At Microsoft, we’ve found that sharing our AI transformation stories—especially how individuals and teams have harnessed the power of AI to address common business, technical, and operational challenges—is the key to accelerating our customers’ AI transformation. As Customer Zero, we test our technology, products, and approaches in-house first, then use the lessons learned to help our customers get the most out of technology.

“AI transformation only becomes real when it becomes part of how work gets done. Our role is to lead with our own experience and share what we’re learning, so our customers can move faster from ambition to execution.”

Lorraine Bardeen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Frontier Company

Working across numerous teams at Microsoft, we’re building a library of reusable evidence and lessons learned. These will enable our customers to go from experimentation to operational impact with greater speed and confidence.

In our experience, progress came from prioritizing the best AI use cases, grounding them in real workflows, and building repeatable patterns that teams could trust. That principle shapes our Customer Zero strategy, which is to bring those patterns together so that customers can learn from the same questions about AI that we’ve been working through internally here at Microsoft, including:

• Where to start
• How to build confidence
• How to govern consistently
• How to turn isolated wins into a sustainable, AI-powered competitive advantage

“AI transformation only becomes real when it becomes part of how work gets done,” says Lorraine Bardeen, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Frontier Company. “Our role is to lead with our own experience and share what we’re learning, so our customers can move faster from ambition to execution.”

This is why our Customer Zero insights are so important: They’re a direct channel for sharing what our teams here at Microsoft are learning as we apply AI in the day-to-day work of sales, operations, supply chain, finance, customer service, software engineering, IT, and other business functions.

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Microsoft Frontier Company: AI engineering that amplifies and protects your intelligence

Turning learnings into practice

Shortening the distance between strategy and execution for our customers and giving them concrete examples of what scale looks like in practice is a key mission for our Customer Zero team. Our goal is to help readers start with our larger Microsoft AI transformation story and then move to focused examples, role-specific lessons, and practical assets that can be adapted for their own organizations.

The leadership lens is part of what makes our Customer Zero journey valuable, showing customers how organizations can build momentum through funding the right priorities, exercising practical governance, and facilitating change management that helps people adopt new ways of working.

“The most important thing you can do is create a clear, funded set of priorities in an AI operating model,” Bardeen says. “And those priorities need to be supported by human-centered change and adoption.”

Our AI transformation stories make that guidance tangible by illustrating how specific teams at Microsoft approached familiar business problems, what and how they changed, and actionable insights that customers can apply to their own businesses.

AI transformation at scale

The result is an evidence base that shows how we transformed, so you can learn from our journey across all three of the patterns we’ve identified within Frontier transformation:

Pattern 1

Human with assistant

Every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster

Pattern 2

Human-agent teams

Agents join teams as “digital colleagues,” taking on specific tasks at human direction

Pattern 3

Human-led, agent-operated

Humans set direction and agents execute business processes and workflows, checking in as needed

Across each of these patterns, we seek to answer a critical question: What does AI transformation actually look like when it successfully moves beyond pilots and into enterprise-scale operations?

Here are examples of each of these patterns in action, along with what we’ve learned as Customer Zero in deploying, managing, and leveraging these solutions across Microsoft.

Human with assistant

In Microsoft Customer Service and Support, new technical support engineers no longer have to spend weeks getting up to speed before they can contribute with confidence. Instead, they work on real customer cases from the start, with an AI assistant embedded directly in their workflow. The assistant surfaces relevant knowledge, recommends next steps, and helps guide decision making in the moment. In our Customer Zero pilots, onboarding competency assessments were completed up to 3.3 times faster.

The lesson is simple but powerful: Learning is more effective when it happens in the flow of work, where employees can build skills while solving real problems.

Human-agent teams

Our supply chain planners have traditionally spent hours comparing demand signals, reviewing forecasts, and analyzing scenarios before making decisions. Today, agents automate much of that work. Planners can interact with the system using natural language and rapidly explore different options.

The primary benefit is faster, higher-quality planning decisions. By automatically comparing demand plans, surfacing meaningful changes, and explaining their impact through natural language and visualizations, the agents reduce the effort required to analyze planning data. Planners spend less time gathering and reconciling information and more time evaluating exceptions and responding to changes in demand. Internal telemetry estimates the solution saves up to 80 hours per planning cycle.

Our Customer Zero experience here reinforced that the quality of the user experience matters. Simple changes, like adding richer visualizations, helped make agent-assisted planning easier to understand and encouraged broader use across teams.

