Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is a revolutionary new framework for advancing enterprise AI. By creating their own agents, individuals and teams can customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions, all while providing a clear and discoverable entry point in the tool’s user interface.

These agents help employees reach beyond Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 applications to do their work more thoroughly and efficiently. By empowering users to experiment with AI-driven assistance and capabilities internally at Microsoft, we’re unlocking efficiency, process automation, and data-driven insights tailored to specific individuals’ or teams’ needs.

One tool is making Copilot extensions accessible to more employees than ever before: Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This low-code solution makes it possible for both technical and non-technical users to create their own agents and tailor Copilot’s capabilities to their work. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re the first to implement Copilot Studio and develop a methodology for empowering our employees to create while establishing guardrails to keep our organization’s data safe.

As a result, we’ve built best practices that help us protect employees while enabling helpful agents—from individualized tools to organization-wide utilities. We’ve also learned lessons that can help customers navigate their own Copilot Studio journey.

Extending enterprise AI with Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio, a part of Microsoft Power Platform, empowers employees to build their own agents or use them to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot’s value. It uses the same low-code connector model as Power Platform to power actions through first-party and third-party services.

As a result, users can create their own agents tailored to specific professional needs and business functions. These agents can narrow the focus of knowledge within the Microsoft 365 Graph, reach outside of it, and even take actions.

There are several ways to create agents. They range from simple natural language queries in Copilot Studio agent builder through Copilot Chat in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to the full-featured Copilot Studio graphical authoring environment to a combination of Copilot Studio and Azure AI.

“Copilot Studio is a way for a non-technical person to spin up an agent quickly,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager responsible for Copilot extensibility internally at Microsoft. “You can pull from a SharePoint site, from a graph connector, or from the web, and so employees are using it to tailor their experience to their business process.”

Building agents with Copilot Studio

Ultimately, the goal is to help employees work more efficiently by putting them in the driver’s seat through the power of self-directed agent creation. It also helps alleviate strain on business functions by getting people to the answers they need faster, without the need for human intervention.

“There’s an important role for Copilot Studio in helping customize the solutions our employees create, whether they want to use existing functionality, extend their knowledge, or expand their skill compatibility,” says Eileen Zhou, senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. “And it provides opportunities for both non-technical creators who want to create individualized solutions and people with advanced knowledge who are building more enterprise-focused agents.”

To empower our employees for this kind of creativity, we needed to put guardrails in place that ensure they can build agents confidently without putting themselves or the company at risk.

Managing the scale and sophistication of Copilot Studio creations

Building guardrails around agent production meant developing a system for classifying them according to their purpose, reach, and potential risk.

On one end of the spectrum, simple retrieval agents might only access content that individuals author and own. Non-technical employees typically create this kind of agent through natural language prompts in Copilot Studio agent builder.

On the other end, more elaborate tools—task or autonomous agents that combine knowledge, action, and orchestration—need to cross data boundaries to accomplish their work. More technically advanced IT employees and professional developers build these agents for larger-scale business functions using the full-featured Copilot Studio authoring environment.

Agent capabilities

This simple taxonomy doesn’t capture the whole picture though. As a result of the varying reaches and risk profiles for different agents, we tend to group them into three categories:

• Personal self-service agents created by employees to meet highly individual business needs.
• Line-of-business agents created by individual organizations within Microsoft to fulfil discipline-specific work functions.
• Agents intended for publishing across the entire organization.

“If an employee is building a service, we need to manage it like a service,” says Jake Visser, principal architect manager for Copilot and AI apps. “There’s a time and place for personal agents that integrate with business workflows, but if something is a business-critical service, we need to think security-first.”

Microsoft Digital is responsible for developing and enforcing guidelines for managing those services.

Governance, processes, and policy for enabling Microsoft Copilot Studio

Establishing guardrails around the different agents our employees can create in Microsoft Copilot Studio involved asking a lot of questions. What Power Platform features apply to Copilot Studio workflows? What additional areas of risk do agents introduce? How can we build policies and processes around low-code AI creations? How can we help employees understand the implications of the agents they create?

“Thanks to our early experiences with Copilot Studio, we’ve been able to develop gates and controls based on the type of agents that creators want to build,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Through predetermined groups and rules, we can allow freedom and experimentation at different scales without putting our internal tenant at risk.”

Since Copilot Studio exists within Power Platform, that tool’s capabilities provided a solid foundation for managing agents. We have extensive experience empowering citizen developers while maintaining good governance through Microsoft Power Platform. So it was easy for us to apply existing administration and governance best practices to this new framework.

At the outset of our journey, we already had robust systems in place for securing custom connectors, and Microsoft 365’s built-in governance capabilities ensure Microsoft 365 agents respect our labeling taxonomy and the policies it articulates. Finally, we have the power to introduce sharing limits that restrict how widely creators can distribute agents depending on their purpose and scope.

Together, these features and capabilities helped us extend existing administration and governance structures to the new world of agents. But thoughtful process and policy are equally important.

For the simpler self-service agents that individual employees create and use, we’re able to define our policies at the Copilot Studio environment level. Tenant administrators and partners on the Microsoft Security team apply data loss prevention policies to configure what individual employees can and can’t do. At this level, everyone in the company has the same configuration and tools available, and automation largely handles agent reviews and assessments based on pre-configured settings.

For more wide-reaching apps that operate at the line-of-business level or that we might publish enterprise-wide, we need to apply greater rigor. Thanks to our experience administrating and governing Power Platform, Microsoft Digital already had a robust process in place to review internally created enterprise apps. Discipline-specific professionals in security, privacy, and other spaces conduct these reviews to ensure internal teams meet our high standards.

By building onto that structure, we’ve updated our custom environment review process for agents created in Copilot Studio. We step through a review process that includes phases for security assessments, threat modeling, privacy assessments, and Responsible AI reviews.

“Our goal is to properly scope our governance controls into what people are building,” says Lianne Zelsman, senior product manager in Microsoft Digital focused on Power Platform governance. “If we can easily enable things we consider low-risk like retrieval agents, we let employees build those in their personal development environment, but more powerful or far-reaching custom agents require more thorough oversight.”

Configuration, review, and assessment are only parts of the puzzle. We also flighted user awareness efforts to help employees understand not just how to use Copilot Studio, but also its implications for security, privacy, and Responsible AI.

These campaigns included field readiness through Viva Learning, Copilot Champs sessions, newsletters, marketing campaigns through Viva Amplify, office hours, internal roadshows, and elite programs. We even launched an agent-building contest that invited employees to design whatever they liked.

Providing employees with opportunities for learning and experimentation has helped jumpstart interest in creating agents. Together with product features, process, and policy, it ensures we unlock the full value of Copilot Studio safely and effectively.

Unlocking Copilot Studio value

With the freedom to create using Microsoft Copilot Studio and the protection of robust guardrails, individuals and teams are flexing their imaginations to create highly useful agents. We’re in the early days of our own Copilot extensibility journey, but agents are already driving faster and more accurate access to information and greater productivity.

Two examples stand out:

• The IDEAS Copilot, a retrieval agent, empowers informed decision-making by democratizing access to our IDEAS knowledge base and its insights on app usage. Through natural language queries, IDEAS lets users take action on crucial usage data without the need for technical expertise.
• The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, a more advanced and organization-spanning agent, provides access to HR and IT information and tools through employees’ choice of two interfaces: Copilot or our company sites. More business functions like Facilities are lighting up soon.

As the capabilities of Copilot Studio continue to grow, Microsoft Digital is actively collaborating with the product team to ensure administration and governance features keep pace with its technical elements. Our experience as the first and largest adopters of this new framework mean that every lesson we learn internally helps the product accommodate businesses’ needs more effectively.

Thanks to our experience at Microsoft, the product has incorporated several new features:

• A set of controls for Copilot Studio connectors that allow guardrails for self-service.
• The ability to specify data sources including SharePoint sites, public URLs, internal documents, or others.
• Connector endpoint filtering that lets administrators govern the SharePoint sites and other connectable endpoints when creators build apps, flows, or agents.
• Different channels for publishing agents, like Microsoft Teams, websites, or integrations into tools like Dynamics 365.
• Suggested configuration defaults, for example requiring authentication so people can’t create anonymous Copilots.

