At Microsoft, Windows 11 has been powering the 225,000 devices our employees and vendors use to do their work since it was released in the fall of 2021. Since then, the addition of many new features and the integration of AI have made it even more useful to us.

Like other enterprises, we’re benefitting from how AI is being woven into every part of the technology sector, including with Windows, where we’re using Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the rest of the broad range of AI-powered tools and features that we’re using across the company to get more out of our longtime, signature operating system today, while also preparing for how it will continue to power everything we do in the future.

According to our 2024 Work Trend Index (WTI) annual report, 79% of US business leaders believe their company needs to adopt AI to remain competitive. Yet, the numbers suggest that those that are just now starting to get ready for AI are already behind. Users say AI is saving them time now (90%), allowing them to focus on their work (85%, be more creative (84%), and enjoy their work more (83%).

The AI era is already here, and organizations must seize every opportunity to catch up and get ready for the future.

At Microsoft Digital, our internal IT organization, we’re harnessing Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs to give our business and our employees a foundation to build on for future developments in AI. AI interactions are happening at the desktop, in the browser, across apps, and, with Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs, right in the local operating system.

With Windows 10 end-of-support approaching in October 2025, every organization needs to assess their PC inventory and create a plan to move forward. Outdated PCs put users and businesses at risk, and the security and functionality updates that come with Windows 11 provide the best protection and productivity for Microsoft customers.

Learning from our own deployment of Windows 11

Our own first internal rollout of Windows 11 was the smoothest and quickest operating system upgrade in the history of the company. During the key phase of the rollout, we deployed Microsoft 11 to more than 190,000 devices in five weeks.

Starting small and growing from there is an essential part of the way we deploy any solution or tool, Windows 11 included.

“We followed a ring-based approach, which is pretty typical,” says Markus Gonis, a service engineer and deployment lead with Microsoft Digital. “The initial feature testing happened with a small group of Microsoft Digital users who were close to the feature sets and understood their key implications.”

The testing team subjected Windows 11 to an initial test process to ensure it met our organization’s internal standards, the same standards that we apply to any new software or solution, whether it was developed by Microsoft or by another provider.

Following initial testing, we deployed Windows 11 to a small, specifically selected proof of concept group to ensure that its overall functionality met our expectations and requirements. Pilot-testing followed, and then full implementation. This phased approach ensured that any potential issues were identified and addressed early, and that we could perform the majority of the deployment with few issues.

“We had a minimal number of standard incidents, and no major incidents reported through support channels directly related to the Windows 11 update nor the deployment itself,” Gonis says. “Despite the complexities of hardware eligibility and app compatibility with a new operating system being a typical challenge, we were able to execute the deployment with minimal disruption.”

Moving forward with deploying subsequent versions of Windows 11, we have refined the deployment process to include many more devices, now exceeding 225,000 with the 24H2 update, both by having users update their devices on their own and through pushed deployment.

Improving deployment with Windows Autopatch

The deployment process used several new features, including Windows Autopatch (which now includes Windows Update for Business).

“Windows Autopatch has been a game-changer for us,” says Harshitha Digumarthi, a senior product manager at Microsoft Digital. “It allows us to manage our updates more effectively and to ensure our devices are running the latest and most secure versions of Windows.”

Digumarthi’s team used Windows Autopatch to manage and control Windows 11 updates throughout the deployment. By using device group membership and a few deployment parameters, they had full control over when and how they deployed major updates to the entire organization. This approach allowed for a more streamlined and efficient update process, ensuring our devices received the updates without causing disruptions.

The team also integrated Windows Autopatch into the deployment process to further enhance the efficiency of updates. This feature keeps our devices patched and up to date, reducing the need for manual intervention as it reinforces our security posture and Zero Trust strategy.

Deploying Windows 11 with security and compliance

Feature testing, especially new features included in later builds, is an important part of the ongoing security and compliance practices at Microsoft Digital.

“When a new feature comes out, we need to ensure that we can deploy and govern it securely,” says Yulia Evgrafova, a principal security engineer with Microsoft Digital. Her team helps to ensure new features are ready for enterprise deployment at Microsoft.

Evgrafova points out the extra responsibility and privilege that comes with testing Microsoft products.

“With Windows 11, it’s a Microsoft product, but we’re also using that product as a customer,” Evgrafova says. “We call ourselves Customer Zero.”

Our Customer Zero relationship at Microsoft is a special one.

We in Microsoft Digital usually adopt products like Windows 11 before any other customer. Then, as part of the relationship, we test, use, and offer feedback on the product. It’s an internal feedback mechanism that we use for most of our products, and it leads to better, more complete products that are enterprise tested and enterprise ready.

“Our feature testing is comprehensive,” Evgrafova says. “We start with the basics: what is the scope of this feature and what’s the enterprise readiness of this feature for the rollout? Our goal is to understand not only the immediate risks that a feature might pose, but also the potential risks of that feature as it matures.”

However, deploying Windows 11 wasn’t simply testing and upgrading the operating system on existing hardware.

Windows 11 has specific hardware requirements, which meant not every device at Microsoft would be part of the deployment. Most of our devices were eligible, but communicating hardware requirements was an early step.

“Communicating with our employees about the requirements and how we would handle new devices was important,” Gonis says. “Since Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be managed side-by-side with no additional overhead, we could co-manage both upgraded and non-upgraded devices until all the older Windows 10 devices were replaced.”

Replacing Windows 10 devices with new hardware created an opportunity for us to examine our hardware refresh policy, assess the hardware options, and finally make Copilot+ PCs our device refresh of choice.

Turning to Copilot+ PCs

Integrating Copilot+ PCs into the mix was a very natural next step for us.

“Copilot+ PCs were the obvious choice to replace unsupported Windows 10 hardware,” says Pandurang Savagur, a senior product manager with Microsoft Digital. “Copilot+ PCs bring an entirely new level of hardware support and acceleration of Windows 11 capabilities, in AI and beyond.”

Copilot+ PCs offer a new hardware feature set that goes beyond the traditional PC. Those features are headlined by the neural processing unit (NPU) present in every Copilot+ PC.

Neural Processing Units (NPUs) have become a crucial component in modern computing, especially with the advent of AI-driven applications. Initially, devices like the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio Two were introduced with NPUs primarily for Windows Studio effects. These NPUs offloaded processing tasks from the CPU, enhancing device performance and battery life.

With the introduction of Copilot+ PCs, the role of NPUs has expanded significantly. Copilot+ PCs can run AI features and processing locally on the device, using the NPU. The NPUs in these devices enable faster and more efficient on-device AI processing (they support over 40 TOPS, which means they can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second). For instance, tasks like natural language translation and generative AI features can be processed locally, reducing the need for cloud-based processing and accelerating processing times.

Built-in features that support NPU offloading are coming to Windows 11, including improved Windows search, across local and cloud-based files. With improved Windows search, Windows 11 will be able to use NPU-powered search capabilities to understand the context of each file, including contents, and return more accurate and complete results.

There is now no need to remember file names, settings locations, or even worry about spelling; just type your thoughts to find what you need on a Copilot+ PC. You can even locate photos in OneDrive by describing their content in the same way. With the over 40 TOPS NPU in Copilot+ PCs, it works even when you’re not connected to the internet. Improved search will initially be available in File Explorer and will later extend to Windows Search and Windows Settings. This means searches in Windows 11 for files will become faster and more intelligent.

Copilot+ PCs also will make Microsoft 365 Copilot better. Microsoft 365 apps will soon be able to use the NPU for AI-based tasks, so the same Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities that work in the cloud also will be available offline and with lower latency.

This also happens in apps that might surprise you. For example, Microsoft Teams has several AI-based features including face tracking and voice isolation that can use the NPU directly, freeing up CPU resources, increasing performance, and improving battery life.

Boosting ARM-based Windows 11 mobility

We’ve found significant performance improvements from NPU integration, especially from ARM Copilot+ PCs. The reduction in CPU usage has provided significantly better overall performance across Windows 11. Many of our users with ARM-based Windows 11 devices are reporting battery life exceeding 20-22 hours of active usage.

Other benefits of the ARM-based Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs include cellular data connection, providing continuous network connectivity for a new generation of ultra mobile Windows laptops. ARM-based Windows 11 devices also support instant-on power capability, just like your mobile phone or tablet.

Our employees are seeing huge benefits.

“Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs have been a huge difference-maker for our employees,” Gonis says. “Their laptops have become truly mobile devices, and it changes how they use them and where they can take them.”

The deployment of Copilot+ PCs has also highlighted the importance of app compatibility. While many apps that we use run natively on ARM-based devices—including Microsoft 365 and a large percentage of our first party apps—some still use x64 emulation. We’re working to achieve 100 percent compatibility by the end of 2025, ensuring that all our tools can fully take advantage of the capabilities of NPUs and the ARM platform.

It’s a bright feature for hybrid AI, and we’re ready for it with Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs.

Looking forward

We’re continually evaluating and implementing new Windows 11 features as they come available in each release. We’re currently testing hotpatching in Windows 11 to allow updates without system reboots. We aim to reduce the number of required reboots to one per quarter, improving efficiency and maintaining system stability.

We’re also testing the Recall experience. Recall creates an explorable timeline of a Windows 11 PC’s past using snapshots and natural language queries. It helps users find past content on their PC by responding to natural language prompts with images, text, or even the exact location of the item you’re searching for.

Of course, we’re excited about the next generation of Copilot+ PCs and the hardware and software improvements coming to Windows 11. As AI continues its rapid evolution, we’ll be working alongside the Windows 11 team to bring advancements in productivity, accessibility, and security.

We believe that hybrid AI is the future and Windows 11 with Copilot+ PCs is the platform that will support it.

Here are some tips on getting started evolving your Windows ecosystem with Copilot+ PCs:

• Adopt Copilot+ PCs as the hardware platform of choice for Windows 11 devices.
• Explore the enhanced performance and battery life of ARM-based Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs.
• Use Windows Autopatch to manage your Windows 11 deployment.
• Consider the benefits of upcoming Windows 11 features, such as Hotpatch for Windows and Recall for improved efficiency and user experience.

Prepare to deploy Windows 11 at your company.

• Learn more about how hardware-backed Windows 11 is empowering us with secure-by-default baseline.
• Look back at our deployment of Windows 11 at Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re boosting Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot with smart enterprise content management.

• 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 AI in action: Unpacking our internal journey with Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Our employees at Microsoft are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot to find answers, work faster, communicate more effectively, and boost their creativity. Copilot has become a true personal AI assistant.

To make this tool even more valuable to our employees and users at all companies, we’re creating new agents with specialized AI-powered skills and capabilities built around specific needs and use cases.

An agent specializing in workplace services—starting with HR and IT—is now available as part of a private preview our customers can sign up for here, with support for additional services (such as Facilities) coming soon. The public preview will be available in the first quarter of 2025 and general availability is scheduled for the second quarter of 2025.

Our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has played an integral role in building and piloting the Employee Self-Service Agent. In addition to co-developing it with the Copilot product group, we’re also serving as its Customer Zero, meaning we’re the first company to use it. As such, we rolled out early versions of it to our HR and IT professionals and wove their feedback into the product.

“We’re very pleased with the results we’ve seen in both HR and on the IT side in the support space,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “These agents aren’t just speeding up how our teams help employees get the answers they’re looking for, but they’re also giving employees better answers right from the start.”

Augmenting employee self-service with intelligence

At Microsoft, AI has created new possibilities that support our culture of enabling employee self-service, especially in HR and IT. In a survey by our Microsoft 365 Copilot Research Hub, our employees said they’re spending too much time and energy searching for policy related information and navigating siloed systems to complete simple tasks related to their professions.

Like most companies, our HR and IT employees work in complex enterprise environments where they need to take action or find information across hundreds of tools and content repositories. When an employee can’t discover the information they need or accomplish crucial tasks, they’ll typically take one of two routes: They’ll either do without a service or file a ticket for support. The former leaves the employee unsatisfied, and the latter takes up valuable HR and IT staff time.

As industry leaders in HR and IT, and as the creators of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we designed the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot to take on these well-known challenges.

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot gives users the right answers at the right time with context-tailored responses grounded in official content sources. Through natural language queries on key HR and IT questions that they input into the Microsoft 365 Copilot interface of their choice or a company site, the assistant empowers them to quickly locate the resources or tools they need.