Human-led, agent-operated

In Microsoft Finance, AI agents are helping collections teams move faster and make better decisions. Connected to SAP and Dynamics 365, agents can predict late payments, identify potential customer disputes, categorize and summarize cases, route inquiries to the right owner, and provide AI-generated recommendations that help teams focus on the highest-priority work.

By reducing the manual effort required to assess customer accounts and resolve issues, the AI solution has cut case-handling time by 22 percent and reduced customer inquiry-handling times by as much as 60 percent. Collection teams are resolving inquiries up to 2.5 times faster, while improved automation and decision support helps accelerate quote-to-cash processes, contributing to a 48 percent reduction in time from quote to deal close. The result is not just time savings, but faster customer responses, improved operational efficiency, and more capacity for our finance professionals to focus on the activities that have the highest business impact.

Across all these scenarios, a consistent pattern has emerged: The biggest gains come when AI is embedded into established processes, supported by strong governance, and designed around the realities of daily work.

“Our responsibility is to lead by doing—and to share those lessons openly. Customer Zero is how we help our customers turn AI from opportunity into operational reality.”

Lorraine Bardeen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Frontier Company

Moving faster with greater confidence

While our journey is far from over, we’ve already identified numerous practical themes for leaders who are ready to embrace AI transformation within their own organizations. That is the promise of Customer Zero: to share our own operational lessons with customers while those lessons are still timely enough to be useful.

“Our responsibility is to lead by doing—and to share those lessons openly,” Bardeen says. “Customer Zero is how we help our customers turn AI from opportunity into operational reality.”

For organizations trying to move from AI ambition to enterprise execution, the guidance you’ll find here will reduce uncertainty and accelerate progress. Microsoft is still learning, and that’s part of the point. By sharing practical evidence from across our business as it happens, we can help our customers move faster with greater confidence, better context, and a clearer sense of what transformation looks like in the real world.

The post From AI ambition to enterprise execution: Our Customer Zero journey appeared first on Inside Track.

As these processes grew in scale and complexity, it became clear that improving something highly manual and already operating at massive scale would require a fundamentally different approach.

“With BPO, we’re dealing with high-volume, high-touch processes that are core to how the business runs,” says Jonathan d’Orgee, an AI transformation lead for Microsoft Business Operations.

For many organizations, the idea of overhauling a core business process can feel like a daunting step. At Microsoft we act as our own first customer, which gives us a way to test, refine, and de-risk that transformation in our own operations before bringing those proven patterns to customers. We call this approach Customer Zero.

In this case, that meant rethinking how high-volume operations could run better with AI directly embedded into day-to-day tasks, including building solutions using tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure AI.

“We looked at manual steps, broken workflows, and disconnected systems as opportunities for AI transformation.”

Jonathan d’Orgee, AI transformation lead, Microsoft Business Operations

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Check out more stories about our Customer Zero journey with our products and services here at Microsoft.

Identifying manual inefficiencies

On top of the complexity of handling so many transactions across the globe, Business Operations sometimes experienced periodic surges that could exacerbate inefficiencies. During these surges, the team would see a high volume of complex, time-critical transactions— especially at the end of the month or the quarter—and manual processes were too slow to keep up.

As we reviewed these inefficiencies, we looked for the most impactful use cases—places where we could integrate AI into workflows. To do this, we asked two important questions:

• What types of transactions have the highest volume?
• What parts of the process take the longest time or consume the most resources?

It was a classic case of the 80/20 rule—finding the 20% of the processes that required 80% of the work.

“We looked at manual steps, broken workflows, and disconnected systems as opportunities for AI transformation,” d’Orgee says.

An example might be where we receive an email asking to have a contract updated. In the former process, the email might sit there until a human could review it manually. Then someone would review it, direct it to the right queue, and assign it to the right person.  

“With AI in the workflow, emails and attachments are analyzed right when they arrive, and immediately assigned to the right queue and person,” d’Orgee says.

Taking these kinds of steps dramatically increased efficiency and reduced costs overall.

“With deep knowledge of our Business Operations ecosystem, we targeted high-volume, repeatable workflows across globally distributed operations. These were processes where AI could break traditional location and labor constraints, unlocking scalable automation and measurable business impact.”

Shashidhar Lanka Venkata, partner group engineering manager, Business Commerce Platforms

Configuring an AI toolkit

Once we’d identified the areas that were ripe for transformation, we set about developing an AI-driven solution on top of our existing critical workflow systems.

“With deep knowledge of our Business Operations ecosystem, we targeted high-volume, repeatable workflows across globally distributed operations,” says Shashidhar Lanka Venkata, a partner group engineering manager in the Business Commerce Platforms team. “These were processes where AI could break traditional location and labor constraints, unlocking scalable automation and measurable business impact.”