Between built-in features and emerging best practices, Copilot Studio is unlocking the freedom to create like never before while maintaining organizational safety. For our customers and Copilot users, that means multiplying AI’s impact by setting employees free to create tools that will help them do their work faster, better, more creatively, and more insightfully.

“Everyone wants to move fast, and people are enthusiastic to explore this new framework for enterprise AI,” says David Johnson, principal program manager architect for governance at Microsoft Digital. “Our guiding principle is making the product secure by default so businesses can make it happen safely.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Copilot Studio at your company:

• Have an all-up tenant strategy. Create separate Power Platform environments based on what people want to build, what data they want to use, and what controls you need as a result.
• Take this opportunity to make sure that your governance is up to date and aligns between Power Platform and Microsoft 365 properly.
• Educating your users is key. Recognize that most difficulties arise from inefficiency and error, not nefarious intention.
• Evaluate your risk tolerance for different kinds of Copilot Studio creation and structure your security and governance efforts around that.
• Take advantage of dev environments to learn and practice.

Curious what Copilot Studio can accomplish for your business? Try a demo here.

• Learn how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.
• Check out our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.
• Discover ways that Microsoft is unleashing the citizen developer in all of us with the Microsoft Power Platform.

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

The post Unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When we launched Microsoft 365 Copilot in February of 2023, it was a watershed moment in the history of Microsoft. By incorporating next-generation AI into the productivity tools that millions of people depend on every day, a new era of productivity was born.

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

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

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

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

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

The opportunity that agents present is massive.

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

They will become our personal assistants.

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

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

Enabling an agent-powered Microsoft

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

Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise deployment phases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing agents to life at Microsoft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{Find out how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.}

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

Enabling employee self-service

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

Other capabilities include:

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

Employee self-service agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Employee-self service is being used by some partners and customers in a private preview and will be available globally to all Microsoft customers soon.

{Learn how we’re building employee self-service agents for IT and HR.}

The future of IT

While we’re at the very beginning of this agentic journey at Microsoft, the pace of change has been and will continue to be incredibly swift, as new capabilities emerge and autonomous agents become more common. In Microsoft Digital, we see a world where agentic AI will unlock productivity and creativity, empowering our employees to train their own agentic teams that handle routine day-to-day operational tasks so they can focus on the higher value work only humans can do. Some ways we’re exploring applying agents within Microsoft Digital include:

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

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

“We are so at the tip of the iceberg, and the pace at which the product is developing is unlike anything I’ve seen in my tenure at Microsoft, and I’ve been here a while,” Rosencranz says. “Agents are already so powerful, but they’re only going to get more powerful. More “wow” moments are coming.”

We invite you to seize this generational opportunity with agents to provide more “wow” moments for your own employees.

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

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

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Find out how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re keeping our network infrastructure healthy at Microsoft with an employee-built AI agent.
• Check out how we’re transforming our data culture with AI-ready data.
• Learn more about how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.
• Find out how citizen developers at Microsoft are empowered through good governance with the Power Platform.
• Learn how we’re building employee self-service agents for IT and HR.
• Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.

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

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

Business transformation is complex, multifaceted, and perpetual. It’s also firmly rooted in an organization’s culture, so it requires change management technology that meets human needs directly.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we have decades of experience leading technological change in search of innovation and better experiences for our employees. To ensure we’re matching transformation to our culture as we adopt new technology and integrate it into our processes, we use a powerful set of tools that meet our employees where they work and how they think.

The toolset at the core of our business transformation work?

Microsoft Viva.

Viva is more than just a collection of employee experience applications. We certainly use these tools to complete important everyday tasks and keep our teams connected. But thanks to Viva’s connected, integrated, human-focused experiences, it’s especially powerful for helping teams, leaders, and employees transform the way they work and how our company functions at a deep level.

In 2024, we were able to put the suite into action supporting the most revolutionary business transformation in decades: AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. As a result, we learned lessons that can help any organization use Viva to guide change effectively.

Transformation starts with culture

At Microsoft, we have a strong culture built around embracing a growth mindset, achievement, and inclusivity. Whenever we drive transformation and adopt new technologies like Copilot, we build our efforts on those cultural values.

“Everything we do links back to our culture,” says David Laves, director of Business Programs at Microsoft. “What that means is we focus on the people side of change, and we take a human-centered approach that focuses on the user’s experience of the process.”

In practice, human-centered transformation relies on open, bidirectional communication that always ties back to the “why” of any change. It also depends on organizational leaders as the torchbearers of culture.

We continually ask ourselves a set of questions about how to engage and support our employees:

• How do we generate awareness and motivation in scalable ways?
• How do we understand what our people are feeling before, during, and after the transformation, and how can we track that progress effectively?
• How do we build knowledge, skills, and confidence to maximize impact across our workforce?

“Having a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all culture implies that we need to listen to our users,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president leading product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences. “We understand that we can’t solve everything with technology, and we need to attune transformation to people.”

Human-centric transformation at scale

In an organization as large as Microsoft, our sheer scale amplifies transformation challenges. We operate across so many geographies and so many business units, each with its own priorities, that finding a common thread requires immense effort and thought.

Consider the sheer number of different languages, regulatory frameworks, and even holidays to account for. Then imagine applying changes in all of those different environments.

There’s also the interplay between broad strategic transformation and tactical change management. True transformation requires mind shift, motivation, and cultural buy-in at the individual level.

“It’s about making sure every single employee knows there’s a change, understands why there’s a change, and feels included with where we’re going long-term,” Laves says.

All of this comes alongside the day-to-day demands of helping teams run smoothly and keeping objectives in sight.

“People have their day jobs, and they have other demands on their time than adopting new technologies or frameworks,” says Kevin Wooldridge, senior director with the Office of the Chief Operations Officer at Microsoft. “So we need to provide access to content and experiences that make sense for people where they work, on their timelines.”

Finally, the perpetual nature of business change means strategy needs to be robust and flexible. Otherwise, it risks irrelevancy or causing burnout.

“We know that change is evergreen on the business-wide, team, and personal levels,” says Dee Brake, strategic planning lead and principal program manager for Microsoft Viva Customer Experience. “But change always starts in the mind of individuals before it ever shows up in behavior or organizational transformation.”

Making change with Microsoft Viva

Business transformation relies on creating a vision that provides a durable North Star. From there, it takes collaboration between technical and change management professionals to achieve strategic alignment and create a holistic plan.

It’s the holistic aspect of change management where Microsoft Viva really shines.

“Understanding how an organization behaves and why, then aligning employees’ ambitions with organizational goals is the core discovery,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of HR Digital Strategy and Innovation at Microsoft. “Our task is to enable these org shifts with technology. Viva’s focus on comprehending needs and promoting personalized adoption is crucial in achieving this.”

Microsoft adoption framework

Get ready

Identify opportunities, secure sponsorship, and apply insights to the planning process.

Onboard and engage

Drive awareness, provide opportunities for knowledge and skill building, and scale across communities.

Deliver impact

Build communities of practice, highlight wins, and resolve knowledge or skill gaps.

Extend and optimize

Conduct employee listening, measure outcomes, and explore opportunities for further maturity.

Our Microsoft adoption framework helps us assemble business transformation efforts into four key stages.

In early 2024, we initiated our organization-wide adoption initiative for Microsoft 365 Copilot, our first major internal technology transformation using Microsoft Viva. This was more than just a product rollout—it was a way of embracing an AI-first approach to help us reimagine the way we work.

Microsoft Viva operates within employees’ existing workspaces and workflows. That was essential for helping us make a wide-reaching and profound change.

“It’s a natural fit, because awareness, engagement, and insight pieces are baked in,” Wooldridge says. “Instead of getting hit from different directions for each change management goal, employees embark on an orchestrated journey that change management leaders can monitor and modify as it progresses.”