“The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot reorients problem-solving from a tool-based focus to a task-based focus,” says Kyle von Haden, principal PM manager for the Employee Self-Service Agent team in the Copilot product group. “It allows somebody to think about the problem they’re trying to solve and just express that rather than thinking about what tool they’ll need to do it.”

When an employee makes an inquiry, the agent connects to SharePoint and other knowledge sources and additional responses can be retrieved from our Microsoft Graph. When needed, it can also retrieve and integrate data from SAP SuccessFactors or ServiceNow. From there, the agent provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for them to resolve their query—clearly distinguishing between answers from official content and those from the broader Microsoft Graph data.

“It’s exciting to see the transformation of employee experience and support through generative AI with simple conversations,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, senior director leading the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. “As Customer Zero for this new suite of capabilities, we take great pride in channeling our insights and past investments in improving the employee experience at Microsoft and for our customers into this new era of AI.”

The agent includes pre-configured prompts, responses, and templates for self-service use cases so admins can configure the tool with minimal effort and maximum impact for employees.In addition to SAP SuccessFactors and ServiceNow, it also includes other third-party software integrations built into Microsoft 365 Graph and Copilot Studio, which allows administrators to build new connections via Microsoft Cloud Services to streamline business processes.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Knowledge access

Guidance from official sources, custom tailored to the individual employee

Examples:

• Looking up company policies
• Finding team member anniversaries
• Identifying which training courses are due

Action-taking

Take action on key HR and IT issues directly from the Employee Self-Service Agent

Examples:

• Submitting time off requests
• Requesting a new computer
• Updating name and transferring direct reports
• Checking and remediating device compliance

Business agility

Reduced case volume and tickets back into HR and IT

Examples:

• Freeing up HR and IT agents from simple or easy to resolve tasks
• Improving employee satisfaction and productivity

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides employees asking for help in the HR and IT spaces with a single starting point for knowledge access and task completion.

Microsoft Digital has already implemented these capabilities in small-scale pilots, in partnership with our HR, IT, and product teams to ensure the agent balances utility with security and employee privacy.

“The tool needs to be able to segregate data properly while still presenting the information employees need from a variety of sources in one place,” says Poorvaja Lingam, a principal PM in Microsoft Digital responsible for enabling the IT function in the Employee Self-Service Agent. “Natural language means AI can detect the context that’s relevant for the action it needs to take.”

Those capabilities depend on a layer of connectors, agents, and plugins that loop the Employee Self-Service Agent into different content repositories, third-party apps, and tools. As the team responsible for much of the agent’s configuration and administration, Microsoft Digital’s Elite Builder group created these background elements through another Copilot extensibility tool: Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This tool, based on Microsoft Power Platform, lets low-code, no-code, or pro-code developers enhance Copilot with agents and build their own custom experiences. It’s the key to configuring the Employee Self-Service Agent to access the tools and repositories relevant to our internal organizations.

Similar to other enterprises, HR and IT are natural places for us to start with profession-based agents because of how resource-intensive and complex they are.

HR services, simplified

As an organization, our HR team balances a long list of priorities that support both employees’ needs and the company’s priorities.

“HR is harnessing the power of AI to support our exceptional employees in achieving their professional goals and aspirations, while also addressing needs that affect their livelihoods,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of Digital Strategy and Innovation for HR. “These innovations are driving greater business agility and efficiency, ultimately creating more value for both our employees and the organization.”

There’s an almost dizzying array of solutions and information repositories that support those goals—from payroll to benefits to skilling and more. The HR team uses more than 100 tools to handle these functions.

“Within HR, responsibility for policies and documents does not rest with a single individual, but rather with multiple program owners who have different areas of expertise,” Ajmera says. “Employees need to be confident they’re getting the right information and taking the right action.”

With the sheer scope and complexity of our organization, employees can get lost or confused trying to find guidance on our HR portal. The Employee Self-Service Agent speeds up that process and minimizes the need to reach out to HR professionals.

Instead, all an employee needs to do is enter a natural language query through the interface of their choice. These queries can be articulated in the same conversational manner that an employee might use when speaking with an HR representative. They could ask it questions like:

• Can you tell me how to update my preferred name?
• Show me my pay stub and help me understand my benefits deductions.
• Do I have any training due?

Besides answering questions, the Employee Self-Service Agent can also help you complete tasks. For example, you could say, “Help me schedule time off in February.” To bring back a holistic response, connectors link the agent to common tools like ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors, and to public-facing knowledge bases and internal SharePoint sites, email correspondence on the topic, and any other Microsoft 365 Graph info. The intelligence of the assistant and the ability to find information or invoke tools to complete tasks within a single pane is a giant leap forward for our employees.

Compared with our pre-existing HR virtual agent, we’ve discovered that people within our pilot who use the Employee Self-Service Agent are 25% more likely to receive a correct response and, as a result, we expect they will be 31% less likely to create a support ticket.¹ Early reports suggest that knowledge discovery is getting faster as well.

Even though it’s still early days, the impact of the agent is clear.

“When people come to HR, they’re now getting responses that are faster and more personalized,” says Christopher Fernandez, corporate vice president in HR. “It’s great to see this positive impact—which is exactly what we are aiming for in enhancing the employee experience. This HR innovation would not have been possible without all the thoughtful work and close collaboration across Microsoft Digital and Product.”

Unburdening IT through AI assistance

Routine IT issues are time-consuming for both employees and IT professionals, with much of that inefficiency being tied to how their larger IT organizations function within their companies.

“For an employee to stay productive, they need to have a simple, accessible, and transparent support experience,” says Silvina Olkies, senior director of Global End User Support Services and Employee Experience in Microsoft Digital. “Having multiple entry points for support can lead to confusion and inefficiencies.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is helping us move away from traditional bot, phone, and email support channels. Instead, employees have a single, intelligent entry point to IT. Although HelpDesk support is one of the primary scenarios for IT, the platform also facilitates self-help for other common questions like sign-in information, device status, or internal network connectivity.

The main value driver for the Employee Self-Service Agent is in providing an alternate default to human agents as a first touch. Instead, the platform can help users resolve the vast majority of questions and issues on their own.

The vision is that only the most pressing and complex problems—ones that genuinely require human intervention—will reach our support professionals. To streamline the process further, the entire experience will take place within a single, intelligent pane.

“Our vision is for the support to start and end in Copilot,” Olkies says. “From there, whether you resolve your issue through a comprehensive self-service experience, or you transition seamlessly to a live agent, you remain within a unified, streamlined interface.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is already helping a small test group of employees get answers faster, reducing support incidents, and reclaiming time for agents to focus on more complex and interesting problems. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we conduct IT services.

Early results are extremely encouraging. To date, the overall self-help success rate has increased by 36%, while information discovery saw a 34% gain in self-resolution. Importantly, user satisfaction for the IT function grew by 18%. It’s clear that employees appreciate self-service experiences enhanced by AI.

Exploring the new frontier of AI-enabled employee self-service

The time savings and increased accuracy that the Employee Self-Service Agent unlocks don’t just benefit general employees. They also drive efficiency gains for HR and IT professionals themselves.

“Many join HR because they want to make a positive impact on others’ lives and contribute to a better workplace,” Ajmera says. “By answering routine admin queries, the Employee Self-Service Agent sets subject matter experts free from the day-to-day minutiae of people knocking on their doors, allowing them to provide meaningful consultation, enhancing their impact and satisfaction at work.”

Despite significant investment, HR program owners struggle with benefit utilization due to awareness and ease of use. The Employee Self-Service Agent improves utilization by providing relevant information when employees are engaged. For example, when an employee asks about their 401k balance, the system can also show their contribution rate and highlight any unclaimed company match.

Our experience in creating and implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent internally has provided valuable lessons for customers who want to adopt the solution. First and most importantly, it’s crucial to properly govern your data estate. That ensures a baseline of data safety thanks to Copilot’s adherence to data loss prevention policies and other guardrails.

“We’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure customers can easily configure and manage this solution, but it’s important to be thoughtful,” Krishnamurthy says. “A big bang approach might not be the best way to get started, but rather by asking pertinent questions about the initial scope, the areas you might want to start with, and who your audience should be.”

The product team has used these lessons to shape the solution itself. The Employee Self-Service Agent supports a phased roll-out that increases in complexity as an organization’s maturity progresses:

• An out-of-the-box experience facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted answers where necessary, lowering search time and frustration while improving trustworthiness and administrative control.
• Additional configuration reduces cost and decreases time to value for HR functions, including company policies, employee profile management, payroll, and benefits and IT workflows like ticket management and live agent support.

“As your engagement with the solution deepens, we’ve made it easy to tell the agent where your authoritative content or data lives through templated connectors, then the tool will make sure it’s surfaceable,” von Hayden says. “There’s an ongoing process of continual refinement and improvement until you’ve fine-tuned the solution to exactly what your organization needs.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates not just the power of AI but its elasticity. It represents the next step in tailoring AI to specific business needs to enrich culture, empower people, reshape processes, and accelerate performance.

“The technology is there,” D’Hers says. “Now it’s about applying it to real-world scenarios so it can help people achieve their best.”

Here are some tips for getting started with the Employee Self-Service Agent at your company:

• First, we suggest finding one or two of your biggest pain points and addressing those.
• Start on broad patterns to get horizontal scale. Seek out easy wins with less complexity to drive early value.
• Content is key: prioritize knowledge bases, accuracy, and content creation.
• Focus on continuous improvement through quality, accuracy, and user feedback.
• Make sure your content is accurate and well-governed.
• Take a data-driven approach where you clearly identify and communicate the primary volume drivers in your business.
• Ensure content excellence by prioritizing authoritative knowledge and implementing rigorous processes for accuracy, curation, and review.
• Work to keep your users within a single platform, which will enable you to provide them with a seamless self-help experience.
• Continuously enhance your response quality and accuracy by measuring and acting on user feedback.
• Start testing with your human agents who usually answer questions, effective, clean, and well-governed.

The out-of-the-box experience for the Employee Self-Service Agent for Microsoft 365 is currently in limited private preview. Sign up here to be included in the next phase.

• Find out how Microsoft’s pivot to generative AI is being fueled by its rich IT history.
• See how Microsoft Digital is leading AI transformation with an AI Center of Excellence.
• Learn how we’re redesigning how we work at Microsoft with generative AI.

• 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 Boosting HR and IT services at Microsoft with our new Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The AI revolution is here, so what are you going to do about it?

This question is for IT leaders, IT practitioners, and others out there who need to decide how your companies will respond to the onslaught of AI products and solutions that are coming your way!

We had the same question here at Microsoft, and to make sure we responded in the right way, we—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—created an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to guide us.

Here’s the story of how we did that and how our CoE is now helping us navigate the AI revolution and figure out how to deploy it internally across Microsoft.  

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

For us, it started with evaluating what our people want from AI.

Next-generation AI is transformative, and as it does for all enterprises, it presents a huge opportunity for us at Microsoft. One of the fundamental steps our CoE is taking is to accept this and not get in the way. We’re encouraging a culture of disruption while also living up to our obligation to do so responsibly.

We know that integrating AI into everything we do will never be a matter of stitching AI features or capabilities into our existing systems and processes, but rather a process of reexamining how we do things. We want it to do three important things—amplify human ingenuity, deliver transformative experiences, and safeguard our people, business, and data.

Our CoE encourages our teams to think about how AI can help their work and to rethink their work with AI in mind. To respond adequately to this AI revolution, we took a holistic view of how each of our employees can achieve their full potential and how each team, department, and the entire organization can benefit from AI.

“Getting AI right is about empowering your people to do their best work,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, a principal program manager architect in Microsoft Digital and one of the leaders of our CoE. “We’re off to a good start—now that we’re underway, we’re laser focused on making sure everything that we do empowers our employees be their best, most creative, selves while also protecting them and the company as well.”

Meeting needs and answering important questions

We’re using feedback from our employees and leaders to guide how we invest in AI.

Our employees are telling us they want to simplify and offload mundane tasks and focus on productive, creative work. They view AI as a tool to find information and answers, summarize meetings and action items, perform administrative tasks, and plan their day. However, their focus is on more than administration and tedium. Employees also want to use AI to improve and inform their creative work and enable them to produce deeper and more insightful analytical work.

Drilling down, we asked our employees for specifics on what they want out of AI to improve the experience they have at work.

What employees want from AI

Our leaders want AI to empower employees, not replace them.