The BPO AI Toolkit is our AI operating system for business process operations. Its job is to help us with decision making. Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure AI, it brings process mining, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows 365, and the Azure Marketplace together into AI-native workflows that can be reused by different vendors.

The toolkit is built on a handful of capabilities that work together:

Agentic memory turns tribal knowledge into structured operational intelligence that agents can access on demand.

Prebuilt agents provide enterprise-ready capabilities that teams can reuse instead of rebuilding workflows.

An agentic UI reduces context-switching time, helping operators focus on decisions and exceptions.

Digital Twins measures real end-to-end process performance and continuous improvement.

Agent Desktop provides secure access anywhere.

“It’s just part and parcel of working with AI, which is much different than working with more traditional ways of automating,” says d’Orgee.

He explains that because the AI is configurable, our teams are able to move faster. “The lead time is a lot shorter, and we’re able to make changes a lot more quickly.”

At the core of everything during this effort was the drive to constantly assess “the human buy-in:” How are people using this technology in a way that solves real problems at a global scale?

Keeping humans in the loop and measuring AI transformation

Integrating AI into existing workflows and processes isn’t just about the technology—it also should entail a cultural shift within an organization.

We wanted to ensure that our operations team was adopting the AI tools in the right way. That meant understanding which processes must still be human-led, such as areas where the handling of exceptions requires more discernment.

Rather than removing humans from the process, the team redefined the human role. AI now handles tasks such as data validation, case creation, and compliance checks, while our team members focus on judgment, exceptions, and continuous improvement.

“It’s really exciting for us, because operations has always been about trying to be efficient. With AI, it’s allowed for breakthroughs that we haven’t been able to achieve before.”

Jonathan d’Orgee, AI transformation lead, Microsoft Business Operations

That balance helped the team scale automation without losing the oversight and expertise needed to maintain quality.

The impact of this Frontier model has been significant. So far, we’ve been able to transform roughly a quarter of our BPO processes with AI. This has led to an 80% improvement in process quality and a 33% reduction in cost per transaction, d’Orgee says.  

More than 75% of the cases our teams work on are processed utilizing the AI toolkit. These gains are measured with Digital Twins, a process-mining model that monitors each workflow live, allowing teams to continuously track and improve. Building on this momentum, the team has plans to transform 80% of the BPO process with AI by fiscal year 2028.

D’Orgee urges organizations that want to apply our Customer Zero learnings to their own workflows to look for high-volume, high-effort, highly manual work. This will lead you to the best opportunities for automating your processes at scale and deliver the most benefit.

From finance to sales operations, teams across Microsoft have turned to the BPO AI toolkit to prove how reusable AI capabilities can drive enterprise-wide transformation.

“It’s really exciting for us, because operations has always been about trying to be efficient,” d’Orgee says. “With AI, it’s allowed for breakthroughs that we haven’t been able to achieve before. I’ve just been thrilled to come to work on that front.”

The post Streamlining business operations at Microsoft with an AI toolkit appeared first on Inside Track.

Here at Microsoft, we’re no different.

Complaints about the time and effort required to approve expense reports have been consistent from managers across our organization.

“We continuously heard feedback from our leaders that they were spending too much time approving expense reports,” says Michael He, a senior business program manager in the Greater China Region. “They didn’t know where the potential risk actually was, so they had to review everything in detail.”

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve taken this challenge on by introducing an AI-powered Intelligent Risk Engine.

“The Intelligent Risk Engine cuts through complexity, pointing approvers straight to the expenses that warrant attention. This clears up the noise that has been driving review fatigue, especially at quarter’s end.”

Sangay Wangmo, Microsoft Digital experience director, Middle East and Africa

With this new tool, we shifted approvals from uniform, manual scrutiny to automated, risk-based decision making. This enables faster reviews, reduced cognitive load, and improved compliance outcomes.

“The Intelligent Risk Engine cuts through complexity, pointing approvers straight to the expenses that warrant attention,” says Sangay Wangmo, a Microsoft Digital experience director for our Middle East and Africa region. “This clears up the noise that has been driving review fatigue, especially at quarter’s end.”

Looking ahead, we plan to expand the tool to include automated approvals for low-risk cases, creating a more scalable, intelligent, and efficient process. This will ease the pain for our managers and allow them to focus on their strategic work.

Manual approvals in a complex compliance environment

Across our global enterprise, we handle nearly a million expense reports annually. In regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA), our expense approval processes are shaped by diverse regulatory requirements in many different countries.