Get ready

The initial stage of transformation is all about measurement, planning, and goal setting. For our internal Copilot rollout, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint were essential for establishing baseline usage and preliminary employee sentiment.

The Copilot Dashboard within Viva Insights delivered crucial usage data. But at this stage, it also provided an opportunity to align our change efforts with who our employees are, where they work, their roles, and other ways to organize usage data. We also had the opportunity to ensure the dashboard provided change leaders and managers with information that would help them guide the transformation.

Meanwhile, team-focused surveys in Viva Pulse and organization-wide questionnaires in Viva Glint gave prospective users a voice. Together, these sources provided transformation leaders with opportunities to understand what employees needed and how they felt. Our internal experience gave us extensive insights into what sentiments are useful for organizations implementing AI transformation, and we’ve packaged them into templates you can use to assess your own organization’s Copilot readiness or sentiment.

During this phase, we established our change charter and set objectives, determined who was essential for our change teams, and built out the components of success. Those involved metrics like percentage of adopters, number of users trained, and number of communications received.

Finally, Viva Amplify helped our change management professionals communicate with leaders and secure executive sponsorship. That high-level support would be crucial for driving ongoing change. Collaborative campaign creation and flexible audiences in Amplify made it easy to both craft and deploy messaging to potential leadership sponsors and their communications teams.

Onboard and engage

Onboarding and engaging employees during our Copilot transformation involved a mix of communication, skilling, and community building.

Viva Amplify was at the center of our communication efforts. Thanks to its ability to deploy campaigns from multiple sources across several channels that include Outlook, Teams, and Viva Engage, this app was instrumental in providing different touchpoints for adoption communications. These largely contained product documentation, tips for quick wins, and skilling opportunities.

To make that skilling a reality, we tailored curriculum in Viva Learning to our employees’ needs. The app’s flexibility allowed for multiple learning formats, from self-directed courses to videos and live sessions, resulting in the Copilot Academy.

As our Copilot implementation has grown alongside the product’s rapid evolution, we’ve been able to modify this learning path to continue meeting our employees’ needs, with significant results. Internally, employees who access the Copilot Academy see twice as many days of Copilot usage, 5% more engagement, and better Copilot adoption within Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps.

Because Microsoft is a culturally oriented organization, community-driven adoption was a core part of our Copilot transformation. Viva Engage provided a forum for peer leaders to hone their skills as Copilot leaders in the form of our Copilot Champs Community while also enabling the viral spread of tips, inspiration, and learning content through line-of-business communities and other groups.

As a personalized home feed, Viva Connections complemented both our communications and community-led adoption efforts. It helped us land connected community experiences by surfacing leadership and adoption communications in one place and ensuring employees learned about important engagements like Camp Copilot. This multi-week series of peer-to-peer, hands-on, gamified activations helped employees to engage with AI capabilities in community with likeminded peers.

Deliver impact

Deepening the impact of our Copilot rollout involved collecting employee signals across several vectors.

With the parameters we established during our readiness phase, we tracked our progress against individual and team objectives. Meanwhile, collating analytics and employee sentiment from Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint has provided relevant and powerful insights that we’re using to govern and guide our ongoing transformation.

For example, Pulse surveys alerted our team that employees were feeling saturated with onboarding sessions. Instead, they needed to see example scenarios that were directly applicable to their work. In response, we conducted focus groups that helped us build role-specific scenarios and guidance to demonstrate concrete ways our employees could adopt Copilot in their day-to-day work.

We also conduct regular, organization-wide Glint surveys that include questions about whether employees feel energized and empowered at work—what we call “thriving metrics.” By collating these signals with Copilot usage, our HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.

Communications and community apps also have a role to play at this stage of adoption. Our change managers have been careful to monitor Viva Amplify’s and Viva Engage’s built-in consumption metrics to help determine what efforts help employees most.

In a comparative trial that tested adoption communications through email alone versus campaigns using Amplify and Engage, the difference was stark. Over the course of the trial, conventional communications resulted in a 2.9% increase in monthly active usage. Meanwhile, the team that benefited from adoption campaigns flighted through Amplify and Engage saw monthly active usage increase by 6.6%.

Extend and optimize

Extending and optimizing business transformation creates a virtuous cycle where we harvest insights to deepen our change management practices while nurturing greater maturity with our target technology. That relies on visibility and effective measurement.

Once again, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint worked together to help us understand our Copilot transformation journey. They were particularly useful for comparing sentiment against behavioral data to give our change professionals a more holistic picture.

For example, change leaders noticed a spike in Copilot usage after adoption sessions with our engineering team, but that surge was followed by a drop-off. Thanks to Pulse surveys deployed to the relevant teams, we realized that the dip in Copilot uptake was associated with engineers’ Microsoft 365 usage patterns, and we needed to lead adoption work in that space. Through Microsoft 365 adoption drives, we were able to increase daily active usage of Copilot by 48% on those teams.

Viva Amplify and Viva Engage also provided opportunities to deepen our Copilot maturity. In the case of Amplify, our messaging centered around transformation progress and further opportunities for growth—for example by becoming a peer leader or even taking part in customer-facing engagements.

Engage provided a forum for emergent peer leaders to share their expertise. It also helped our change leaders solidify adoption by building a repository of conversations and knowledge. Using this resource, users can guide their own progress or seek help from trusted colleagues.

Microsoft Viva: Our primary vehicle for business transformation

Real business transformation involves everyone in an organization. Microsoft Viva capabilities accelerate how we meet those diverse needs and deliver value to employees and the organization faster.

“Microsoft Viva is one of the few tools that has different levers to pull across the entire change management framework,” Laves says. “Regardless of the change you’re trying to make, Viva increases the speed to value.”

For our change practitioners, the suite ensures they can connect with users. For our employees, it provides the support they need in the places where they need it—spaces like Microsoft Teams where they work every day.

Managers and directors get the insights and visibility they need to identify behaviors and provide course corrections. And for senior leadership, Viva provides opportunities to enact meaningful sponsorship by connecting directly with employees while they monitor the ROI of an unfolding transformation.

At Microsoft, the results of our Copilot transformation demonstrate the power these apps hold. In one region where we used Viva to support our rollout, daily active usage of Copilot increased by 39.6%. In a similar period and a comparable region that wasn’t able to use Viva during that time, that metric increased by only 4.1%.

Usage is only part of the story.

One of the business impacts that we were measuring involves Copilot-assisted hours. In the region that didn’t use Viva to drive transformation, Copilot-assisted hours increased to 5,090 hours. But in the area where Viva was in play, that metric rose to 9,143 hours, demonstrating real time-savings for employees and value to the organization.

Ultimately, it’s a testament to how Viva is more than the sum of its parts as a suite of communication, community, and analytics tools. It’s a connective, human-centered ecosystem that empowers business transformation for both change leaders and employees.

“Viva’s all about helping people thrive amidst transformation,” Gregersen says. “At the intersection of how people communicate with each other and how companies communicate with employees, at the junction of how people feel at work with how they do their work, that’s where Viva makes an impact.”

Learn how to use Viva as a transformation engine at your company:

• Start with the culture you want to have as an organization, then look at Microsoft Viva’s capabilities to see how they apply.
• Understand that transformation begins with and centers on people—so be open to feedback throughout the transformation process.
• Make sure your goals are clear and keep them firmly in mind.
• Viva Engage is one of the most flexible and powerful apps in the suite. It’s a natural place to build awareness and generate desire. It’s also a great way to activate sponsors.
• Pay attention to measurements and metrics in communications and community tools. They layer nicely on top of other Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams to provide greater insights.
• Let your change practitioners dictate how you do things. They’ll see the value where it lies.
• Measurement is key: Determine and monitor key metrics to understand where you’re getting pockets of high traction and then adjust address pockets of resistance or lag.

Curious about what Microsoft Viva can do for your business transformation efforts? Try it free today.

• Find out how we’re driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva
• Read how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters
• Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva

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

The post How Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is the next frontier of enterprise AI at Microsoft. By managing it effectively, we’re giving our employees the power to revolutionize how they access data and accomplish tasks.

But how are we implementing this new framework?