Leaders want AI to create an environment for employees that increases their productivity, improves their well-being, decreases the time they spend on low-value activities, and improves their skills.

“We want to empower employees to find time for more innovative and rewarding work,” Krishnamurthy says.

What leaders want from AI

Transforming Microsoft with the AI Center of Excellence

Now that we’ve shared how our CoE is listening to our employees and leaders, we’ll share more detail on the CoE itself.

Our AI CoE team is comprised of experts across Microsoft in various fields, including data science, machine learning, business intelligence development, product development, experience design and research, accessibility, and program management.

Working under the AI 4 ALL (Accelerate, Learn, and Land) tagline, the team is responsible for planning, designing, implementing, and championing how we use AI internally at Microsoft.

Our CoE uses these pillars to guide their work:

• Strategy. They work with product and feature teams to determine what we want to achieve with AI. They define business goals and prioritize the most important implementations and investments.
• Architecture. They enable infrastructure, data, services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all our AI use cases.
• Roadmap. They build and manage implementation plans for all our AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.
• Culture. They foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI among our stakeholders.

“These pillars are helping us stay focused on the right things,” Krishnamurthy says. “It’s about using AI to grow and nourish a culture of innovation and excellence across the company.”

Strategy

Our CoE Strategy team evaluates what we’re doing with AI at Microsoft. The most fundamental perspective for the strategy pillar is examining AI as a catalyst for transforming our tools and processes, not as an addition or augmentation to existing tools and processes. While AI is designed to augment and improve human capabilities, it can’t be approached as only an augmentation or improvement to the tools and processes we use. We must be willing to start over if that achieves the best outcome for our employees and business.

From the beginning, the strategy team examined the projects and business goals through positive disruption—a willingness to refine each idea to its core. To capture the full value of AI in our organization, we knocked down boundaries. We examined every one of our business processes, reimagining them and how AI could improve them, often in revolutionary ways.

Our strategy is driven from the organization’s top level, and executive sponsorship is crucial to executing our implementation well. When our transformation mandate comes from the organization’s leader, it resonates in every corner of the organization, every piece of work, and every task that could be changed.  Simultaneously, we have encouraged and welcomed ideas from every level of the organization, empowering individuals from across our organization to contribute their AI insights.

We’re moving quickly, thanks to our digital transformation. David Finney, director of IT Service Management, is excited about the rapid progress the CoE is making.

“The pace of AI technology is incredibly fast,” Finney says. “We’re moving into implementations quickly to capture value and stay relevant to developments in AI technology. Our digital transformation has made this possible in many ways.  At the same time, governance and control have to be at the forefront of our strategy and consider and respect responsible AI tenets in everything we do.”

Capturing strategy with an idea pipeline

The strategy pillar captures all the ideas and all the ongoing work that’s happening within AI at Microsoft. Idea capture involves the entire organization, and every employee is invited to contribute ideas for how AI can transform how we work, from the most straightforward task to the broadest organizational policies and processes. No element of our business processes is off-limits. Our pipeline contains ideas for the next year or so range from AI-powered career planning, to intelligent helpdesk and troubleshooting tools, to fully automated issue detection and remediation, to AI-powered codebase migration.

One of the CoE Strategy team’s most significant responsibilities is prioritizing the idea pipeline for AI solutions. All employees can feed the pipeline through a form that records important pipeline details. The strategy team evaluates each idea in the pipeline, analyzing two primary metrics: business value and implementation effort.

• Business value. How important is the solution to our business? Potential cost reduction, market opportunity, and user impact all factor into business value. As our business value increases, so does the idea’s position in the pipeline priority queue.
• Implementation effort. How much effort is required to implement the idea? We evaluate the implementation effort based on data gaps for modeling, the complexity of the solution, and the resources required. Low-effort ideas can result in quick wins, while ideas requiring more significant effort must be further evaluated.

Activating AI here at Microsoft

Business value and implementation effort supply the two axes for the simple four-quadrant matrix we use to determine the overall priority for the ideas and their order in the pipeline. High-value, low-effort ideas are at the start of the pipeline and our highest priority. Low-value, high-effort projects are sent to the back of the pipeline. High-value ideas are all essential and deserve focus, and our strategy team used this evaluation matrix to determine which projects should be started and when.

Architecture

Our architecture pillar focuses on the readiness and design of the infrastructure and services that support AI at Microsoft. It also encompasses data readiness and the reusability of enterprise assets used for AI capabilities.

The CoE’s Architecture team manages these systems’ supporting infrastructure and ensures that our environment adheres to best practices for standards and governance. Architecture dependencies and interactions are critical to establishing sound architecture practices.

When a product team is developing a service within the architecture, like storage, compute, or an API, decisions about design and architecture are influenced by the dependencies across these services.

The architecture we build is focused on open and liberal architecture standards. We know that if our engineers and developers use the tools they’re most comfortable and fluent with, they’ll be able to create quickly with competency and confidence. With more than hundreds of potential projects in the pipeline, rapid iteration and agility are critical.

We’ve made our teams aware of AI playgrounds and aggregators that they can use to explore supported AI tools and machine-learning models to test their scenarios and validate data-handling practices. Standardizing these playgrounds and aggregators provides freedom for our developers to experiment and innovate while staying within the bounds of our AI best practices and approved technologies.

We’re also enabling our architecture communities to collaborate and share ideas about developing the most optimal microservice architecture, cloud service-based architecture, or hybrid infrastructure architecture. We have presentations, on-demand engagements, and groups that use Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Teams to encourage and facilitate collaboration. This enables our architecture teams to move quickly and in concert with each other, which is necessary with the rapid pace of AI technology advancement.

A comprehensive architectural view involves understanding the nuances of the infrastructure and how new infrastructure will affect the current architectural state. We achieve this view by gathering data on systems and dependencies across the existing architecture and super-imposing new ideas or new architecture on top of it.

“We ask questions,” says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect on the CoE Architecture team. He stresses the importance of continual self-examination. “What are the touch points? What is the impact? How do we achieve cost and performance balance? Where are we going to invest? Which of these services is going to get the capabilities? How are we organizing services? What platform-level capability will all services use, and what will be native to a particular area or service within a smaller group?”

The answers help us make sure we take the right approach.

“Determining dependencies and working through the implications has to be done, and it has to be continually evaluated,” Nasir says.

Roadmap

The CoE Roadmap team examines our employee experience in the context of our AI solutions and governs how we achieve the optimal experience in and throughout AI projects. One of the most critical aspects of implementing AI is how our employees will interact with it. Getting the roadmap right ensures these user experiences are cohesive and align with our broader employee experience goals.

The Roadmap team leans heavily on research to confirm and test capabilities and the potential for AI-based services and processes. The user experience involves many considerations, including how employees interact with a service, ordinary use case scenarios, accessibility needs, etc.

We’ve recognized AI’s potential to impact how our employees get their work done and what level of satisfaction and positive experience comes from the interactions with AI services and tools. The roadmap pillar is designed to encourage experiences across all these services and tools that are complementary and cohesive.

“AI isn’t a traditional product, so there isn’t a traditional path for user experience,” says Aria Fredman, a senior user experience researcher on the CoE Roadmap team. “We’re using AI to level the playing field for all Microsoft employees.”

AI is an excellent tool for leveling the playing field for everyone.

“We’re using next-generation AI to transform how everyone interacts with the products we’re building,” Fredman says. “Natural language interfaces and predictive interactions remove the barriers of traditional input and user interface design. Accessibility becomes not something that we build into a user interface but something that the interface natively is. Our goal is universal accessibility, to use AI to empower and include everyone.”

We’re focusing on the open nature of AI interaction. We’re surfacing AI capabilities and information when the user needs them, according to their context. It makes the user experience and user interface for an AI service less important than how the service allows other applications or user interfaces to interact with it and harness its power.

“We’re moving away from the legacy models of interaction and navigation of static product topologies,” says Yannis Paniaras, a principal designer at the Microsoft Digital Studio who collaborates with other designers to create entirely new user experiences with AI and ML. “We’re transforming the user experience through AI and copilot-based experiences and creating new paradigms of interaction and navigation across a complex topology of services and products.”

Meet the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence team

It’s about design that simplifies employee workflows for speed and efficiency.

“Our goal is to enable instant point-to-point access to all employee services with minimal or no navigation,” Paniaras says. “It’s like experiencing UX-teleportation, where accessing a service becomes instantaneous.”

This concept is what we call “Just-In-Time UX.” Furthermore, we use AI to facilitate continuous relationships between our employees and the various services that they use, which ensures that the experiences are always on and available to them.

“In our studio, the designers are also reinventing how we design for the era of AI,” Paniaras says. “We are transforming our discipline as much as the experiences and products we create for everyone at Microsoft.”

Culture

Our long-running focus on fostering a culture of innovation within our organization is now helping us embrace this new opportunity with AI. It’s enabling us to empower our employees to learn the skills they need to lead us through this transformation and to help us build a vision for what we can do with it as a group.

Our CoE Culture team focuses on two key areas of our AI implementation: responsibility and education. Culture moves into and influences the other pillars more than any other pillar. Culture underpins everything we do in the AI space. Ensuring our employees can increase their AI skillsets and access guidance for using AI responsibly are critical to AI at Microsoft.

AI’s opportunities are immense, and our implementation must be carried out with a growth mindset and responsible approach.

The Culture team has published training, recommended practices, and our shared learnings on next-generation AI capabilities and worked with individual business groups at Microsoft to determine the needs of all the disciplines across the organization, including groups as diverse as engineering, facilities and real estate, human resources, legal, sales, and marketing, among many. A telling example of how we’re rallying around AI is how quickly we created a Data and AI curriculum that everyone in our larger organization can take—employees of all roles are using it learn about and roll AI into their individual work.

We’re weaving responsible AI into the fabric of everything we do with AI, so our employees understand the importance and implications of responsible AI for their work, their teams, and the organization. We’re continually asking questions about our AI practices and evaluating the answers through diverse lenses to ensure our AI capabilities are fair and unbiased.

Urvi Sengar is a leading voice on the cultural team. She highlights the critical role responsible AI plays in developing AI at Microsoft.

“AI provides so many potential capabilities, but we must always ask, ‘are we using it in the right way?’” says Sengar, a software engineer on the CoE and in Microsoft Digital. “We’re building governance and guardrails around our systems to ensure we don’t misuse it. Our mandate to use AI responsibly underpins everything we do in this space.”

Our aim is to weave AI and education together in ways that enhance but don’t overrun our company culture. Our aim is to show our employees how they can transform the work they do while also making sure they protect the social and cultural considerations of the rest of our employees, our partners, our customers, and our larger organization. To do this important work, we’re implementing listening systems throughout our organization that are enabling us to adjust and adapt our approach to make sure we stay focused on the right things.

Moving forward

We’re at the beginning of our journey toward harnessing the transformative power of AI at Microsoft. Our AI CoE will provide the guidance and governance we need to foster innovation and encourage positive disruption in all lines of business. We’re ushering in a new vision for creativity, productivity, and personal growth for each of our employees, and we’re excited to capture those benefits within our organization and share them with our customers.

“Whatever applications we produce, whatever experiences we create, whatever productivity and efficiency we want to bring to our employees, we always ask the question: ‘How will this contribute to their engagement and involvement and enable them to thrive within the company,’” Krishnamurthy says. “The answer to this question is found in the moments that matter to our employees, in which they meaningfully contribute to the teams around them and move forward toward our collective vision, from the beginning of their time with Microsoft and all the way through their journey.”

Here are some tips for getting started with a AI Center of Excellence at your company:

• Use AI to fuel organizational transformation and to improve your employee experience.
• Approach AI as a tool that can help your employees boost their creativity, enhance their productivity, and grow their skills.
• Provide personalized and contextualized information to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
• Use AI to improve both the on-site and remote experiences for your employees—it can help you get hybrid work right.
• Use AI to improve your infrastructure management, compliance monitoring, governance, and real estate and space planning.
• Give your employees good guardrails—take a responsible and responsive approach in each area where you use AI.
• Encourage your employees to contribute ideas on how AI can improve their work processes and evaluate ideas that are most valuable and feasible.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability around AI and data, where failures become steppingstones, and cross-functional collaboration drives innovation.

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access program and new capabilities in Copilot.

• Explore ChatGPT & AI: 6 Tips for Managing Support Content.
• Unpack a foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork.
• Discover transforming modern engineering at Microsoft.