“As organizations scale, managers naturally have more direct reports, which means more approvals to process. At the same time, accountability for all compliance still sits with the manager, which adds pressure.”

Kethan Parbhoo, general manager, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa

To take one example, the Middle East and Africa—featuring multiple subregions, languages, and local policy nuances—presents a complex challenge for expense management. Applying a consistent risk lens to every case is difficult.

To ensure they stay compliant, leaders often review expense reports in detail, including verifying receipt accuracy, matching invoice data, and checking supporting information (like attendee lists). This level of review requires substantial time and attention, particularly for managers with large teams who receive a high volume of submissions. This becomes even more time-consuming as groups grow.

“As their organizations scale, managers naturally have more direct reports, which means more approvals to process,” says Kethan Parbhoo, a general manager in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. “At the same time, accountability for all compliance still sits with the manager, which adds pressure.”  

The current tool, MS Expense, which was useful in a pre-AI environment, doesn’t provide an optimal user experience. The process was repetitive and depended heavily on manual validation. Existing tools provide limited support for prioritizing risk or simplifying these tasks, resulting in a similar effort being applied to both low- and high-risk expenses. 

As a result, leaders experience increased workload, slower approval timelines, and continued exposure to potential compliance gaps, despite careful review. 

The four top-level internal pain points of the old approval process can be summarized as: 

• Not knowing where the risk is 
• Approvals take too much time, especially at quarter’s end 
• Too much effort is spent on low-risk, routine reviews 
• Issues are found too late, triggering audits and resubmissions after the fact

The Intelligent Risk Engine is helping us address all of these in a unified, cohesive way.

“The system leverages a combination of AI-based risk checks and policy-driven risk checks. This produces a quantifiable baseline score that allows for easier comparison and risk assessment.”

Eric Carnrite, principal product manager, Travel and Expense

AI-assisted risk scoring embedded in MS Approvals 

The Intelligent Risk Engine that our team developed integrates with the existing MS Approvals system, shifting from volume-based checks to risk-based decisioning. We embed this analysis directly into the workflow.

The risk engine evaluates each expense report against multiple criteria, including receipt matching (which leverages AI and optical character recognition), spending patterns, and policy alignment. It assigns a risk score (1-100) and a risk level—1 at the low end and 5 at the high end—and then highlights specific areas that might require attention. 

“The system leverages a combination of AI-based risk checks and policy-driven risk checks,” says Eric Carnrite, a principal product manager for the Travel and Expense team. “This produces a quantifiable baseline score that allows for easier comparison and risk assessment.”

Expense risk score table

The tool also explains why something has been flagged. This allows approvers to quickly understand where to focus their review and to catch issues early, rather than after the fact. 

“AI is effectively doing the initial assessment that a human would otherwise have to do,” Parbhoo says. “It gives you a strong signal, so you can decide quickly where deeper review is needed.” 

With our new model, low-risk expenses can be reviewed and approved with minimal effort, while higher-risk items receive closer examination. It just makes sense to prioritize our work this way.

“Previously, a $10 coffee receipt required the same level of scrutiny as a $300 invoice, which doesn’t make sense at scale,” Wangmo says. “Leaders are forced to treat everything the same, even when the risk level is clearly different.”

Early returns indicate significant improvements. These include:

• Immediate productivity gains, as approvers stop reviewing all expenses manually
• Reduced rework and late‑stage audit findings 
• Stronger governance at scale, without adding headcount or introducing new manual processes

“It pulls the three parts together: Employees, approvers, and auditing and compliance. It will ultimately make it more proactive for all parties involved, rather than reactive—making sure the whole flow of the expense process is more meaningful.”

Michael He, senior business program manager, Greater China Region

Future direction: Expanded automation and standardization 

This kind of AI-powered technology will eventually allow us to pull everything together in one unified system, meeting the needs of all the major players in the expense management process.

“It pulls the three parts together: employees, approvers, and auditing and compliance,” He says. “This will ultimately make it more proactive for all parties involved, rather than reactive—making sure the whole flow of the expense process is more meaningful.”

And we’re not done innovating. The current risk engine implementation establishes a foundation for further automation, and that’s where we’re headed.

One planned enhancement is the automatic approval of low-risk expenses, subject to compliance approval. This could produce significant savings and greater efficiency across our organization.

“With auto-approvals, we’re not talking about a nominal amount,” Carnrite says. “At this point, we’re targeting up to 75 percent of expense reports being automatically reviewed and approved. This could save us around 150,000 to 200,000 person-hours a year—and that’s at the manager and director level.”

We’ve also added advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology into our expense tools. This now allows for automatic categorization of expenses, so employees don’t have to enter the category manually for each item.