Thanks to our team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re extending Copilot’s value by taking better advantage of our Microsoft 365 Graph in more connected and efficient ways. As a result, Copilot extensions can connect with widely dispersed organizational information to help our employees find answers more effectively, work more efficiently, and think more creatively.

Taking Copilot to this next level is enabling us to extend its reach into more specific business scenarios. Those include quickly spinning up specialized agents that range from large, companywide experiences—like an agent that’s streamlining how our employees interact with HR and IT—to small, citizen developer-built solutions that solve specific tasks for individual employees or small teams. Using Copilot Studio, organizations from across the company can build agents that provide tailored AI assistance to unlock new experiences for our employees, optimize our core processes, and provide deeper business insights.

Opening new horizons for intelligent assistance

Out of the box, Microsoft 365 Copilot provides powerful access to company data across our Microsoft tenant, discoverable through the Microsoft Graph. But not all information lives in the Microsoft Graph, and our employees do their work using more than just one set of tools.

Many companies have data spread across an expansive digital landscape. Within Microsoft, our employees access a vast quantity of content within Microsoft 365 apps and in other data and systems. That breadth can create issues with discoverability and block our employees from taking action effectively. On top of that, some processes benefit from narrowing search parameters instead of widening them.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is the framework that makes closing those gaps possible. It enables users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions while providing a clear and discoverable entry point in the user interface.

“Organizations have mountains and mountains of data available, with an ever-increasing number of tools and experiences,” says Matthew Marzynski, product manager with Microsoft Digital. “The problem is that our needs as employees don’t conform neatly to the different tools that we use to fulfill them. Copilot extensions are a way to collapse that complexity.”

Through Copilot extensibility, employees no longer need encyclopedic knowledge of each and every app, tool, or repository that pertains to their work, enabling them to avoid time-consuming manual exploration. Instead, users and organizations can configure Copilot extensions to intelligently surface the information they need within a single pane. And at the center of this shift is a new kind of interface: the agent.

Agents enable users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions, and they provide a clear and discoverable entry point through a single, accessible user interface. As a result, it’s now possible to extend the power of Copilot beyond our first-party product portfolio to deliver highly transformative and personalized employee experiences.

Users have enormous flexibility in terms of the kinds of agents they can create, their level of complexity, and how they create them. Creation approaches include Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder, Copilot Studio itself, or working with both Copilot Studio and Azure AI.

For the simplest agents, creators can access Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder right in Teams through Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. They can use it to walk through a streamlined process driven by natural language. Simple prompting and configuration panes make this interface accessible to anyone who wants to create agents.

Accessing Copilot Studio directly provides more power and flexibility. Based on Microsoft Power Platform, this tool provides a low-code or pro-code environment for creating and enhancing agents with custom experiences.

By focusing Copilot intelligence on specific repositories and apps, agents created in Copilot Studio provide greater discoverability outside the Microsoft 365 data estate while unlocking custom workflows. Most importantly, they make it possible to explore different information silos and take different kinds of actions from one interface, accessed through Copilot.

“We’re looking at every workflow, process, and interaction to find ways of applying a Copilot-first perspective,” says Nitul Pancholi, a lead on in the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. “It’s an opportunity to redefine how we do work and drive greater impact than ever before.”

Whether an employee creates a personal agent tailored to their role or a line of business builds an enterprise tool to support their team’s work, Copilot Studio brings their vision to life. It lets users create agents using two building blocks, connectors and plugins, plus the ability to customize those elements.

Kinds of Copilot agents

“Through extensibility, we’re enabling anyone to create a Copilot-powered solution tailored to their team, suited for their organization, and focused on the right content,” says Dodd Willingham, program manager for internal deployment of search and chat in Microsoft Digital. “Graph connectors and plugins make the right content easily identifiable for their agents so they can target the data they need appropriately.”

Our Copilot extensibility journey

Microsoft is actively building and deploying agents. The Microsoft Digital team has been instrumental in creating and implementing these early scenarios using Copilot Studio through Microsoft Elite Builders, our internal program that encourages Microsoft employees to build and share their custom agents with fellow employees.

Simple retrieval agents are enabling much of this early work. This kind of extension powers scoped, task-specific experiences to accomplish specialized tasks in Copilot by accessing Microsoft Graph data alongside additional semantic ground.

The IDEAS Copilot is one example. It democratizes access to our IDEAS knowledge base’s insights on app usage to empower informed decision-making. Through natural language queries, it enables users to take action on crucial usage data without technical expertise.

“The copilot extensibility concept is really about creating agents that are low-maintenance and high-value for users,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Anyone on the tenant can create their own agents, while engineering teams can build enterprise-level solutions using Copilot Studio to solve business problems and boost productivity on a wider scale.”

Our most ambitious project so far has been an agent that unlocks scoped, role-specific Copilot experiences we can embed in public and private apps. The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot grants employees access to HR and IT information and tools through their choice of interface—Copilot or our company sites. It’s now available to customers in private preview.

The agent connects to SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, and other resources that comprise the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the right information. Depending on whether the employee’s query is related to HR or IT, the agent integrates their personalized data from a variety of knowledge bases and third-party apps. From there, it provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for resolving their query.

Employees are finding HR and IT answers more accurately and faster, without the need for extensive searches across wide-ranging toolsets. In our initial pilot, people who use the Employee Self-Service Agent for HR receive 42% greater accuracy in answering their questions. On the IT side, the overall self-help success rate increased by 36%. But the greatest benefit is the way this agent keeps employee productivity flowing by allowing users to seek out crucial HR and IT information in a single pane within their flow of work.

Learning from early extensibility projects

As one of the first enterprises to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, developing and implementing these solutions comes with its own challenges and learnings.

“As Customer Zero, we need to balance product innovation with security and operational needs,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated apps at Microsoft Digital. “We’re balancing the priorities of driving productivity for the business, supporting the product teams in deploying new features, and also maintaining the guardrails to protect employees and our organization.”

Within Microsoft Digital, we have two chief advantages as we address these IT challenges:

• A trustworthy technology ecosystem operating at an incredible scope and scale across a huge product suite, ripe with the kinds of data that empower AI tools.
• A mature IT organization that has decades of experience in adopting and operationalizing new technologies and mitigating risks.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned has been about adapting our existing governance structures to the framework of Copilot extensibility.

Agents rely on connections with existing tools that have well-established parameters for reasoning over data and governing information. Because Copilot respects Microsoft 365 governance and data loss prevention protocols, it honors all the access controls, security policies, and personally identifiable information (PII) data-handling structures that an organization puts in place across its tenant. As a result, businesses can rely on Microsoft 365’s robust foundation of security even as they forge ahead into new AI capabilities.

But this is a new approach to technology, so we’ve adapted our review process for new agents alongside our implementation to ensure governance and security keep pace with innovation. Those reviews largely revolve around key questions we ask about all our technology, with an added layer around Responsible AI, where we ask ourselves questions like these:

• Security: How does data move from one app to another across the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, and how does an agent interact with that data?
• Privacy: Where does the agent handle and store PII?
• Accessibility: Does the UI make this technology equally available to all users?
• Responsible AI: Does the agent meet our standards for fairness, reliability and safety, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability?

From a security and governance perspective, it can be daunting to implement internally built extensions that have access to your organizational data and incorporate them into your business workflows. By asking the same questions we’ve embedded into our review framework and relying on the robust security and governance features of Microsoft 365, you can ensure you maintain control over your organizational data.

It’s also important to realize that adopting this new framework will take time. There’s a natural progression from simpler extensions to more complex tooling. It’s all part of accelerating along an adoption maturity curve with the next iteration of AI tools.

The technical aspects of enabling Copilot extensibility require forethought, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. If your team maintains robust governance policies through your Microsoft 365 tenant and they’re experienced with Power Platform, much of the legwork is already done.

But if your organization is new to this space, our internal experience governing Copilot can act as a guide for keeping your data secure. We’ve also created resources tailored to helping first-time users get up to speed with Copilot Studio. We’ve also made the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot available to customers in private preview to provide a straightforward on-ramp to extensibility.