• 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 The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital (IT) is responding with an AI Center of Excellence appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Anyone who has been around the technology industry for a while is familiar with the concept of “dogfooding.” “Eat your own dog food” is a phrase that has been in use at Microsoft since the 1980s, and it is common vernacular in the industry to describe the process of a company using its own products and services before they’re available in the market to power internal operations. The idea behind the metaphor may have been inspired by a 70’s era TV commercial—“The dog food is so good, I serve it to my own dogs.” In other words, when Microsoft uses it internally, we learn from that experience and use our insights to improve the product or service so it’s good enough for your business too.

As Microsoft has become more sophisticated in the way we build, test, deploy, and improve our products, equating the usage of our own solutions to eating dog food has become outdated. It doesn’t speak to the sophistication with which we obsess over the employee experience to ensure that our products and services don’t just meet the needs of our own employees, they exceed them. And by applying our internal learnings to improve our solutions, we ensure that we exceed the expectations of your employees also.

The new term to describe that employee obsession is “Customer Zero,” and in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we take pride in being the first customer for a wide variety of Microsoft products and services, obsessing over our own employee experience to make every person on the planet more productive.

Being Customer Zero at Microsoft

As the team that “powers, protects, and transforms the employee experience at Microsoft,” we are responsible for driving Microsoft’s own digital transformation in a hybrid world.

I asked Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group program manager, what it means to be Customer Zero at Microsoft. “It means that I get to represent the user voice and needs at Microsoft as well as enterprise users at large to help shape our products and solutions.”

But how do you do that?

“Part of this is establishing a shared vision, strategy and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with multiple product engineering partners to accomplish our ’north star,’” Alaparthi says. “It also means that we get to co-develop select capabilities that not only help Microsoft users but also get integrated into our products.”

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

There are four dimensions of our Customer Zero approach that shape our investments:

Customer Zero at Microsoft

We envision highly transformative experiences for our employees, obsessing over their experience to improve the experience for every Microsoft customer.

We build, evaluate, and drive adoption for those experiences.

We deploy, govern, operate and support highly secure, compliant, and manageable experiences.

We are the voice of Microsoft’s own digital transformation, to share our experience and inspire our customers and partners through our own journey.

Being Customer Zero for Microsoft means continuously working to improve the experience our employees have at work.

Envision

The key to succeeding as Customer Zero at Microsoft is to envision the right experiences in the first place, then to use our insights and knowledge to influence the direction and development of those experiences. We do that in multiple ways:

• We listen to our global employees to better understand their needs, then work with product engineering to co-envision the right user experiences.
• We anticipate and address product requirements that other large enterprise customers will have, based on our experience managing large tenants at Microsoft.
• We research user needs, analyze feedback, and leverage insights to influence product design and development. In this way, we are the champions of the employee experience at Microsoft.

Build, Evaluate and Drive Adoption

Before Microsoft customers and partners ever interact with new products and services, we evaluate those products on your behalf, often co-developing solutions driven by our insights as Customer Zero. Once developed, we drive adoption of those solutions through structured change management programs to help maximize employee usage and value, unlocking the value of our own digital transformation.

• As the team that manages and deploys enterprise-level systems at Microsoft, we use our expertise to ensure that administrative capabilities and user experiences are built and optimized to maximize employee productivity.
• We leverage those same insights to ensure our solutions are secure and compliant with global regulations.
• As a result of envisioning or even in response to insights driven by internal deployments, we partner with our product group counterparts to drive innovative experiences into our products based on our experience as Customer Zero.
• We evaluate those same solutions to ensure their adherence to security, privacy, and other compliance requirements globally.
• Once built, we engage in structured, locally relevant change management to drive usage and to maximize the value of our investments in digital transformation. As a byproduct of our landing and adoption activities, we bring user insights back to our product groups to further improve our solutions.

Deploy, Govern, Operate, and Support

A key function of our role as Customer Zero at Microsoft is to operate and govern the tenants that power Microsoft. Through our operational processes and learnings, we can ensure the stability, scalability, and compliance of our employee experiences at a global scale, improving the experience for all users. Here are a few of the things we do:

• Monitor service health and invest in measures to maintain high levels of service uptime, sharing insights with our product group peers based on our learnings.
• Leverage user feedback and service analytics data to influence product development.
• Represent the “voice of information technology” at Microsoft, compiling and sharing feedback that improves manageability, scale, and supportability of our enterprise solutions.
• Facilitate security, privacy, legal, and other compliance reviews for enterprise-level solutions.
• Develop and enforce policies that reduce risk of data exposure and sprawl through tenant-level governance policies. We then share those same policies with our product group counterparts.

Evangelize

Near and dear to our hearts here at Inside Track are our efforts to evangelize and promote what we have learned as we continue our digital transformation journey at Microsoft. While Inside Track is a primary channel to share those learnings, our Microsoft Digital team also engages directly with customers and partners here in Redmond and across the world, while also engaging in CIO forums and other events. We do that to ensure that you, as a digital transformation leader, benefit from our insights as Customer Zero at Microsoft so we can be a conduit back to our engineering teams as we collect feedback and insights from our customers and partners.

A mindset, not a marketing slogan

As we in Microsoft Digital have continued to evolve, the Customer Zero mindset has become key to our own digital transformation. It is no longer good enough to just “eat our own dog food.” We obsess over every detail to ensure our employees are the most productive in the world. As a customer, you can have even greater confidence in our products and services since we’ve already run and tested our products at global enterprise scale and have channeled our own employee feedback and insights to improve the experience.

“Similar to IT organizations in many companies, we’ve become an increasingly strategic contributor to Microsoft’s product offerings,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “In our ‘Customer Zero’ capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring our employee experience vision to life. This includes doing some of the product engineering work ourselves, in close partnership with product teams. Everything we do as Customer Zero to obsess over the employee experience makes our employees more productive—and that extends to our customers through our products.”

These are still the early days in this newest chapter of our journey, but we are excited to share our progress so you can better understand how this approach improves the employee experience at Microsoft, and by extension, in your enterprise too.

Here are some of the top lessons we’ve learned as Customer Zero for Microsoft:

• As “Customer Zero,” we are the company’s first customer and works in tandem with product engineering to envision and develop the best possible employee experiences.
• Through our insights and usage, we influence product engineering to improve experiences, often co-developing solutions based on our insights.
• Your enterprise can also benefit from a Customer Zero approach, by obsessing over your own experience, listening to your employees, and proactively improving experiences prior to general availability.

• Read more about how we reinventing our employee experience in a hybrid world.
• Find out how our ‘born in the cloud’ thinking is fueling our transformation.
• Explore how our change management best practices helped us launch a business intelligence platform.

• 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 How Microsoft Digital improves its own employee experience—and yours—as Customer Zero appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

If you’re on a sales team, you know that there are all kinds of distracting tasks that eat away at your time and get in the way of what you do best—building relationships with and solving problems for customers.

There’s no doubt that modern salespeople need to rely on too many tools and services to get their jobs done. We in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, see firsthand the stress this puts on our sales teams.

“We wanted to alleviate as much of that pain as we could,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We realized that the AI and automation that comes baked into Copilot for Sales could make the lives of our sellers much better.”

Microsoft is Customer Zero for our own products, which means we typically try them first, put them through their paces, and send our feedback to the product group. Usage has steadily increased since we adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally.

“We’ve had a great Customer Zero experience with Copilot for Sales,” D’Hers says. “We’ve been very pleased with how much it has simplified the lives of our sellers and enabled them to focus more on selling.”

{Check out our full content suite on how we use Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva. Learn about our journey as the company’s Customer Zero.}

Unlocking human potential with AI and automation

It’s hard to overstate how complicated selling is—there seems to be no end to the countless small tasks that sellers need to accomplish to keep their day-to-day moving. From managing communications to pulling in relevant stakeholders to inputting information into customer relationship management (CRM) software, sales professionals are constantly allocating and reallocating their attention across different apps and work modes.

During internal simplification research at Microsoft, we discovered that our sellers were using as many as 40 tools per day. Flipping back and forth between those different workspaces results in a lot of wasted time.

“Sixty-eight percent of sellers’ time gets spent on critical but tedious sales tasks,” says Cory Newton-Smith, head of product management for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “If we can identify what they’re doing in this non-selling space and recover time from that, they can spend more of their day where humans excel.”

We wanted to design a way for salespeople to keep essential tasks within the flow of work, then introduce powerful features to speed up their efforts. It’s especially important to minimize the time they spend in CRM programs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Although those solutions are essential to modern sales and contain many powerful features, they add steps into a seller’s workflow.

“You have the CRM space and then you have the productivity space,” says Smita Shrivastava, product strategy and growth lead for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “Sellers mostly work in Microsoft Outlook and Teams, so juggling apps to work within the CRM is a constant drain on productivity.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales maximizes sales teams’ productivity with AI-assisted content creation and meeting summaries across Microsoft 365 apps. It seamlessly connects data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRMs from the apps where salespeople get their work done—within Microsoft Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales saves sellers time through three main functionalities:

• Automating and simplifying tasks with AI-generated emails, meeting summaries, data collection, and data entry
• Getting actionable insights in the flow of work by bringing together data from Microsoft 365 apps and CRM systems
• Maintaining momentum with AI-powered analytics that provide recommendations and reminders

“It’s really all about seller productivity,” says Peter Macy, technical specialist within our SaaS organization and pilot program participant for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “It helps maintain that focus and streamlines your work so you don’t have to jump back and forth and lose attention.”

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

To deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales thoughtfully internally here at Microsoft, we engaged our team of change management professionals, product specialists, and internal early adopters to make sure the tool landed just right. Fortunately, we’ve built out a robust deployment and adoption framework that we’ve iterated over several large-scale product rollouts.

“We have a repeatable process for landing changes,” says Alexandra Jones, senior business program and change manager in Microsoft Digital. “We can take advantage of a framework that’s already in place, including local adoption teams in each subsidiary and well-structured pilot programs.”

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

We built a five-step plan to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to around 60,000 employees worldwide.

01

Build a change management plan

02

Provide landing toolkit

03

Build a change management plan

04

Build a change management plan

05

Build a change management plan

We’ve developed a tried and tested method for deployment that was instrumental in our Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales deployment.

Through conversations with salespeople across Microsoft, our change management team focused on identifying how the tool would interact with different roles, then built communications around value propositions for each of those use cases. That helped produce readiness toolkits that demonstrated Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales’ value.

From there, it was time to begin a phased deployment—starting with a pilot. Generative AI drove a lot of uptake thanks to its popularity in the public imagination.

“The second I put out a post asking who wanted to be involved in a pilot, I had virtual hands up all over the world,” Jones says.

Real-world usage by our early adopters in the pilot helped guide our wider deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. One thing we determined was that as a companion app designed to function intuitively, the training burden for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales was much lower than for standalone programs. As a result, change managers simply dropped into existing monthly team trainings and town halls to get the message out.

The value of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales was immediately apparent. That helped drive adoption across Microsoft.

“The moment sellers launch Copilot for Sales, they see CRM data infused into emails and Teams conversations,” Shrivastava says. “They can see the power of Copilot for Sales very quickly.”

Clearly, Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales has struck a chord with our sellers. Since general availability in October 2022, we deployed it to nearly all of the company.

We have since moved on to listening and gathering customer feedback. That feedback helps inform both our future deployment efforts and the month-over-month rollouts for new Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales features. In the meantime, sellers are saving time every day.

Putting time back in salespeople’s days

For sellers like Macy, the most substantial benefit of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is the newfound efficiency that comes from automation. It’s the result of powerful features like the sales pane in Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 Copilot responses, and automated data connections that pull information out of CRMs and prompt you to input new contacts and opportunities.

Research has shown that sellers spend upwards of 60 percent of their time managing their inbox. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales helps lighten some of this burden through AI-generated email summaries and responses. According to Macy, this tool can help sellers recapture 20% to 30% of their time.

But it’s more than just time savings. Those Copilot features help sellers reclaim cognitive space that’s better spent on building relationships.

“What I find is that it frees you up to be present in the conversation,” Macy says. “There’s no more going silent or pausing to take hurried notes in the midst of a chat because the technology captures that value for you.”

And perhaps most powerfully, there’s no more broken focus or juggling apps from jumping between Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and CRM systems. Contact and opportunity management happen within the flow of work, where sellers spend their time.

As Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales continues to evolve, our product team has its eye on features that extend its value even further across the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Those features include intelligent contract authoring in Microsoft Word and automated collaboration space creation with partner channels in Microsoft Teams.

“Our productivity suite is so powerful, but up until now it’s remained relatively generic to suit many different tasks,” Newton-Smith says. “Our new concept is that apps like Copilot for Sales can show up and make these tools more powerful because they’re more contextually relevant to specific jobs.”

For our sellers, the bottom line is that Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is saving time and cognitive effort to help them be their fullest selves at work.

“The tool isn’t there to do your job,” Macy says. “It’s there to learn how to work alongside you and accelerate your productivity.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at your company.

• Leverage the easiest-to-use features first: email summary and conversation intelligence.
• Start with adding new contacts from Outlook to gain easy wins as you familiarize your team with the app.
• Use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales as an introduction to generative AI and intelligent co-pilots.
• Get your CRM admins, senior decision makers, and core IT onboard by demonstrating the most useful features.
• Pilot with your all-stars to gain insights and build groundswell for your deployment.
• Connect with your users to see where they’re finding value, then promote those features.
• Sellers like to hear from their peers. Be sure to leverage the champions that develop out of your pilots.

Click here to try or learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

• Check out our full content suite on how we use Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.
• Learn about our journey as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

• 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 See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Since generative AI exploded onto the scene, it’s been unleashing our employees’ creativity, unlocking their productivity, and up-leveling their skills.

But we can fly into risky territory if we’re not careful. The key to protecting the company and our employees from the risks associated with AI is adopting proper governance measures based on rigorous data hygiene.

Technical professionals working within Microsoft Digital, our internal IT organization, have taken up this challenge. They include the AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE) team and the Microsoft Tenant Trust team that governs our Microsoft 365 tenant.

Since the widespread emergence of generative AI technologies over the last year, our governance experts have been busy ensuring our employees are set up for success. Their collaboration helps us ensure we’re governing AI through both guidance from our AI CoE and a governance model for our Microsoft 365 tenant itself.

{Learn how Microsoft is responding to the AI revolution with a Center of Excellence. Discover transforming data governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric. Explore how we use Microsoft 365 to bolster our teamwork.}

Generative AI presents limitless opportunities—and some tough challenges

Next-generation AI’s benefits are becoming more evident by the day. Employees are finding ways to simplify and offload mundane tasks and focus on productive, creative, collaborative efforts. They’re also using AI to produce deeper and more insightful analytical work.

“The endgame here is acceleration,” says David Johnson, a tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital. “AI accelerates employees’ ability to get questions answered, create things based on dispersed information, summarize key learnings, and make connections that otherwise wouldn’t be there.”

There’s a real urgency for organizations to empower their employees with advanced AI tools—but they need to do so safely. Johnson and others in our organization are balancing the desire to move quickly against the need for caution with technology that hasn’t yet revealed all the potential risks it creates.

“With all innovations—even the most important ones—it’s our journey and our responsibility to make sure we’re doing things in the most ethical way,” says Faisal Nasir, an engineering leader on the AI CoE team. “If we get it right, AI gives us the power to provide the most high-quality data to the right people.”

But in a world where AI copilots can comb through enormous masses of enterprise data in the blink of an eye, security through obscurity doesn’t cut it. We need to ensure we maintain control over where data flows throughout our tenant. It’s about providing information to the people and apps that have proper access and insulating it against ones that don’t.

To this end, our AI CoE team is introducing guardrails that ensure our data stays safe.

Tackling good AI governance

The AI CoE brings together experts from all over Microsoft who work across several disciplines, from data science and machine learning to product development and experience design. They use an AI 4 ALL (Accelerate, Learn, Land) model to guide our adoption of generative AI through enablement initiatives, employee education, and a healthy dose of rationality.

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

As Customer Zero for these technologies, we have a responsibility for caution—but not at the expense of enablement.

“We’re not the most risk-averse customer,” Johnson says. “We’re simply the most risk-aware customer.”

The AI CoE has four pillars of AI adoption: strategy, architecture, roadmap, and culture. As an issue of AI governance, establishing compliance guardrails falls under architecture. This pillar focuses on the readiness and design of infrastructure and services supporting AI at Microsoft, as well as interoperability and reusability for enterprise assets in the context of generative AI.

Operational pillars of the AI Center of Excellence

Strategy

Working
with feature crews to determine what we want to achieve with AI at the Microsoft
Digital level and prioritize those AI investments.

Architecture

Enabling infrastructure data, services, access, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for AI for cases.

Roadmap

Building implementation plans for AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and KPIs.

Culture

Fostering collaboration, innovation, education, and ethics among stakeholders.

We’ve created four pillars to guide our internal implementation of generative AI across Microsoft: Strategy, architecture, roadmap, and culture. Our AI certifications program falls under culture.

Building a secure and compliant data foundation

Fortunately, Microsoft’s existing data hygiene practices provide an excellent baseline for AI governance.

There are three key pieces of internal data hygiene at Microsoft:

1. Employees can create new workspaces like Sites, Teams, Groups, Communities, and more. Each workspace features accountability mechanisms for its owner, policies, and lifecycle management.
2. Workspaces and data get delineated based on labeling.
3. That labeling enforces policies and provides user awareness of how to handle the object in question.

With AI, the primary concern is ensuring that we properly label the enterprise data contained in places like SharePoint sites and OneDrive files. AI will then leverage the label, respect policies, and ensure any downstream content-surfacing will drive user awareness of the item’s sensitivity.

AI will always respect user permissions to content, but that assumes source content isn’t overshared. Several different mechanisms help us limit oversharing within the Microsoft tenant:

1. Using site labeling where the default is private and controlled.
2. Ensuring every site with a “confidential” or “highly confidential” label sets the default library label to derive from its container. For example, a highly confidential site will mean all new and changed files will also be highly confidential.
3. Enabling company sharable links (CSLs) like “Share with People in <name of organization>” on every label other than those marked highly confidential. That means default links will only show up to the direct recipient in search and in results employees get from using Copilots.  
4. All Teams and sites have lifecycle management in place where the owner attests that the contents are properly labeled and protected. This also removes stale data from AI.
5. Watching and addressing oversharing based on site and file reports from Microsoft Graph Data Connect.

Microsoft 365 Copilot respects labels and displays them to keep users informed of the sensitivity of the response. It also respects any rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on file labels.

If the steps above are in place, search disablement becomes unnecessary, and overall security improves. “It isn’t just about AI,” Johnson says. “It’s about understanding where your information sits and where it’s flowing.”

From there, Copilot and other AI tools in question can then safely build a composite label and attach it to its results based on the foundational labels it used to create them. That provides the context it needs to decide whether to share its results with a user or extend them to a third-party app.

“To make the copilot platform as successful and securely extensible as possible, we need to ensure we can control data egress from the tenant,” says Keith Bunge, a software engineering architect for employee productivity solutions within Microsoft Digital.

We can also use composite labels to trigger confidential information warnings to users. That transparency provides our people with both agency and accountability, further cementing responsible AI use within our culture of trust.

Ultimately, AI governance is similar to guardrails for other tools and features that have come online within our tenant. As an organization, we know the areas we need to review because we already have a robust set of criteria for managing data.

But since this is a new technology with new functionality, the AI CoE is spending time conducting research and partnering with stakeholders across Microsoft to identify potential concerns. As time goes on, we’ll inevitably adjust our AI governance practices to ensure we’re meeting our commitment to responsible AI.

“Process, people, and technology are all part of this effort,” Nasir says. “The framework our team is developing helps us look at data standards from a technical perspective, as well as overall architecture for AI applications as extensions on top of cloud and hybrid application architecture.”

As part of getting generative AI governance right, we’re conducting extensive user experience and accessibility research. That helps us understand how these tools land throughout our enterprise and keep abreast of new scenarios as they emerge—along with the extensibilities they need and any data implications. We’re also investing time and resources to catch and rectify any mislabeled data, ensuring we seal off any existing vulnerabilities within our AI ecosystem.

Not only does this customer zero engagement model support our AI governance work, but it also helps build trust among employees through transparency. That trust is a key component of the employee empowerment that drives adoption.

Realizing generative AI’s potential

As our teams navigate AI governance and drive adoption among employees, it’s important to keep in mind that these guardrails aren’t there to hinder progress. They’re in place to protect and ultimately inspire confidence in new tools.

“In its best form, governance is a way to educate and inform our organization to move forward as quickly as possible,” Hempey says. “We see safeguards as accelerators.”

We know our customers also want to empower their employees with generative AI. As a result, we’re discovering ways to leverage or extend these services in exciting new ways for the organizations using our products.

“As we’re on this journey, we’re learning alongside our industry peers,” Nasir says. “By working through these important questions and challenges, we’re positioned to empower progress for our customers in this space.”

Consider these tips as you think about governing the deployment of generative AI at your company:

• Understand that IT organizations have inherently cautious habits.
• Leverage what industry leaders like the Responsible AI Initiative are sharing.
• Recognize that employees will adopt these tools on their own, so it’s best to prepare the way beforehand.
• Consider your existing data hygiene and how it needs to extend to accommodate AI.
• Make sure you have an enterprise plan for ensuring labeling and security, because AI tools will provide the most complete access by default.

Get started on your own next-generation AI revolution—try Microsoft 365 Copilot today.

• Learn how Microsoft is responding to the AI revolution with a Center of Excellence.
• Discover transforming data governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric.
• Explore how we use Microsoft 365 to bolster our teamwork.

• 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 Getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Imagine having a personal assistant that helps you navigate your daily tasks effortlessly. Microsoft 365 Copilot offers just that, allowing you to work smarter, not harder. And the best part? You don’t need to be a prompt engineer to use it.

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we found 10 scenarios for using Copilot every day in an experience we’re calling Monday morning with Copilot. Many of the scenarios are one-click actions, making them beginner-friendly. They’ve been thoroughly researched and tested by our Copilot Readiness team.

“We did over a month’s work of surveying different groups to find out what their daily top Copilot scenarios are,” says Cadie Kneip, a readiness business program manager on the Readiness team in Microsoft Digital. “Our extended team whittled them down to ten, from over 100. They had to be things you could use every single day.”

Originally our Readiness team did an intensive training called the Copilot Power Hour. “It was like drinking from a firehose,” says David VanGilder, also a readiness business program manager in Microsoft Digital.

We winnowed the good ideas we got from that exercise down to 10 scenarios that we thought would be a good way for teams like yours to get started using Copilot. “We made sure to focus on those that are for everybody,” VanGilder says. “It’s not for power users.”

Once our 10 scenarios were defined and learning assets made available to Microsoft employees, Microsoft Digital partnered with the MAGIC Skilling Team in our Customer Success Engineering organization that creates impactful and educational customer-facing learning content for Microsoft customers.

“We were able to integrate the scenarios into a robust skilling model that provides an easy-to-follow path for customers to onboard and extend their knowledge of Copilot,” says Tricia Gill, a principal program manager on the MAGIC team. “This is enabling us to help customers realize value even faster.”

The partnership between the two teams has been key, says John Martin, a director of skilling on the MAGIC team. “We love to see how our efforts as Customer Zero translate beyond Microsoft,” Martin says.

Catch up on long email threads with Copilot in Outlook

This is one of many tips that don’t need a prompt—you just open a thread and select the Summarize button. Copilot then provides a summary at the top of your email.

You could use this when your boss adds you to an email thread that has been going on for a long time and asks you to solve a problem that’s buried somewhere in all those many emails back and forth. Copilot can save you the 30 minutes it might take to wade through the entire thread.

“It has annotations of where it found things,” VanGilder says. “If you click the number, it’ll take you to the source, so you can get the full story.”

Recap Teams meetings with Copilot in Teams

You can use this tip to recap an entire meeting, or if you join late, you can recap only the part you missed.

For example, when you return from vacation, instead of spending days catching up by watching the recordings of several meetings, you can quickly read a text summary of each meeting.

“With Copilot, the prompt ‘Recap the meeting so far’ gets you caught up when you’re five minutes late, and you don’t have to disrupt the meeting by asking,” VanGilder says.

Summarize your week with Copilot

Say you’re working on two or three major projects and several minor projects. It can be a lot to keep track of.

With this prompt, Copilot shows you the past week of chats and emails, and you can easily see them in a table that includes whether you’ve responded.