“The end goal is an AI agent that can proactively create an expense report for you and ask you to review it. You would just validate it and move it forward, instead of building it from scratch.”

Salvador Segura, director of business programs, Field Capability Services

Additional future improvements could include expanded use of AI for data validation, receipt processing, and identification of inconsistencies across submissions. Over time, the goal is to support a standardized approval framework that adapts to regional differences while maintaining consistent risk evaluation and reducing manual workload.

At the next level, we’re hoping to use AI to eventually fully automate the creation of expense reports as well. This would be essentially the Holy Grail for this function.

“The end goal is an AI agent that can proactively create an expense report for you and ask you to review it,” says Salvador Segura, a director of business programs in Field Capability Services. “You would just validate it and move it forward, instead of building it from scratch.” 

It’s this kind of AI-powered work environment that we’re pushing for at Microsoft Digital as we play a leading role in our company’s ongoing Frontier Firm journey.

The post Simplifying expense approvals at Microsoft with AI-powered risk assessment appeared first on Inside Track.

Imagine a facilities service technician responding to a high‑priority heating issue. The service ticket has the right building, floor and space, but no clear indication of where in the space the problem exactly is—this can be a particularly challenging problem when dealing with large spaces like we do here at Microsoft. Making matters more complicated, the technician might also need specialized schematics that are behind walls and ceilings.

In the past, it might have taken that technician a long time to get that necessary context.

Not anymore.

Thanks to a solution we created that is internal to Microsoft, our indoor maps are now always current. (And while this solution isn’t presently available to customers, we’re sharing our story around it in hopes that you can learn from our approach.)

With these maps available, the service ticket mentioned above now includes a visualization of the floor plan, which immediately indicates the correct room and highlights the faulty equipment’s exact location (if already on the floor plan).

The technician can now diagnose the problem in minutes. This can be done on their equipment, without the need to understand how to use specialized software or having knowledge of the building’s layout.

This shows the value of indoor maps when they work correctly. But our maps here at Microsoft didn’t always work this way.

A long-standing map gap

For years, facility service technicians at Microsoft could access floor plans that were stored in a central repository but needed specialized software to view them. Our floor plan files came from a wide variety of vendors, with different naming conventions and drawing standards.

Initially, we created indoor maps using this data for some buildings requiring a lot of manual work. As a result, updates to the maps were slow and expensive. As soon as a map slipped out of sync with reality, teams stopped relying on it.

“Enterprises have struggled for years to maintain accurate indoor maps. The heart of this struggle is ultimately standards that are applied inconsistently to the source material.”

Vishu Admal, program and product lead, AI indoor maps initiative, Microsoft Digital

These issues had a real impact on our day‑to‑day operations:

• Our facilities teams didn’t have the spatial context in their work order to understand exactly where problems were happening, because they didn’t have convenient access to detailed map layers that indicated the precise location of building elements (such as plumbing, or heating and cooling systems).
• Our security teams couldn’t easily overlay incident data on floor plans.
• Our IT teams couldn’t map device locations to the real world with confidence and relied on PDF version of maps.

“Enterprises have struggled for years to maintain accurate indoor maps,” says Vishu Admal, our program and product lead for our AI indoor maps initiative here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The heart of the struggle is ultimately standards that are applied inconsistently to the source material.”

Recently, we’ve developed an intriguing solution: An AI‑driven mapping data pipeline—with out-of-the-box large language models (LLMs)—that recognizes patterns, identifies inconsistencies, and produces updated indoor maps every day, as the floor plans evolve and change.

Today, that data pipeline is keeping our indoor maps up to date for more than 500 buildings around the world. It supports the systems and teams that keep our campuses operating every day—facilities, space management, security, and IT.

And more importantly, this solution makes sure that when someone has a high-priority need for an indoor map, it’s completely accurate and current.

“The problem has always been tripping up on the varying quality and consistency of the AutoCAD files. This is especially true at enterprise scale, where drawings come from different firms and have different standards.”

I.M. Ndimubanzi, engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

From CAD to operational maps: Finding a solution

Some indoor mapping projects start with a simple assumption: The floor plan is already structured data.

Our project didn’t have that. What we had was computer-aided design (CAD) geometry, plus text, plus years of vendor variation.

Different architecture and construction partners drew buildings in different ways. Labels, layers, symbols, and even basic conventions (like how rooms were “closed” in a drawing) weren’t consistently followed. That inconsistency is what broke any attempts at automation.