It starts with considering where Copilot extensions might fit into your workflows and what data it needs to access, starting with simple implementations, then deliberately building from there.

“A cornerstone of Copilot extensibility is understanding your data and the scenarios you think will be most impactful for optimizing processes,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager for Customer Zero Extensibility in Microsoft Digital. “Then ensure your endpoints are ready to hook into natural language processing and build your instructions.”

A principled approach to employee usage and adoption is also important. Eagerness among IT professionals and early adopters won’t necessarily drive business-wide transformation. As a result, we’re actively working to inform employees about the value of these tools and provide skilling opportunities.

“One of the main things we observed is that there’s a certain level of change management involved,” Pancholi says. “In order to build these habits, we’ve focused on creating simple workflows with tangible impacts so employees can see the value and start building Copilot-first habits.”

Finally, we’ve discovered that keeping agents lean in scope helps them function more easily. It’s important to think about back-end processes as you create extensions. For example, including too many data sources can become a serious tax on processing power. From both a performance and scenario standpoint, it’s a better strategy to keep agents narrowly focused.

Next steps into the era of extensibility

As we continue our Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility journey, we’re looking to our internal experience to guide the product for our customers, especially in IT. Our team is currently exploring ways to further unify the ecosystem until administration and management of extensions can all occur through a single layer. That will reduce operational costs and enable successful adoption on a greater scale.

We’re also exploring ways to shift more aspects of governance to Copilot itself. Since many agents access data and third-party apps outside our tenant, those sources might not benefit from Microsoft 365 data protection policies. Allocating more of the burden of governance to agents themselves may help fill that gap.

For now, we’re still exploring what’s possible. And employee uptake tells a strong story about extensibility’s impact. Since the release of our initial Copilot extensions a few months ago, usage of retrieval agents has shot up by 10x. Initial results from our Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout are equally promising.

It’s all coming together to demonstrate the profound value Copilot can provide for businesses.

“The vision around extensibility is that Copilot can be the single place where all tools coalesce into one single pane,” Marzynski says. “It’s a way to make your time much more effective and reduce the cognitive tax of changing channels or swiveling seats, and it’s ultimately a way to make your employee experience more rewarding.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company:

• Be curious: Don’t limit your imagination, because it’s a chance to redefine workflows.
• Be patient but continue driving forward. This is the beginning of a more long-term journey, and it’s important to get more comfortable with the technology.
• Hackathons produce amazing results, and it’s important to give people time to experiment together.
• Have a strong change management program. No matter how wonderful the tech is, people need to see helpful use cases and real value.
• Use your existing investment, processes, governance, and management practices for Microsoft 365 and scale it out.
• Build a well-documented review process.
• Start with only allowing approved apps or enable guardrails for self-service to ensure IT maintains control and security, then grow from there. When it comes time for citizen developers, open the door to retrieval agents.
• Think in terms of data—it’s about what data is you have, if it’s properly governed, where it’s being accessed, and what tenant boundaries it crosses.

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company.

• Find out how our pivot to generative AI is being fueled by our rich IT history.
• See how we’re powering our AI transformation with our 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 Unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva

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

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

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

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

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

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva

Viva Connections

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

Viva Amplify

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

Viva Learning

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

Viva Goals

Establishing and tracking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on employee Copilot usage and productivity gains.

Viva Engage

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

Viva Insights

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

Viva Pulse

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

Viva Glint

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

Viva Amplify

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

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

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

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

Viva Learning

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

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

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

Viva Engage

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

For our Copilot adoption efforts, we leaned on our Copilot Champs Community—a dedicated group of 3,000 early adopters, AI enthusiasts, and peer leaders. Through community posts, ongoing conversations, and self-driven knowledge sharing in Viva Engage, their efforts turned into a powerful organic groundswell, with employees sharing prompts and advice on their own.

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

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

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

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

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

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

Throughout our Copilot adoption process, we discovered which kinds of data are most valuable for transformation specialists and managers. Through those efforts, we assembled the Microsoft 365 Copilot Impact survey templates for both Viva Pulse and Viva Glint.

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

Viva Insights

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

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

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

Our internal efforts helped inform the Microsoft 365 Copilot Dashboard powered by Viva Insights. This out-of-the-box feature provides privacy-protected data throughout every stage of your Copilot transformation journey and can help you understand its impact across meetings, email, chat, documents, search, and more.

Viva Goals

Our intent with Microsoft Viva Goals is to enhance the experience of both individual users and entire departments by providing a clear, structured approach to goal management, encouraging individuals to understand how their daily work accrues to organizational objectives. 

Viva Goals also helps with cross-department alignment, ensuring everyone is working towards the same objectives. This alignment fosters better collaboration and reduces silos. Managers can use dashboards to monitor team progress, identify bottlenecks, make informed decisions, and celebrate achievements by their team.

“As part of our strategic approach to drive adoption, we agreed on clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that we used to measure Copilot adoption,” Woolridge says. “For example, we set a target for the specific percentage of active users that we were looking for within a quarter. We aligned these success measures with specific business objectives we have in specific geos and regions.”

Our OKRs are regularly tracked—we use them to report our progress and to adjust our adoption strategies based on feedback and performance data.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing support is just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

• Check out our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide.
• Explore how we’re enabling internal collaboration at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva.
• Discover how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot with the help of—you guessed it—Copilot.

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

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

Although these features have proven to be incredibly useful to our employees and our wider organization, there are also concerns about how retaining Microsoft Teams meeting data might affect our security posture, records retention policy, and privacy. Just like any other company, we at Microsoft have to balance these varying aspects.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re leading cross-disciplinary conversations to ensure we get it right.

{Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365. Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.}

Policy considerations of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention

Our Microsoft Teams meeting data comes in the form of three main artifacts: recordings, transcriptions, and data that AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot and recap services can use to increase our general business intelligence.

We find meeting recordings and transcripts are helpful for many reasons, including helping us overcome accessibility issues related to fast-paced, real-time meetings or language differences—this is a powerful way to level the playing field for our employees. Our ability to share recordings and transcripts also supports greater knowledge transfer and asynchronous work, which is especially helpful for teams that operate across time zones.

Microsoft Teams Premium enables AI-generated notes, task lists, personalized timeline markers for video recaps, and auto-generated chapters for recordings. Within a meeting, the Microsoft 365 Copilot sidebar experience helps our late-joining employees catch up on what they’ve missed, provides intelligent prompts to review unresolved questions, summarizes key themes, and creates notes or action items.

The helpfulness of these tools is clear, but data-retention obligations introduce challenges that organizations like ours need to consider. First, producing and retaining this kind of data can be complex if it isn’t properly governed. Second, data-rich artifacts like video recordings occupy a lot of space, eating up cloud storage budgets.

“We tend to think of the recordings we make during meetings as an individual’s data, but they actually represent the company’s data,” says Rachael Heade, director of records compliance for Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). “We want to empower individuals, but we have to remember that retention and volume impacts of these artifacts on the company can be substantial.”

In light of these potential impacts, some organizations simply opt out of enabling Microsoft Teams meeting recordings.

Asking the right questions to assemble the proper guardrails

Our teams in Microsoft Digital and CELA, our legal division, are working to balance the benefits of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention with our compliance obligations to provide empowering experiences for our employees while keeping the company safe.

“Organizations are always concerned about centralized control over the retention and deletion of data artifacts,” Heade says. “You have excited employees who want to use this technology, so how do you set them up so they can use it confidently?”

Like many policy conversations, getting this right starts with our governance team in Microsoft Digital and our internal partners asking the employees from across the company who look after data governance the right questions:

• When should a meeting be recorded and when should it not?
• What kind of data gets stored?
• Who can initiate recording, and who can access it after the meeting?
• How long should we retain meeting data?
• Where does the data live while it’s retained?
• How can we control data capture and retention?
• What does this mean for eDiscovery management?

These questions help us think about the proper guardrails. Our IT perspective is only one part of the puzzle, so we’re actively consulting with CELA, corporate security, privacy, the Microsoft Teams product group, the company’s data custodians, and our business customers throughout this process.