“What’s really lovely about this one is that people already know how to do the first half of this prompt,” VanGilder says. “But the second part, to put it the results in a table—that creates a nice display of results. I was able to get caught up on all my projects quickly.”

Generate meeting notes with Copilot in Teams

Copilot can list key topics and action items from a meeting. If you’re the meeting host, this can be very helpful, as you’re probably used to spending the meeting with your nose buried in OneNote. With Copilot taking your notes, you can be an active participant in your meetings.

“There’s more than one way to use this functionality,” VanGilder says. “Instead of clicking ‘Generate meeting notes,’ I can type in the prompt and add ‘and put the results in the form of an email I can send to participants.’ I do quickly proofread it because it’s not called Pilot, it’s Copilot, so you do need to check its work!”

Draft email with Copilot in Outlook

Of course, many of us are experts in sending and receiving emails for work. But sometimes you have an email that’s especially challenging.

For example, it could be that there’s some friction about the subject, and you want some help in being diplomatic. Or maybe the recipient doesn’t want or need a lot of technical details, and you’d like some help making it understandable to a general audience.

“This is one that will help you look good,” Kneip says.

Get ready for your day with Copilot

In movies and TV shows, when a busy executive walks into their office, an assistant is standing there to say, “Good morning, So-and-so called about the XYZ project, and you have a meeting at 9 o’clock with the Such-and-such team.”

This tip turns Copilot into that assistant for you. It summarizes a lot of things from the preceding day—emails, Teams messages, and meetings. It also gives you a table of your upcoming meetings for the day.

You don’t have to use the part of the prompt that requests an “inspirational tone” and “a touch of fun,” but it shows the power of Copilot prompts. “It’s a good example that shows how users can tailor the prompts,” Kneip says.

Discover what was said with Copilot

This tip is for when you remember that someone messages you, but you can’t find their message, or you want to know what a key stakeholder said about a project.

“This prompt uses the Context IQ, and that’s really the magic of Copilot,” VanGilder says, referring to the forward slash (“/”) you type when entering the prompt. “You can use it to search for documents, meetings, or people.”

Boost your brainstorms with Copilot

This tip also uses the smart search feature of Context IQ. You might not use it daily, but it can save you a lot of time.

The Microsoft Digital readiness team used this to come up with Camp Copilot, a three-week training program. “The prompt we gave was, ‘I want to do a fun, interactive, summer training session for employees. Can you come up with a few ideas?’” Kneip says.

One Copilot user came up with an innovative use that’s similar. They used Copilot to write an email responding to a customer complaint, using the company guidelines for such responses. After refining Copilot’s draft email into the final version, they said the Copilot draft was 70-80% complete.

Create presentations from your ideas and files with Copilot in PowerPoint

You probably won’t use this tip every day, but it’s helpful because it removes the struggle of staring at a blank page.

“People will collect information from customers, put it into a Word document, and then use Copilot to convert it into a PowerPoint presentation,” VanGilder says. “It has a lot of use in training and selling.”

Uncover relevant files with Copilot

If you’ve ever needed to find a file but couldn’t remember exactly what it was named or where it was located—and who hasn’t?—then this tip’s for you. Copilot can search for a specific project or topic.

The prompt was suggested by an attorney at Microsoft, who asked if Copilot could help find files. VanGilder’s response was, “Give it a try and let me know what happens.” And it worked!

“This one’s an exciting prompt that people are absolutely in love with, to quickly find what you’re looking for,” VanGilder says.

We hope these top 10 scenarios help you and your organization get more out of Copilot. When people see how easy these tips are—many of them need just a click or two—they’ll be able to save time and mental effort.

Check out our full Monday morning with Copilot exerpience.

To learn more about Microsoft Copilot and tools for product management, join us here at Copilot for Work.

• Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva.
• Driving Copilot for Microsoft 365 adoption with our Copilot Champs Community.
• Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters.

• 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 Unlock your productivity: Here are our Top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When our employees look for content internally here at Microsoft, they go to Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot first. With Business Chat, they can easily get answers to questions, catch up on missed work, generate new ideas, and more by tapping into the work data that they have access to via Microsoft Graph.

An employee might ask, “Can you tell me how I can learn more about AI in Healthcare and who the experts are in the company?”

Whether they ask in Microsoft Teams or another Microsoft 365 app, or right in their browser, they likely will get a helpful, accurate response very specific to the healthcare sector. The answer could refer to an AI industry PowerPoint presentation, articles on responsible AI strategies, Microsoft Research publications, or a list of employees who are experts on the topic.

But how does Copilot know how to reference the AI industry PowerPoint presentation for Healthcare? How does it know which versions of the responsible AI strategies for Healthcare articles to use? How does it identify experts in the company?

It’s because Copilot connects to all the content on the topic available through Microsoft Graph.

“Our internal Microsoft content is the content Copilot uses to generate its results,” says Dodd Willingham, a principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital, the IT organization at Microsoft. “How Copilot consumes and uses our content determines the success—or failure—of Copilot for our employees.”

{Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft. Check out how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium.}

Enabling useful results

When it comes to returning the right content with Copilot, context is key.

Copilot uses the capabilities of Microsoft Graph to power its AI-generated results. For Microsoft Digital—like most organizations—that includes the content our users store and work with in our Microsoft 365 tenant. Results from Copilot directly depend on the quality of the content it uses. There’s an enormous opportunity to increase the capabilities of Copilot-based solutions because the underlying content is of such high quality. We’re seizing that opportunity to get this right internally at Microsoft.

“You hear a lot of people talking about Copilot, but few address the importance of improving content quality,” says Stan Liu, a senior product manager and knowledge management lead with Microsoft Digital. “The quality of an organization’s content management must be considered in every implementation of Copilot, and we’re doing some great things at Microsoft Digital to ensure Copilot returns accurate, relevant, and up-to-date responses.”

It’s an exciting time to be in content management, and we’re excited to share how our team in Microsoft Digital has met and addressed the challenges of preparing our content for a bright future with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Curating enterprise content for Microsoft 365 Copilot

There’s an urgency for organizations to bring advanced AI tools to their employees, but it must be done thoughtfully and with good intentions. One of the fundamental challenges in implementing generative AI technologies like Copilot is balancing the desire to move quickly with the need for caution with technology possessing potential risks that haven’t been fully revealed.

“A lot of what we do lies in managing our content in a way that aligns with company strategy, and Copilot isn’t different in that respect,” says David Johnson, a tenant and compliance architect in Microsoft Digital who ensures that the company’s content is well governed. “It’s important that Microsoft employees understand why content management is important and how they can help do it well.”

To be effective, we must lean into our ongoing culture shift to embrace knowledge sharing. We’ve been fostering a knowledge-sharing culture at Microsoft for years, and our adoption of Copilot has magnified the importance of that culture and the need to continue driving awareness and education for Microsoft employees.

Liu and his team are prioritizing this culture transformation.

“You need to build and encourage a culture that embraces user-driven content management,” Liu says. “Teams that document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company are contributing hugely to what we’re trying to accomplish.”

It’s a two-fold challenge that involves encouraging and supporting our employees in collaboration and sharing and ensuring that the tools they use—including Copilot—provide results they can trust and use confidently.

“We’ve set goals within our organization to make Copilot a daily habit,” Liu says. “Community engagement and participation is a significant part of Copilot adoption, and we’ve been identifying use cases and success stories across Microsoft to share as success stories to inspire our employees and encourage adoption and innovation.”

Next generation content management with SharePoint Premium

Microsoft SharePoint Premium (formerly known as Syntex) is a critical part of our content management strategy to get the most out of Copilot. We’re using the AI capabilities in SharePoint Premium to give employees access to simple and capable content management tools.

SharePoint Premium helps our Microsoft Digital enterprise content team ensure the right capabilities are in place to help people manage content. Missing metadata is a common issue with information stored in SharePoint, and SharePoint Premium makes it easier for users and administrators to add metadata, classify and organize content.

SharePoint Premium brings AI, automation, and added security to our content experiences, processing, and governance. SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content and prepare it for Copilot, helping us manage and protect it throughout its lifecycle.

Automating metadata extraction with document processing

The document processing capabilities in SharePoint Premium simplify and automate the process of extracting important information from existing content. Liu’s team helped deploy the document processing capabilities across Microsoft to enable teams to automate processing of important content, such as contracts, invoices, and statements of work.

Document processing uses machine learning models to recognize documents and the structured information within them. Using optical character recognition (OCR) combined with deep learning models, it identifies and extracts predefined text and data fields common to specific document types, including contracts, invoices, and receipts. It also supports the detection and extraction of sensitive data such as personal and financial identification. Liu’s team is using prebuilt and custom document processing models to automatically populate metadata columns in SharePoint for many different document types. The metadata this processing provides improves search and creates a more complete understanding of what the files contain, so Copilot can recognize and return relevant information that was previously incomplete or unavailable.

“We’re capturing information across a plethora of documents automatically and almost none of it was recorded previously,” Liu says. “Some of our business groups were entering the metadata manually, but it was a time-consuming and expensive process. For most documents, it just wasn’t done. It’s a massive difference-maker in finding information about a specific contract or invoice that would have been close to impossible. Now with SharePoint Premium and Copilot, it’s a simple question away.”

Standardizing content creation with content assembly

Liu’s team enabled the content assembly feature of SharePoint Premium across the company to simplify document creation and ensure that new documents follow metadata and structure guidelines.

Content assembly creates modern templates that can be easily maintained and used to generate repetitive documents quickly. This feature is particularly useful for departments like finance, where templates for partner letters or contracts are frequently needed. By using content assembly, teams can reduce the time spent on template management and document generation, as it allows for the creation of documents with just the key parts needing changes.

While the time-saving benefits of content assembly don’t directly affect Copilot results, they do encourage users to create better documents, eliminating the need to rewrite entire documents or repeatedly upload the same document. These documents—created using modern templates—are significantly more discoverable and classifiable and lead to more authoritative answers in Copilot.

Taxonomy tagging

Liu oversees a team that has been managing the company’s corporate taxonomy in the SharePoint term store for many years, maintaining a hierarchy of terms that can be reused throughout the SharePoint environment. The term store helps ensure that SharePoint metadata is consistent across the organization, and it provides employees with a standard set of choices when populating commonly used metadata such as products, job roles, or departments.

Taxonomy tagging in SharePoint Premium automatically tags documents in SharePoint libraries with terms configured in the term store using AI. As at other companies, we face the ongoing challenge of getting employees to tag content. Most times, even when you have managed metadata set up in your document library, employees often don’t use it. This means the content is never further enriched with that metadata.

With taxonomy tagging, you set it and forget it. Uploaded content is automatically tagged, which does the job that a person would typically do, but often never does. This automated process ensures that documents get one or more metadata columns populated with standard terms from the term store based on the document content. This leads to more complete metadata for documents and more authoritative results for Copilot results when referencing data in those documents.

Using generative AI to help generative AI with autofill columns

Autofill columns in SharePoint Premium takes content management to the next level by harnessing AI LLMs to automatically extract, summarize, and generate content from files uploaded to your SharePoint document library. This feature allows users to set up a simple natural language prompt on a column in SharePoint that extracts specific information or generates content from files. The extracted information is then displayed in the columns of the library, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

Liu has a lot to say about how his team is transforming document processing with autofill columns in SharePoint Premium, “autofill columns are a game-changer for enhancing productivity in Copilot and ensuring that our documents have the necessary context for efficient retrieval and use. Autofill’s impact on our metadata within SharePoint document libraries is huge.”

Teams within Microsoft have started setting up new and existing columns with prompts to identify the types of information to extract from a file. These prompts can be customized and tested to ensure that they provide the desired results. After the autofill columns are set up, any new files uploaded to the library are automatically processed (and existing documents can be manually processed), and the result of the prompt is saved to the corresponding columns.

This approach not only streamlines document processing workflows but also enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of their data management practices, making Copilot even more powerful and effective.

Continuing to grow with SharePoint Premium

Liu’s team continues to drive SharePoint Premium as a crucial part of their content management toolkit. “We’re seeing immediate and significant benefits from using SharePoint Premium and its AI features to manage our content,” Liu says. “In the first half of 2024, we estimated that our employees saved more than 120,000 hours in processing documents, pages, and images across the company for over 1,000,000 content items in our environment. It’s a great start, and we’re targeting even greater improvements across more content soon.”