“The problem has always been tripping up on the varying quality and consistency in the AutoCAD files,” says I.M. Ndimubanzi, an engineering manager in Microsoft Digital who is the technical lead for our indoor maps initiative. “This is especially true at enterprise scale, where drawings come from different firms and have different standards.”

So, we built a data pipeline that assumes the input will be messy, but it can still produce a reliable output, time and again.

Converting CAD geometry into render-ready maps

We split this work into three stages. In brief, these can be labeled as: parse, interpret, and serialize.

1. Parse CAD input into machine-usable signals

We start by extracting raw geometry and text from CAD using open-source parsing libraries. That gives us the basic data we can feed into downstream steps without forcing every file to look identical first.

2. Use AI for interpretation and hygiene

The hardest part of the work isn’t reading the CAD file. It’s interpreting what the drawing means when dealing with variations in room names, abbreviations, and other conventions (which may differ by vendor, region, or even building).

This is where we use AI-driven large language models to transform the extracted CAD signals into structured data.

Instead of manually cleaning and translating each file, we use AI models to ingest CAD drawings directly and interpret what the data represents. Walls become walls, rooms become rooms. Doors, elevators, and fixtures are identified as distinct, usable elements rather than raw line work.

That same approach helps solve a long‑standing data hygiene issue: inconsistent naming. For example: across the portfolio, the same type of space can appear as “Conference Room,” “Conf. Rm.,” “MPR,” or “Multi‑Purpose Room.”

The AI helps normalize those variations into standardized space categories, turning messy labels into consistent, structured data that can be reused across systems.

3. Serialize to GeoJSON with proven tooling

Once AI produces a structured representation, we convert the data into GeoJSON—a popular spatial data exchange and rendering format—using open-source tooling.

GeoJSON gives us a clean, reliable data source for our mapping tools. This keeps the final output consistent and predictable, which is critical for rendering at scale and integrating into other applications.

Note that this design is intentional: AI does the interpretation, while deterministic tooling does the formatting. This separation is what makes the pipeline stable.

“As long as they can add this SDK in their application or interface, they can connect to our databases. It gives them access to our map library.”

Amr Dawood, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital

Creating an SDK that makes maps usable everywhere

A mapping pipeline is only valuable if other teams can use the results without becoming mapping experts. That’s why we paired the mapping pipeline with a software development kit (SDK) that makes indoor maps embeddable inside operational tools.

“As long as they can add this SDK in their application or interface, they can connect to our databases,” says Amr Dawood, a senior software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “It gives them access to our map library. They can use predefined functions to choose the buildings, the layers they want to render, and how they want to display and order those layers.”

We built this SDK so product teams can treat the new indoor maps like any other UI component:

• Drop it into a web app and connect to our map storage without building custom integration
• Choose buildings and floors using built-in selectors and navigation patterns
• Toggle layers to show only what matters for the scenario, including specialized operational layers
• Overlay operational data on top of the floor plan, so teams can visualize work in spatial context, not just in tables
• Make the map interactive by adding pins, polygons, and other spatial annotations directly in the app experience

Under the hood, the SDK is built on MapLibre, and open-source toolset for interactive maps and geospatial visualization. It gives the team a mature rendering foundation without locking them into a bespoke mapping stack.

We also built the SDK for “plug and play” adoption. That means providing examples, tutorials, and guidance so teams can embed maps quickly and consistently, instead of reinventing the same integration patterns across multiple apps.

This is the part of the solution that turns the pipeline into a platform. It’s how we move from “we have maps” to “any team can build with maps.”

Turning floor plans into user interfaces

We’re currently integrating indoor maps directly into several of our facilities processes and applications. As we do, we’ve noticed an important change: Employees stop treating the floor plan as reference material and start treating it as the user interface for detailed building information.

“Managing a physical space through tables and charts only gets you so far. It’s much more powerful when that information is visualized through a floor plan.”

Harris Thamby, integration lead, Microsoft Digital

Take our LiveCampus app, for example.

Live Campus is an internal app used by the Microsoft Facilities team to aggregate all operational information about Microsoft buildings into a single, comprehensive view. It simplifies facilities management by integrating various data points and presenting them on a visual floor plan.

Historically, building data lived in tables, tickets, and dashboards scattered across multiple systems. None of it was spatially oriented by default. If something broke, you read a text description, then tried to figure out the location.

With our new indoor map solution, location comes first, and it’s bringing life to Live Campus.

Instead of navigating through multiple systems to gather information, Facilities employees can access everything they need in one place. The floor plan serves as the primary interface, allowing users to overlay different types of information, such as facility tickets, service issues, and role-based employee data.

This visual approach helps facility managers quickly identify and address problems, improving operational efficiency.

