, but we needed to collect that knowledge so it would be actionable in real situations. To accomplish that, we created a special Teams channel where our support team members collaborate with pilot users of Copilot and representatives of the product group. From there, we worked with marketing and communications professionals to start building our support team’s knowledge base, which would also serve as the foundation for our user-facing content.

Eventually, the time came to provide access to our wider support team. At that point, our support pilot members operated as learning leaders. When it came time to share their knowledge, it took the form of informal brown-bag sessions. We also engaged in shadow/reverse-shadow role-playing exercises so our support agents could practice addressing common issues.

Principles of good support

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users. As a result, they won’t need to access a human agent unless they’re at a genuine impasse.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. That might come through in-app support or access to knowledge bases.

Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include those self-service support vectors in their rollout communications. For us, self-service was able to answer many of our users’ questions, and for any extra-tricky issues, we had them access human-led support.

Seven things we learned preparing our Copilot support

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

As the first enterprise organization to go through the Copilot deployment process, we’ve identified a few challenges and questions you might have. Feel free to add these to your support knowledge base and employee-facing communications.

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

• Ideally, your adoption communication waves solve this issue by alerting employees when they will get their licenses. Otherwise, consider having a readily available link answering licensing questions for users or directing them to their relevant managers or admins. You can also automate this process.

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

• Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources, including your user-facing knowledge base, self-help videos, and Viva Engage communities focused on Copilot.

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

• Share this list of prebuilt connectors to help your users integrate various data sources into your Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported.

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

• As long as your employees are signed in to Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

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

• Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.” Those terms also include our Customer Copyright Commitment.

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

Where possible, Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It answers complex questions by distilling information from multiple web sources into a single response. Copilot provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Applying our deployment lessons at your company

You’ve learned from our Copilot deployment—now it’s time to get started on yours

Embarking on your Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that we have learned from our internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls. By anchoring your work in careful planning and using the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

“Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience,” says Claire Sisson, principal group product manager at Microsoft and leader of the team that deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot here at Microsoft. “With the lessons we learned from our deployment, we’re confident that we can support businesses around the world achieve more through the next generation of intelligent experiences.”

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

For inspiration around ways that Microsoft 365 Copilot can become your employees’ AI assistant at work, read stories about how we’re using AI within Microsoft Digital and Microsoft as a whole.

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Appendix

Downloadable assets adapted from Microsoft’s internal deployment content