Protecting content with Microsoft Purview Information Protection

Microsoft Purview Information Protection provides a wide range of content governance capabilities that help us discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it stays or moves in the Microsoft tenant.

We use Purview Information Protection tools to identify sensitive content using expressions, functions, and trainable classifiers. With these tools, our enterprise data teams and employees can use corroborative evidence like keywords, confidence levels, and proximity to identify sensitive information types. They can also use examples of sensitive content to train recognition engines on expected patterns. All of this helps to better inform Copilot regarding the relevance of our Microsoft 365 content.

We use sensitivity labels in Purview to apply flexible protection actions that include encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings. This capability ties in nicely with SharePoint Premium, which also uses and applies sensitivity labels.

Purview sensitivity labels provide a single labeling solution across apps, services, and devices to protect content as it travels inside and outside our organization. Purview sensitivity labels can be applied to Microsoft Office documents, third-party document types, meetings, chats, and the broader Microsoft 365 environment.

The sensitivity labels that we use to protect our content are recognized and used by Copilot to provide an extra layer of protection. For example, in Business Chat conversations, which can reference content from different types of items, the sensitivity label with the highest priority (typically, the most restrictive label) is visible to users. If the labels apply encryption from Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Copilot checks the usage rights for the user and only returns content that the user has access rights to.

Looking forward

Our enterprise content management transformation is ongoing.

Our teams are looking at new content management capabilities across the company to ensure Copilot continues to provide current, accurate, and relevant results for our employees.

We’re continually evaluating our enterprise content management to identify new ways to create a Copilot-assisted workday for Microsoft employees. We’re also evaluating new technology, organizational practices, and industry standards as we strive to set the standard for how an organization can capture maximum value from its content using Copilot.

We’re currently working with the SharePoint Premium product team to grow the AI-based capabilities for content management and classification. We’re experimenting with our own solutions and capabilities in SharePoint that will lead to the next generation of AI-supporting features that drive innovation and creativity here at Microsoft and for our customers.

Are you looking to prepare your enterprise content for Copilot and AI? Here are a few suggestions:

• Pursue content quality. Ensure that the content is current, accurate, and relevant. This is crucial for Copilot to provide authoritative answers and maintain user trust.
• Promote knowledge sharing. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing within the organization. Encourage teams to document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company.
• Use SharePoint Premium. Use the AI capabilities in SharePoint Premium to simplify and automate content management processes.
• Implement Purview Information Protection Use Purview Information Protection tools to apply sensitivity labels to ensure content is protected as it travels inside and outside the organization.
• Prepare for future enhancements. Stay updated with ongoing transformations in enterprise content management and Copilot capabilities.

Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft.
• Here’s how you can get started with Microsoft SharePoint Premium.
• Learn more about Microsoft Purview.
• Check out how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint Premium.
• Discover getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.
• Find information faster: How Microsoft is transforming internal search.
• Explore how Microsoft redefines the digitally assisted workday.
• Unpack internal search bookmarks and how it boosts productivity at Microsoft.

• 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 Boosting Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot with smart enterprise content management 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.

Location-based routing helped Microsoft overcome the challenge of finally moving its employees in India from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.

Made more challenging by the outbreak of COVID-19 and by India’s strict telecom regulations, the now-complete shift was the last large group of employees at Microsoft left to move to Microsoft Teams.

The daunting task entailed upgrading Skype for Business enterprise voice-enabled employees in India to Microsoft Teams while also enabling location-based routing—all while maintaining compliance with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Getting regulatory approval

The December 2021 date for retiring all of Microsoft’s internal Skype for Business on-premises infrastructure was fast approaching.

The team was in the process of moving the infrastructure of Enterprise Voice, Microsoft’s cloud-based phone and audio-conferencing system, to the cloud via Microsoft Teams. While this transition played out smoothly across the globe for the rest of Microsoft, the shift to Microsoft Teams in India had an important hurdle to overcome—meeting India’s strict regulatory requirements.

One of the biggest challenges of the migration was convincing India’s local telecom service providers that the shift from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams would comply with India’s telecom regulations, says Chee Ming Tan, a telecom engineer from the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience group, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company.

“The government has guidelines around hosting telecom services for the service providers,” Tan says. “We had to work with the service providers and understand their concerns. It was a shift in mindset with how we operate our Enterprise Voice infrastructure with Microsoft Teams.”

In India, it’s illegal to bypass the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) provider to reduce call toll charges. TRAI regulations require phone calls to go through approved routes, whether within India or from India to phone numbers outside the country.

With Skype for Business nearing the end of its support for its nearly 4,000 employees across 13 sites in India, the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience group set up the location-based routing (LBR) feature as the solution that would save the day, albeit a complex one.

[Find out how to update your organization’s federation with Microsoft.]

Deploying location-based routing in Microsoft Teams

As the name suggests, location-based routing is used to route calls based on an employee’s physical location.

“Without LBR in Teams, we wouldn’t have been able to move India-based users from Skype for Business on-prem to Microsoft Teams with Enterprise Voice,” says Priyanka Revuri, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “Enterprise Voice is a feature that allows users to make calls to a telephone number. An India user who wants to make calls to a telephone number while on Teams or any platform has to abide by this telecom restriction, which LBR allows.”

Jerry Newell, a senior service engineer from the Employee Experience group, was heavily involved in managing the Enterprise Voice Enablement feature (PSTN services) in Skype for Business and Teams for Microsoft worldwide. His group played an essential role in managing all the devices and services to enable LBR, such as session border controllers (SBC), media gateways, and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunks. SBCs are devices that protect and regulate all forms of real-time communication, while SIP trunks are methods of sending voice and other communication services over the web.

In the following call examples, Newell illustrates three Microsoft Teams calling scenarios in the United States compared with calls in India with location-based routing in place. In the US, where there are no restrictions based on location, calls egress through the employee’s home base office (Redmond, Washington, for example). In India, however, because of the local telecom restrictions, the caller must be onsite and egress through where they are located.

In the left and right scenarios shown for an employee in India, location-based routing enables Vijay to make Microsoft Teams calls to different locations onsite from a Microsoft office. With LBR, an employee’s location must be validated before that employee can make a call. The middle scenario shows that employees are still unable to make Microsoft Teams calls outside of the Microsoft network, because there is no way to validate their location.

The engineering group encountered a couple of issues with LBR and compliance at the beginning.

“We learned that just because the user PC clients on our corpnet network segment were following the India regulations, that doesn’t mean our other Teams object types like a Teams IP phone were,” says Shin Kodaira, a senior service engineer with the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team.

“The issue we ran into was that Teams’ IP phone device accounts are supposed to be installed onto our Zero Trust network (ZTN) segment,” he says, adding that the firewall for the network was located outside of India. That meant that moving devices to Microsoft’s ZTN segment would have potentially incurred huge fines for breaking regulations.

It was a constant review of scripts, compliance, and logic. These efforts included the actual migration, licensing, setting up dates and locations—all to ensure that the migration was successful.

– Gerard Nijhuis, service engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

The group’s takeaway?

“Always check the routing for each object and network type when implementing LBR to ensure that all paths meet the regulations,” Kodaira says.

Since then, six new sites have been added to comprise a total of 19 sites that successfully use this setup in India.

“It was a constant review of scripts, compliance, and logic,” says Gerard Nijhuis, another Microsoft Digital Employee Experience service engineer who worked on the Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams migration. “These efforts included the actual migration, licensing, setting up dates and locations—all to ensure that the migration was successful.”

Extending beyond a collaborative approach

It goes without saying that the success of the location-based routing implementation in Microsoft Teams can be attributed to the collaborative approach of all the groups involved.

Revuri is quick to express gratitude to the multiple teams involved in the project.

“Outside of the service and telecom engineers, we had help from the Extended Service Engineering team to coordinate these efforts,” Revuri says. “The India IT managers were key in providing feedback on the overall process, as well as helping test the functionalities before continuing to other phases of the migration. They helped us identify our users and connected us directly with them to get their feedback.”

Along the way, the groups had to network with the product group and managers to get the right people involved.

“The Microsoft legal department played a big part between us and the local government,” Revuri recalls.

On top of the engineering teams, the communications and internal Microsoft Helpdesk teams also played key roles in notifying users about the planned feature changes. It was highly crucial, considering that the migration primarily took place during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.

“The emergence of COVID was definitely a challenge,” says Scott Kovach, the project’s Microsoft Teams service manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “One of the requirements we had to fulfill to complete the audit was to deploy an onsite team to meet the telecom company. This delayed the actual approval process.”

Adapting a multitier rollout

After many twists and turns, the team was finally ready for a multitier rollout in November 2020.

The first site that went through the migration was Gurgaon, a city in New Delhi, with 300 employees, followed by Hyderabad with 3,000 employees, another city with 1,000 employees, and soon after, the team started migrating users in four or five cities all at once.

“There were trainings before and after the migration just to make sure that things were moving smoothly,” Nijhuis says. “We got amazing feedback from the team.”

The team was able to complete the migration by January 2021.

I’m proud of how Microsoft collaborates as a team. Everybody is willing to work together for alignment. Everybody is very inclusive and collaborative.

– Chee Ming Tan, telecom engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

A sense of accomplishment

After having gone through several rounds of trial and error with location-based routing implementation in Microsoft Teams, the team successfully wrapped up 2020 with a renewed sense of accomplishment, being pioneers of LBR with Enterprise Voice in India.

“I’m proud of how Microsoft collaborates as a team,” says Tan, who was involved with the Skype for Business India implementation in 2013, and now the migration to Microsoft Teams in 2020. “We didn’t lose that intense and deep collaboration. Everybody is willing to work together for alignment. Everybody is very inclusive and collaborative.”

K.C. Han, another senior engineer from the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team, is proud of building a solution that can help Microsoft’s customers overcome the same challenge. “Using our roadmap and our solutions, other companies can also move to Microsoft Teams and implement the same thing,” he says.

Nijhuis echoes Han’s assessment.

“When it comes to this project, I’m proud of being part of it from beginning to end,” he says. “Making it as secure as possible and fulfilling all the requirements was our last hurdle for people to all be on Microsoft Teams. That’s something to be proud of.”

• Find out how to update your organization’s federation with Microsoft.

The post Location-based routing enables Microsoft India move to Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a first-of-its-kind technology and demands a first-of-its-kind adoption process. We’re using new approaches to learning and development, community engagement and, of course, measuring success.

Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has been leading the charge on Copilot adoption; and measuring the value Copilot is driving for internal users has been an essential part of our efforts. Follow along to see how our strategy for understanding the adoption success, trace the evolution of our approach and metrics, and get pointers for tracking your own Copilot rollout.

Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: More than just a tool

Several aspects of Microsoft 365 Copilot make it an entirely new opportunity for adoption leaders. To start, it isn’t just a single platform or app accessed through one interface, but an intelligent assistant that manifests in different facets of the Microsoft technology stack. Users engage with Copilot using natural language queries and prompts, a new habit for most people.

“Copilot is like nothing we’ve landed before, so we have to think differently,” says Peter Varey, director of employee insights on the Employee Experience Success team in Microsoft Digital. “Instead of just promoting a new tool, we’re changing the fundamentals of how we work.”

A different way of interacting with technology isn’t the only thing we had to consider. Depending on an employee’s role, the value Copilot provides varies widely. Capturing and reinforcing that value is the core of an effective measurement strategy.

Strategizing for insight

It’s tempting to track usage alone and leave it at that. But we knew that to really support Microsoft employees in their Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption journey, we needed to go deeper.

“People only maintain habits when they become part of their identity,” says Tom Heath, a senior business program manager driving AI transformation in Microsoft Digital. “So, a lot of our adoption strategies are based around ‘sticky metrics’ that demonstrate consistent, habitual usage.”

The core objectives of Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption telemetry

Drive clarity on usage, the reporting options available, and the intended audience for each.

Ensure the access and visibility we need to support other adoption
workstreams effectively.

Provide valuable Customer Zero feedback on the telemetry sources and
dashboards available to customers.

Use our reporting to
capture key insights that would help us further fine-tune our adoption
approach.

Microsoft Digital established our Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption telemetry workstream according to four main objectives.

App telemetry is only part of the equation. It’s also important to collect qualitative data through listening campaigns that track satisfaction, adoption enablers, and product feedback.