“As an organization, this is about thinking through your tenant position and getting it to a reasonable state,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital.

Our conversations have brought up distinctions that any organization should consider as they build policy around Microsoft Teams meeting retention:

• The length of time a meeting’s data remains fresh, relevant, or useful
• The difference in retention value between operational and informational meetings, for example, weekly touchpoints versus project kick-offs or education sessions
• The different risks inherent in recordings compared to transcriptions
• Establishing default policies while allowing variability and flexibility when employees need it
• Long-term retention for functional artifacts like demos and trainings

From sharing perspectives to crafting policy

Our policies around Microsoft Teams meeting data retention continue to evolve, but we’ve already implemented some highly effective practices, policies, and controls. Every organization’s situation is unique, so it’s important that you speak to your legal professionals to craft your own policies. But our work should give you an idea of what’s possible through out-of-the-box features within Microsoft Teams.

The policies we’ve put in place represent a mix of technical defaults, meeting options, and empowering employees to make informed decisions about usefulness and privacy. They also build on the foundations of our work with sensitivity labeling, which is helping secure data across our tenant.

• Transcript attribution opt-out gives employees agency and reassures them that we honor their privacy.
• User notices alert employees when a recording or transcription starts, allowing them the opportunity to opt out, request that the meeting go unrecorded, or leave the call.
• Nuanced business guidance from CELA through an internal Recording Smart Use Statement document helps employees understand the implications of recording, when not to record, and when not to speak in a recorded call.
• Recommending that employees “tell and confirm” before recording empowers and supports our people to speak up when they don’t believe the meeting should be recorded or don’t feel comfortable.
• We didn’t wait for Compliance Recording: Although this choice would require that a user consent to recording before unmuting themselves, we decided that opt-outs and user notices provided sufficient agency to our employees.
• Meeting labels that limit who can record mean only the organizer or co-organizer can initiate recordings for meetings labeled “highly confidential.”
• Only meeting organizers can download meeting recordings tokeep the meeting data contained and restrict sharing.
• The default OneDrive and SharePoint meeting expiration is set to 90 days to ensure we minimize the risk of data leakage or cloud storage bloat.

These policies reflect three core tenets we use to inform our governance efforts: empower, trust, and verify.

“The bottom line is that we rely on our employees to be good stewards of the company,” Johnson says. “But because we’ve got a good governance model in place for Teams and good overall hygiene for our tenant, we’re well set up to deal with the evolution of the product and make these decisions.”

We can’t recommend that any organization follow our blueprint entirely, but asking some of the same questions as we have can help build a foundation. To start, read our blog post on how we create self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 and explore this Microsoft Learn guide on meeting retention policies in Microsoft Teams.

With a firm grasp of the technology and close collaboration with the right stakeholders, you can guide your own policy decisions and unlock the right set of features for your team.

Here are some tips for approaching meeting data retention at your company:

• Face the fear and get comfortable with being uncomfortable: First, establish your concerns, then work toward optimizing your policy compliance.
• Consider how to support your company’s compliance obligations while allowing your employee population to take advantage of the product, and let those things live together side-by-side.
• Connecting with your legal team is essential because they’re the experts on assessing complex compliance questions.
• Investigate meeting labels and what policies you might want to apply to meetings based on sensitivity and other attributes.

See how Microsoft Teams Premium can help you manage your data retention.  

• Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.
• Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Unpack Microsoft Teams Premium—the smart place to work.
• Check out our Microsoft Teams Premium overview for administrators.
• Work with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• 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 Empowering employees after the call: Enabling and securing Microsoft Teams meeting data retention at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

With more than 600 physical worksites around the world, Microsoft has one of the largest network infrastructure footprints on the planet.

Managing the thousands of devices that keep those locations connected demands constant attention from a global team of network engineers. It’s their job to monitor and maintain those devices. And when outages occur, they lead the charge to repair and remediate the situation.

To support their work, our Real Time Telemetry team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has introduced new capabilities that help engineers identify network device outages and capture data faster and more extensively than ever before. Through real-time telemetry, network engineers can isolate and remediate issues in minutes—not hours—to keep their colleagues productive and our technology running smoothly.

Immediacy is everything

Conventional network monitoring uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) architecture, which retrieves network telemetry through periodic, pull-based polls and other legacy technologies. At Microsoft, that polling interval typically ranges between five minutes and six hours.

SNMP is a foundational telemetry architecture with decades of legacy. It’s ubiquitous, but it doesn’t allow for the most up-to-date data possible.

“The biggest pain point we’ve always heard from network engineers is latency in the data,” says Astha Sinha, senior product manager for the Infrastructure and Engineering Services team in Microsoft Digital. “When data is stale, engineers can’t react quickly to outages, and that has implications for security and productivity.”

Serious vulnerabilities and liabilities arise when a network device outage occurs. But because of lags between polling intervals, a network engineer might not receive information or alerts about the situation until long after it happens.

We assembled the Real Time Telemetry team as part of our Infrastructure and Engineering Services to close that gap.

“We build the tools and automations that network engineers use to better manage their networks,” says Martin O’Flaherty, principal product manager for the Infrastructure and Engineering Services team in Microsoft Digital. “To do that, we need to make sure they have the right signals as early and as consistently as possible.”

The technology that powers these possibilities is known as streaming telemetry. It relies on network devices compatible with the more modern gRPC Network Management Interface (gNMI) telemetry protocol and other technologies to support a push-based approach to network monitoring where network devices stream data constantly.

This architecture isn’t new, but our team is scaling and programmatizing how that data becomes available by creating a real-time telemetry apparatus that collects, stores, and delivers network information to service engineers. These capabilities offer several benefits.

The advantages of real-time network device telemetry

“Devices are proactively sending data without having to wait for requests, so they function more efficiently and facilitate timely troubleshooting and optimization,” says Abhijit Vijay, principal software engineering manager with the Infrastructure and Engineering Services team in Microsoft Digital. “Since this approach pushes data continuously rather than at specific intervals, it also reduces the additional network traffic and scales better in larger, more complex environments.

At any given time, Microsoft operates 25,000 to 30,000 network devices, managed by engineers working across 10 different service lines. Accounting for all their needs while keeping data collection manageable and efficient requires extensive collaboration and prioritization.

We also had to account for compatibility. With so many network devices in operation, replacement lifecycles vary. Not all of them are currently gNMI-compatible.

Working with our service lines, we identified the use cases that would provide the best possible ROI, largely based on where we would find the greatest benefits for security and where networks offered a meaningful number of gNMI-compatible devices. We also zeroed in on the types of data that would be the most broadly useful. Being selective helped us preserve resources and avoid overwhelming engineers with too much data.

We built our internal solution entirely using Azure components, including Azure Functions and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Cosmos DB, Redis, and Azure Data Lake. The result is a platform that network engineers can use to access real-time telemetry data.

With key service lines, use cases, and a base of technology in place, we worked with network engineers to onboard the relevant devices. From there, their service lines were free to experiment with our solution on real-world incidents.

Better response times, greater network reliability

Service lines are already experiencing big wins.

In one case, a heating and cooling system went offline for a building in the company’s Millennium Campus in Redmond, Washington. A lack of environmental management has the potential to cause structural damage to buildings if left unchecked, so it was important to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. The service line for wired onsite connections sprang into action as soon as they received a network support ticket.

With real-time telemetry enabled, the team created a Kusto query to compare DOT1X access-session data for the day of the outage with a period before the outage started. Almost immediately, they spotted problematic VLAN switching, including the exact time and duration of the outage. By correlating the timestamps, they determined that the RADIUS registrations of the device owner had expired, which caused the devices to switch into the guest network as part of the zero-trust network implementation.

As a result, the team was able to resolve the registration issues and restore the heating and cooling systems in 10 minutes—a process that might have taken hours using other collection methods due to the lag-time between polling intervals.

“This has the potential to improve alerting, reduce outages, and enhance security,” says Daniel Menten, senior cloud network engineer for site infrastructure management on the Site Wired team. “One of the benefits of real-time telemetry is that it lets us capture information that wasn’t previously available—or that we received too slowly to take action.”