“Everything is aggregated and presented as a building view,” says Harris Thamby, who leads integration work for Live Campus in Microsoft Digital. “But managing a physical space through tables and charts only gets you so far. It’s much more powerful when that information is visualized through a floor plan.”

Live Campus uses the latest AI‑generated maps through our SDK. That means facilities teams always see the current layout, not a snapshot from months ago.

And because the map is up-to-date, teams can trust what they’re seeing.

We’re also making big changes to FacilityLink, our internal implementation of Dynamics 365 Field Service. The new indoor maps solution is becoming the center of the technician experience.

“Our facilities teams will use the same maps in Dynamics 365 Field Service. They can turn layers on and off to see exactly what they need. Where are the tickets? Where are people sitting? What areas are impacted?”

Sonaly Choudary, program manager, Microsoft Digital

As the integration progresses, technicians will be able to open a work order and see the associated indoor map alongside the request, either in FacilityLink on the web or through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile on a phone or tablet.

From the same screen where they read the details of the issue, they can also visualize the exact floor, room, and surrounding spatial context of the problem. This will reduce the need to switch between systems or return to a desk to look up drawings, helping technicians diagnose issues faster and with more confidence while they are already on site.

That spatial context—available on a mobile device instantly—changes how work gets prioritized.

“Our facilities teams will use the same maps in Dynamics 365 Field Service,” says Sonaly Choudary, a program manager with Microsoft Digital. “They can turn layers on and off to see exactly what they need. Where are the tickets? Where are people sitting? What areas are impacted?”

“When a technician responds to a work order, every minute matters. Historically, they had to jump between systems to find drawings, interpret layouts, and understand what was behind walls or ceilings. We’re eliminating that friction and giving technicians the spatial context they need to diagnose and fix issues faster.”

Michelle Schaefer, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Instead of scanning lists of open issues, facilities managers and technicians can see clusters of problems on a single floor.

They can spot patterns and determine when a single issue is affecting multiple teams or when a problem is isolated.

“When a technician responds to a work order, every minute matters,” says Michelle Schaefer, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital. “Historically, they had to jump between systems to find drawings, interpret layouts, and understand what was behind walls or ceilings. By embedding AI‑generated indoor maps directly into FacilityLink, we’re eliminating that friction and giving technicians the spatial context they need to diagnose and fix issues faster.”

The result?

It’s faster and easier for facilities teams to understand where an issue is, what assets are involved, and how to act—without leaving the system they already depend on. Indoor maps become a practical extension of FacilityLink, embedding spatial awareness directly into day‑to‑day facility operations. If a service ticket is opened, it’s no longer just text; it’s a pin on the map.

Outcomes and what’s next

As our maps become reliable and embedded into daily workflows, the solution stops being a mapping project. It becomes a platform with the potential for impact beyond facilities operations.

The most immediate outcome has been scale. We’re moving from selectively supporting a limited set of buildings to supporting the entire real estate portfolio. Maps will be onboarded, updated, and maintained automatically, without the manual effort that had slowed previous approaches.

That automation changed the economics.

Instead of paying for one‑off conversions or ongoing vendor updates, the mapping pipeline runs continuously. As layouts change, the maps are automatically updated. That consistency is what allows downstream systems to depend on the data.

We’re continuing to refine the mapping pipeline as models improve and standards evolve. The SDK can be expanded to support more scenarios and platforms. And additional layers and integrations will unlock new operational use cases across facilities, IT, and security.

As teams across Microsoft have learned more about AI indoor maps, the excitement and adoption potential keeps growing. When spatial data is accurate, current, and reusable, teams stop asking whether they can visualize a problem and start asking what else they can do with it.

That’s the real outcome of this work: Not just better maps, but better decisions, built on a shared, trusted source of spatial truth.

Key takeaways

Use these lessons to help you with your own efforts to produce indoor maps you can trust and embed in day-to-day operations:

• Start by standardizing your source drawings and naming conventions. Inconsistent CAD layers, labels, and symbols are the main blockers to automation, so define what “good input” looks like before you scale.
• Design your pipeline to expect messy input, not perfect files. Separate the work into clear stages (for example: parse, interpret, serialize) so you can improve each step without rebuilding everything.
• Use AI for interpretation and deterministic tooling for formatting. Let models infer meaning from CAD files, then convert to a stable format, such as GeoJSON, with proven conversion tools for predictable rendering.
• Build (or adopt) an SDK, so other teams can add maps to tools without becoming mapping experts. Provide common user interface patterns (building/floor lection, layer toggles, overlays, annotations) to standardize implementations across apps.
• Make maps useful by embedding them inside the tools people already use. Adoption accelerates when maps show up in tickets, dashboards, and mobile field workflows.
• Plan for automatic and continuous updates, governance, and trust. Daily automatic refresh, clear ownership, and validation checks keep maps aligned to reality and avoid drift.