Microsoft’s user experience (UX) experts played a key role in planning and implementing this aspect of our measurement strategy. By grounding our listening in the core tenets of effective UX and emerging guidelines for AI-human interactions, we could ensure we were asking the right questions—an essential piece of harvesting helpful feedback.

“If we can understand what’s happening for the user, we’re in a better position to help them,” says Tara Suan, a senior UX research lead with Microsoft Digital. “It’s less about identifying issues or problems and more molding adoption to their experience.”

Metrics that move the needle

One of the lessons we’ve learned during our ongoing Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption measurement efforts is that useful metrics change as a rollout progresses.

“We’re evolving in this journey and building toward a more thorough understanding of what success looks like,” Varey says. “So, we started with high-level OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) around usage, and now we’ve progressed toward more granular metrics.”

In the beginning, the goal was just to ensure that as many Microsoft employees as possible were trying Copilot and experimenting with AI assistance. To do that, we initially focused on monthly active usage (MAU).

But maturity is about more than just accessing a tool once a month. As adoption has progressed, we’ve been getting more granular. That’s possible because of how we structure our objective and key results (OKR) lifecycles: Each measurement cycle lasts six months before we institute new key metrics, and we’re always looking ahead to the next cycle to evaluate what data will be most useful for our next adoption phase.

We capture these metrics through a combination of internal measurement tools and commercially available solutions that include  Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights, the Copilot Adoption Report in the Analyst Workbench, and the Experience Insights Dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Using these tools, we can account for weekly and even daily usage, as well as slicing and dicing the data by role, internal organization, and region. We’re also exploring Copilot distribution by app penetration to understand who’s accessing Copilot through Word, Excel, Teams, or other vectors.

On the qualitative side, we use several options for employee listening. Adoption surveys and in-app sentiment checks provide always-on qualitative data. At the same time, we run listening campaigns through collaborative bug bashes, satisfaction surveys, community outreach through Viva Engage, focus groups, events like “prompt-a-thons,” and more.

These feedback channels help us understand different dimensions of how our employees think about Copilot:

• Net satisfaction: The overall positive or negative experience with Copilot.
• Favorability: Whether Copilot makes employees more productive or faster at their work.
• AI-assisted hours: A measure of time saved through Copilot usage.

In the end, these parallel efforts mean we can collate robust datasets to track both quantitative usage data and qualitative feedback around the employee experience.

Results that inform adoption

Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption metrics are already providing helpful insights that help us ask the right questions to shape further usage across the company.

For example, app telemetry tells us that Microsoft employees use Copilot summarization more than any other feature. It also tells us that most of our users access Copilot through Teams instead of more comprehensive pathways like Graph-grounded Chat.

Our telemetry team extrapolates that the high visibility of in-app prompts—such as the ten-minute Teams meeting summarization reminder—leads to more intuitive access to Copilot capabilities within the flow of work. We can use that information to report to the product group that visible Copilot prompts guide users into beneficial behaviors. We can also signal the adoption team that they might need to supplement less visible Copilot onramps with learning initiatives. That adoption guidance has only become possible as our measurement methods have matured.

From a qualitative perspective, Microsoft employees are deeply satisfied with Copilot. 76% report feeling satisfied with the tool, and 85% are using the tool regularly—more than any other single Microsoft solution.

But listening provides more in-depth information. Patterns of adoption are more illuminating.

“A lot of times, people will share their feelings with you as a researcher,” Suan says. “It’s up to us to peel the layers back and contextualize them to understand what’s really going on, then collaborate with our adoption partners to meet users’ needs.”

One example stands out. With early-career employees, we noticed a distinct arc in Copilot adoption behavior: initial delight and experimentation in the first three weeks of usage, a dip in enthusiasm from weeks three through 10, and then more consistent usage around the 11-week mark. Thanks to this insight, we can provide a consistent, predictable picture of how employees adopt Copilot over time and introduce change management interventions like skilling and reminders that can potentially address that midstream dip.

Finally, it’s important to examine these trends data carefully. If the current adoption for Copilot in Teams is 75%, we can ask why the other 25% of potential users are less engaged. Is it because they don’t use Teams regularly? Is there a language issue? Is it simply a lack of knowledge about how to use the tool?

When employees say they don’t see the value of Copilot for their work, we have a deeper conversation with those respondents to understand their challenges. In many of these follow-ups, we’ve discovered that the difficulty isn’t so much about the tool’s capabilities, but about not having the knowledge and education they need to realize its value.

“A key learning was that a certain percent of folks said they struggled to find time to learn,” Heath says. “So, the change strategy needs to not only understand how to land copilot but also create a better environment for learning and encourage leaders to do so. Learning days, group learning, and gamification are all tactics you can use for this.”

This kind of information has been extremely helpful for our change leaders, who use it to tailor their adoption efforts.

Like technology adoption itself, measuring change never stops maturing. As we continue to track our internal Copilot adoption journey and usage, we’ll keep digging down into new data and asking more directive, deeper questions.

“This is a fundamental way for us to stay in front of adoption and shape our strategy,” says Stephan Kerametlian, director of employee experience in Microsoft Digital. “When we see what the data’s telling us, the trends that emerge, and how our employees feel about Copilot, it puts us in a position to shape both our technology and how we implement it—with people at the center.”

Here are some suggestions for measuring the impact of Copilot at your company:

• Don’t let your Objectives and Key Results lifecycles run too long because things will evolve fast. Use an OKR while it’s useful, and then develop more nuanced metrics for the next cycle.
• Get a firm understanding of how employees are using core Microsoft products first, for example Word and Teams. This will establish product-level benchmarks, and then you can layer Copilot telemetry on top.
• Don’t be discouraged when certain paths of inquiry don’t turn out. Negative results are part of the research process.
• Make sure employee metadata is well structured so you can partition and measure your workforce effectively.
• Let the data lead your questions. Examples include use versus non-use, where the usage occurs, and employee satisfaction. Establish the data, then ask why it looks the way it does.
• Focus efforts on the outcomes you want. Identify benefits employees demonstrably crave and what’s holding them back, then build adoption efforts around those.

Ready to help your employees accomplish more with Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

• Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft.
• Read the Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide we put together based on our internal experience here at Microsoft.
• Check out our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide for executives.
• Learn how we’re powering a generational shift in IT at Microsoft with AI.

• 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 Measuring the success of our Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Teams aims to change that with its AI-powered Intelligent Recap feature in Microsoft Teams Premium.

Intelligent Recap uses machine learning to make meetings more useful for people who attend and for those who need to catch up on what happened later.

Intelligent Recap can summarize meetings and identify key discussion points and action items. It also has special organizational properties, allowing employees to view meeting recordings in color-coded segments that can be sorted by speaker or topic.

“Microsoft Teams Intelligent Recap is a game-changer, especially for busy organizational leaders,” says Claire Sisson, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the internal IT organization at Microsoft.  “Whether you need to follow up on tasks, share notes, or catch up on a meeting you missed, Intelligent Recap has you covered.”

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.

How Intelligent Recap works

Microsoft Teams has a meeting recap feature that includes generating meeting transcripts. The technology behind Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium uses AI to take this type of capability further.

After a meeting is recorded, Intelligent Recap identifies spoken names and the general topics being covered in a meeting. The technology can suggest “chapters” that organize and summarize meetings. It can even suggest action items based on what was discussed.

That information, along with information about events that happened within the meeting, such as when participants shared their screen, is made available to all meeting participants within a few minutes of the meeting’s conclusion.

Let’s take a look at how we use Intelligent Recap internally here at Microsoft (and how you can use it at your company).

Intelligent Recap results

Efficiency for everyone

Intelligent Recap gives us visual indicators that help meeting participants—and non-participants—quickly refer to key moments in a discussion.

Some indicators are shown to all meeting participants, while others are only seen in a participant’s personal view.

Personalized timeline markers include indicators that bookmark moments such as when one of our employees joined or left a meeting and when their name is mentioned.

These personalized indicators make it easy to catch up on anything from the meeting someone might have missed. Perhaps more important, everyone else can be confident that that person will catch up in real time.

Intelligent Meeting Recap helps to eliminate those few minutes at the start of a meeting debating how long to wait for a delayed colleague.

“There’s no need to wait around anymore before we start a meeting,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, who manages the roll out of new Teams meetings features internally at Microsoft. “Since we have Intelligent Recap, those who’ve joined late or need to leave early in a meeting can easily watch anything that they’ve missed before or after using the personalized join and leave markers.”

Another marker shows meeting participants anytime someone mentions their name. The marker will also pop up a very brief snippet of transcript surrounding the mention, so viewers can easily see the context of the mention.

Using at-mention markers

All participants can see an interactive, visual representation of the participants who spoke during the meeting, called the speaker bar.

The speaker bar reduces time spent scrolling back and forth through a transcript or recording to find a remark you want to reference.

“Let’s say I’m very interested in something one particular colleague had to say,” Jensen says. “I can easily click on their speaker bar, and the recording will jump exactly to that point.”

AI takes notes for you

A major leap for machine learning within Microsoft Teams Premium is Intelligent Recap’s auto-generated topics, chapters, notes, and action items.

Intelligent Recap can identify sections of recorded meetings and summarize them. In a few minutes after a meeting concludes, a bar of AI-generated topics synchronized to the recording appears below the meeting video.

“This feature automatically captures the topics that were brought up during the meeting, and divides them into color-coded segments,” Jensen says. “So, if you were only interested in a specific topic that was discussed, you can easily skip to that, and the recording will go to that section.”

As part of this feature, an “AI Notes” tab is populated with “Meeting Notes” and “Follow-up Tasks.”

This is meant to make note taking and meeting follow-up more efficient, especially for busy participants and teams that work asynchronously.

“It gives you a basis for your notes and tasks, rather than having to create everything from scratch,” Jensen says. “It’s almost like sending your personal note-taker right to these meetings.”

Employee benefits

The response to Intelligent Recap has been enthusiastic here at Microsoft.

“This is one of the most impactful features I have seen introduced with hybrid work,” says Tyler Russell, a senior engineering architect on the Azure Databases SQL Customer Success Engineering team. “This functionality improves my productivity significantly and I have started recording more meetings because of it.”

For those involved in long meetings or who have significant meeting conflicts, Intelligent Recap is proving especially useful.

“I was recently involved in a half day, extensive leadership meeting,” says Mike Friday, senior director on the Global Customer Experience—Strategic Programs Team. “Having the Intelligent Recap feature enabled me to quickly catch up with my team through AI-generated notes.”

Boosting asynchronous communication

The features and benefits of Intelligent Recap represent progress in making asynchronous work more efficient.

Traditionally, meetings must take place at a specific time. This creates tension with asynchronous work conditions, where employees live in different time zones and with various living circumstances.

An urgent meeting might be delayed because of the need to include someone in a different time zone, or canceled because one participant has a sick child.

Intelligent Recap’s AI-driven features enable teams to maintain their velocity without losing collaborative value from a team member.

“A lot of my colleagues overseas constantly have to catch up on the Redmond time zone work content,” Jensen says. “Now that AI is capturing the dialogue in these meetings, it’s so much easier for them. They can quickly read the AI-generated summary to see if there’s anything that needs their attention, and if they are mentioned, they can rapidly review that specific part of the recording.”

Intelligent Recap makes it possible for asynchronous teams to welcome more diversity in terms of geographic location and other factors that can impact same-time availability.

Our team looks forward to furthering the feature’s capabilities and offering support in multiple languages beyond English.

“Microsoft’s AI and machine learning capabilities helped bring Intelligent Recap to life,” Sisson says. “Intelligent Recap represents the dawn of a new era for Teams. We expect to continue to roll out AI-based features to make asynchronous work easier, more collaborative, and more effective.”

Here are our top learnings from using Intelligent Recap:

• It will enhance meetings for those on the call and those who couldn’t make it at the time of the meeting.
• It will summarize your meetings, take notes for you, and identify key discussion points and action items for attendees.
• It offers personalized timeline markers and presents information by topic or speaker in color-coded segments, streamlining meeting catch-up.
• It paves the way for diverse teams with varying needs and global locations to collaborate more effectively.

Sign up for a Microsoft Teams Premium trial and try out the Intelligent Recap feature.  

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Read more about meeting recap in Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack Intelligent recap in Microsoft Teams Premium, now available.

• 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 How we’re recapping our meetings with AI and Microsoft Teams Premium at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.