It’s about speeding up how we identify issues and how we then respond to them.  

“With this level of observability, engineers that monitor issues and outages benefit from enhanced experiences,” says Aayush Dave, a product manager on the Infrastructure and Engineering Services team in Microsoft Digital. “And that’s going to make our network more reliable and performant in a world where security issues and outages can have a global impact.”

The future is in real time

Now that real-time telemetry has demonstrated its value, our efforts are focused on broadening and deepening the experience.

“More devices mean more impact,” Dave says. “By increasing the number of network devices that facilitate real-time telemetry, we’re giving our engineers the tools to accelerate their response to these incidents and outages, all leading to enhanced performance and a more robust network reliability posture.”

It’s also about layering on new ways of accessing and using the data.

We’ve just released a preview UI that provides a quick look at essential data, as well as an all-up view of devices in an engineer’s service line. This dashboard will enable a self-service model that makes it even easier to isolate essential telemetry without the need for engineers to create or integrate their own interfaces.

That kind of observability isn’t only about outages. It also enables optimization by helping engineers understand and influence how devices work together.

The depth and quality of real-time telemetry data also provides a wealth of information for training AI models. With enough data spread across enough devices, predictive analysis might be able to provide preemptive alerts when the kinds of network signals that tend to accompany outages appear.

“We’re paving the way for an AIOps future where the system won’t just predict potential issues, but initiate self-healing actions,” says Rob Beneson, partner director of software engineering on the Infrastructure and Engineering Services team in Microsoft Digital.

It’s work that aligns with our company mission.

“This transformation is enhancing our internal user experience and maintaining the network connectivity that’s critical for our ultimate goal,” Beneson says. “We want to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Here are some tips for getting started with real-time telemetry at your company:

• Start with your users. Ask them about pain points, what scares them, and what they need.
• Start small and go step by step to get the core architecture in place, then work up to the glossier UI and UX elements.
• Be mindful of onboarding challenges like bugs in vendor hardware and software, especially around security controls.
• You’ll find plenty of edge cases and code fails, so be prepared to invest in revisiting challenges and fixing problems that arise.
• Make sure you have a use case and a problem to solve. Have a plan to guide your adoption and use before you turn on real-time telemetry.
• Make sure you have the proper data infrastructure in place and an apparatus for storing your data.
• Communicate and demonstrate the value of this solution to the teams who need to invest resources into onboarding it.
• Prioritize visibility into the devices and data you’ve onboarded through pilots and hero scenarios, then scale onboarding further according to your teams’ needs.
• Integrate as much as possible. Consider visualizations and pushing into existing network graphs and tools to surface data where engineers already work.

Learn more about Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service monitoring and Microsoft Azure Functions.

• Learn more about implementing Microsoft Azure cost optimization internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re moving our network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure.
• Check out how we’re boosting our employee device procurement at Microsoft with better forecasting.

• 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 Finding and fixing network outages in minutes—not hours—with real-time telemetry at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Technology is about people, and no Microsoft organization understands that better than Human Resources. When our HR team started rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to the global HR organization, a human-centered approach was a natural fit.

And what better way to focus on the human side of adoption than Microsoft Viva?

This story shares how our HR team used the Viva suite to communicate, provide opportunities for skilling and development, and measure success. As a result, they’ve been able to craft and disseminate effective adoption content through several different channels, provide both centralized and peer-led learning opportunities, and effectively track their progress.

Applying HR expertise to Microsoft 365 Copilot

AI represents the greatest workplace shift in a generation, so Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption has been a priority across the company. The HR team has an especially important role in that process: They’re both practitioners supporting AI transformation across the rest of Microsoft and professionals who use this technology in their own roles.

“As champions for Responsible AI at Microsoft, we have a special duty to learn, experiment, and apply Copilot to the space where we work,” says Liz Friedman, senior director of HR AI Transformation. “To support the rest of the company on this journey, we have to understand it ourselves.”

Copilot brings an unprecedented solution to the table, so we’re applying new technology in innovative ways as we experiment with fresh approaches to adoption. And new technical capabilities aren’t the only aspect of Copilot that affects its rollout.

“In some ways, the adoption challenge with Copilot is flipped on its head,” says Caribay Garcia, a principal people scientist on the Microsoft Viva product team. “It’s not as much about building momentum as it is about guiding excitement to create effective usage and long-lasting change.”

Driving AI adoption is about harnessing the optimism and energy of employees. With its human-centered suite of apps designed for employee engagement, Microsoft Viva has been a natural fit for agile Copilot adoption efforts that respect how people assimilate new tools and processes.

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva

Viva Connections

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

Viva Amplify

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

Viva Learning

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

Viva Goals

Establishing and tracking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on employee Copilot usage and productivity gains.

Viva Engage

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

Viva Insights

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

Viva Pulse

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

Viva Glint

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

With support from our team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, HR is leaning into Viva as a vehicle for change. Their team recognizes its value across every component of the adoption journey, from communication and learning to engagement and feedback.

“Using Viva for our promotion, awareness, skilling, and reinforcement process is tremendously useful,” says Anand Shah, senior business program manager with Microsoft Digital. “It’s critical at scale because it captures so many more people than we could ever manage with just instructor-led trainings or other centralized efforts.”

HR and people science: A powerful pairing

As their Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption unfolds, HR is taking a highly specialized approach that keeps Microsoft’s culture and priorities at its center. The team also benefits from the expertise of people science professionals in the Viva product group who have a background in organizational psychology, behavioral science, data science, and employee experience. These experts take a research-based and people-focused approach, infusing the Viva suite with insights from their discipline and ensuring every app effectively supports employee needs.

“People science helps us understand what’s important to employees to help them feel happy and successful,” says Carolyn Kalafut, a principal people scientist in the Microsoft Viva product group. “When employees experience rapid changes like AI transformation at work, our research shows that we can ease the process by encouraging them to share their voice, addressing their concerns, keeping them informed with key updates, and providing relevant skilling opportunities.”

To support their efforts, Microsoft Digital provides technical and change management expertise based on our experience with repeated deployment and adoption cycles.

The HR AI Transformation team built a strategy to address key challenges associated with AI adoption in HR that include:

• HR practitioners’ professional caution in using AI tech in the context of constantly evolving guidance and laws around protecting employee confidentiality and privacy
• Uncertainty about where and when HR and employees can responsibly use Copilot in their work
• Questions about data security and the appropriate flow of information in the context of Copilot
• The ongoing introduction of new features and capabilities in a rapidly evolving solution category
• How to embrace elective technology that requires buy-in from employees rather than embedding itself into business functions by default

“We think of our efforts in terms of a cohesive strategy for driving change, from generating awareness and motivation to building knowledge and skills, then applying and tracking the behaviors we’ve enabled,” Friedman says. “Viva apps are really well designed for each of these steps.”

The resulting combination of HR’s organizational expertise, the product group’s people science insights, and Microsoft Digital’s time-tested change management processes helped the team develop an effective and multifaceted adoption strategy enhanced by Viva.

Change and adoption communication is a well-established discipline that relies on both centralized campaigns and more localized, intra-departmental efforts. Above and beyond Microsoft Digital’s company-wide Copilot communications, HR’s internal adoption leaders actively construct campaigns specific to their organization’s needs.

In addition to running these campaigns using Viva Amplify, the Viva suite’s organizational communications app, change leaders can deploy adoption material through HR’s own Copilot sponsors and champions, giving them the opportunity to influence their communities on whatever channels feel most natural: Teams, Outlook, or Viva Engage. This approach captures the benefits of an organizationally aligned, carefully crafted narrative while capitalizing on the reach and trust that employees’ leaders and peers inspire.

The ongoing HR AI Roundup is one example of a Viva Amplify campaign. It provides a monthly update on HR’s goals and progress with Copilot adoption, shares new features and capabilities, and offers clear actions employees can take to further their usage.

As this work continues, the HR adoption team is learning from their initial experiments with Viva Amplify. The goal is to collaborate with sponsors and champions to disseminate customized campaigns that provide precise analytics, contributing to continuous improvement.

“Everyone can be an effective communicator with Viva Amplify,” says Laura Luethe, a director of communications on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “It combines the capabilities of corporate communicators with the ability to tailor messaging to uniquely relevant audiences.”

There isn’t one right way to learn, so HR accommodates a diverse array of learning styles. Viva Learning provides opportunities for both self-directed and group learning as components of their Copilot skilling offerings.

Aside from providing multiple paths to learning and development, one of the principal upskilling challenges is the location and discoverability of content. In that context, Viva Learning’s flexibility and ability to pull learning material from multiple sources is a major asset.

“People are hungry for skilling opportunities for their specific disciplines. Viva Learning supports that desire by providing one central location for all their learning needs.”

The HR team assembled a set of discipline-specific learning materials to create the AI for HR Academy. It contains the mainstay AI for HR learning path, as well as other modules that include discipline-specific content, material on systems thinking, and more. For people who learn best alongside their peers, there are also opportunities for collaborative skilling activities like group trainings, community teams, or forums.

With this academy, HR change leaders have a shareable core of learning material they can deploy alongside enablement communications, community blasts, or other activations.

A human-centric approach to adoption respects that change is often community-based and meets people where they are—and that it works best when it’s fun. In an organization as large as Microsoft HR, with many people working in different locations or functioning on a hybrid model, a digital solution for community-based engagement is essential.

“There’s no watercooler big enough for our global community to gather around,” says Chris Owen, a senior program manager on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “In that environment, Viva Engage becomes the one and only space where all of HR can meet regularly and exchange ideas.”

As a grassroots employee community app, Viva Engage enables peer-to-peer guidance and communication about Copilot. It also unlocks synergies between different Viva apps. Change leaders can introduce campaigns into Viva Engage by rallying employees to share pre-populated posts distributed through Viva Amplify.

HR’s Copilot Champs Community, a subset of our wider HR AI Community of Practice, is an essential part of those peer-to-peer change management initiatives. They share best practices for local outreach and support each other’s efforts to drive adoption within their specific disciplines, often through Viva Engage.

Although Viva Engage relies on community members to drive conversations forward, it also allows guidance from change leaders and community managers tasked with supporting the adoption. The tool provides just the right elevation for leaders to introduce change initiatives into the community, which members can adapt and socialize throughout their peer groups.

In one instance, the HR adoption team created a digital Copilot escape room designed to gamify learning about prompts for their HR AI Community of Practice members. Community members found the initiative so helpful that they recommended making it available to the wider organization, encouraging others to replicate the experience within their local teams.

One of most valuable aspects of Viva Engage is the way it decentralizes the responsibility for leading change. By letting conversations unwind organically, it becomes a repository for knowledge-sharing, content, and ongoing conversations about the best ways to use Copilot.

When employees learn together, share best practices, and ask questions, collective conversations unfold and people build valuable connections, which are especially helpful in a hybrid environment. That isn’t just a powerful adoption practice. It also boosts a sense of community and improves morale.

The numbers illustrate how effective and connective this channel can be. Just nine months after the launch of the HR AI Community of practice, almost 900 new members have joined the community, creating more than 230 posts that have collectively earned nearly 50,000 views.

As one of the most effective vehicles for change management in HR, Viva Engage illustrates how social connections can be a powerful force for good.

Orderly data and the ability to process insights are essential to applying people science principles practically. We aren’t just interested in understanding what people are doing, but how they feel about it—uncovering the “why” behind adoption behavior. Employee signals are central to that goal.

As part of HR’s enterprise employee strategy, the team deploys biannual, organization-wide Signals surveys through Viva Glint to gauge sentiment across different topics. With the introduction of Copilot, they included questions about engagement with the new technology. HR’s AI adoption leaders work alongside the HR Business Intelligence team to use select data from that survey to understand sentiment about AI and fine-tune their adoption approach.

Recently, they’ve been working to correlate results from questions about AI usage and employees’ thriving metrics, the main outcome we use at Microsoft to understand the employee experience. To thrive is to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work, and based on recent survey results, the HR team is beginning to understand trends and sentiments around Copilot adoption and its impact on employees’ experiences.

By collating thriving metrics acquired through Viva Glint surveys with Copilot usage, the HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.

That insight accomplishes two things: It validates further investment in Copilot adoption efforts and simultaneously demonstrates its value to users.

“It’s all about energy, empowerment, and whether work is meaningful to employees,” says David Spahr, a director on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “We aren’t just trying to understand the productivity and efficiency gains of AI—we want to see the ways it’s helping humans become more human.”

Clear and structured progress toward goals is a key motivator for employees. Viva Goals provides the benefit of tracking and clarity around OKRs to help deliver that motivation. The HR Services team uses this tool to track progress on Copilot-supported productivity and job satisfaction.

This year, one of the team’s major projects is determining whether using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to handle HR inquiries correlates with an increase in productivity and job satisfaction for HR agents. In addition to tracking these elements and establishing a correlation, Viva Goals helped HR align these objectives and their benefits with their organization’s strategy.

Now that the team has correlated Copilot usage, productivity, and job satisfaction, their next step will be to set targets for each of these three areas and track them effectively. Viva goals will be essential to their work by providing visible, verifiable insights into the team’s progress and how the benefits they realize contribute to their goals.

“We’re very intentional about defining our objectives, anticipating their benefits, and establishing OKRs to track those pieces,” Friedman says. “From there, we can verifiably demonstrate progress.”

One of the most important learnings from HR’s Copilot adoption experience has been that no OKR is ever static. Instead, these metrics help change leaders to answer questions about their current progress, ask new questions about how to adjust work, then revise their measurements into more perfectly calibrated OKRs as needed.

This kind of progressive goal setting moves organizations away from simplistic pass-or-fail thinking and toward dynamic, progress-centered ways of tracking success.

Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is going strong in HR

Thanks to robust change management practices, cross-organizational collaboration, and Microsoft Viva initiatives grounded in people science and tailored to employee needs, HR’s adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot has generated impressive results so far.

“HR has been a powerful adopter,” says Eric Wand, Head of IT at Microsoft Canada. “This organization has been so committed to their Copilot journey; they’ve achieved many of their end-of-year adoption metrics in just the first few months.”

Microsoft Viva is a crucial part of HR’s process, and it continues to be a critical tool for advancing usage at scale. As they incorporate further Viva apps, HR will continue to fine-tune their adoption activities and find new ways to unlock even greater value for employees. The team is currently exploring ways to programmatize agile and decentralized Viva Pulse surveys according to people science principles and gain further visibility into employee sentiment and usage at the team level.

HR is also partnering with Microsoft Digital to track usage through the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data will support even more effective change management as HR continues to deepen its Copilot adoption.

“Our job is to empower the people who empower the planet, and that means changing the way we change,” Friedman says. “The more we can do to meet people where they are and help enhance how they work, the more success we’ll have. So the investments we’ve already made in employee experience areas—communications, skilling, and measurement—have given us a valuable head start at accelerating our own functional AI transformation efforts here in HR.”

Here are some tips on how to use Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower your employees: 

• Build your change strategy first. Know what problems you’re trying to solve, what you’re trying to accomplish, and use Microsoft Viva as your partner in change management.
• Don’t interrupt. Enhance. Build change management activations into the flow of work.
• Build a good virtual team that brings people together from different organizations, with different skill sets within your business.
• Ensure sponsorship is active and visible by using Viva to communicate your strategy with your employees on a regular basis
• Start with the basics. Don’t feel like you need to be an expert in AI, and just land your foundational pieces around communications, skilling, and measurement.
• Don’t be intimidated by the scope and possibility of the new product. Adopt a growth mindset and take bite-sized steps forward.
• Community offers agility. Traditional learning and development may not be able to keep up with the pace of change, so let peer-to-peer enablement in different types of community settings take on some of the burden.

Learn how to use Microsoft Viva to help you deploy and drive adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

• Enhancing employee listening at Microsoft with Viva Glint.
• Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva.
• Unlocking the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot at the role level.

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