Try it out

Learn more about the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app.

Related links

• See how we’re reimagining campus support at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Explore documentation for Azure Digital Twins, a Microsoft solution for modeling real-world spaces.
• Discover our strategies for making Microsoft transportation systems seamless with the power of data and AI.
• Dive into full details on Azure Machine Learning pipelines.
• Read about how to create an interactive search map with Azure Maps.

The post Transforming facility operations at Microsoft with AI maps appeared first on Inside Track.

Our teams across Microsoft Digital—the company’s internal IT organization—leaned in. We built tools, workflows, and AI enabled solutions at speed. Momentum followed, along with real enthusiasm and growth.

“We did a lot of good work building community and excitement. But at some point, we needed to evolve and put more structure around what we’d built.”

Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

But increasing scale required us to evolve our approach.

As adoption accelerated, we began to see duplication, uneven governance, and growing gaps between strategy and delivery. What helped us move fast early on wasn’t enough to sustain impact over time.

“We did a lot of good work building community and excitement,” says Qingsu Wu, a principal group product manager who leads the AI CoE at Microsoft Digital. “But at some point, we needed to evolve and put more structure around what we’d built.”

AI agents and solutions began appearing across Microsoft Digital. Different teams solved similar problems. Standards were interpreted differently. Reporting was inconsistent, and in many cases manual.

The question was no longer, “How do we help teams try AI?” It became, “How do we turn AI into consistent, measurable outcomes at scale?”

Answering that question required a change in how our CoE operated.

Rather than acting primarily as an advisory group, the AI CoE evolved into an execution‑focused function. Its role expanded from guidance to coordination, helping set priorities, define guardrails, and connect AI work directly to business outcomes.

The goal wasn’t to slow AI innovation down, but to help it move in the correct direction with more agility and better scalability.

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

The AI CoE connects AI strategy to execution across Microsoft Digital. It operates as a cross‑functional coordination layer that sets direction and creates shared accountability for how AI work gets done.

“We can see patterns that a single team can’t. We’re translating AI CoE strategy and enterprise priorities into clear execution plans that work in each organization’s context. That helps us align priorities and make sure the biggest bets are actually landing.”

Ria Khetan, senior program manager, Microsoft Digital

The CoE brings our leaders and practitioners together from AI, data, responsible AI, and operations to answer questions collectively. We use that cross‑disciplinary view to operate above individual projects without losing touch with day‑to‑day reality.

The CoE looks across the organization and answers questions individual teams can’t answer on their own.

• What AI initiatives are already in flight?
• Which ones matter most to the business?
• Where are teams duplicating effort?
• Where do we need clearer standards or stronger governance?

“We can see patterns that a single team can’t,” says Ria Khetan, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital who helps lead program management for the AI CoE. “We’re translating AI CoE strategy and enterprise priorities into clear execution plans that work in each organization’s context. That helps us align priorities and make sure the biggest bets are actually landing.”

We’ve designed the AI CoE to act as the connective tissue between leadership intent and execution on the ground. It helps ensure that AI work across Microsoft Digital moves forward with purpose, consistency, and measurable impact.

Building transformation on core pillars

The AI CoE establishes a common structure that helps our teams work toward the same outcomes, even when they are building different solutions.

“We use the CoE to bring consistency to how AI work gets done. It gives us a way to step back and ask whether we’re solving the right problems and whether we’re set up to scale.”

Don Campbell, principal group technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

The operating model is intentionally simple.

AI initiatives are reviewed against shared pillars that help teams think beyond individual projects. These lenses ensure the work aligns to business priorities, can scale safely, has a clear delivery path, and supports responsible adoption.

“We use the CoE to bring consistency to how AI work gets done,” says Don Campbell, a principal group technical program manager who leads AI strategy here in Microsoft Digital. “It gives us a way to step back and ask whether we’re solving the right problems and whether we’re set up to scale.”

Our CoE uses these four pillars to guide our work:

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

These pillars are the common language that helps us connect strategy to execution and make decisions across all teams and scenarios at Microsoft Digital.

Strategy

Our CoE strategy team’s role is to step back and create clarity.

Our strategy is driven from the organization’s top level, and executive sponsorship is crucial to executing our implementation well. When our transformation mandate comes from the organization’s leader, it resonates in every corner of the organization, every piece of work, and every task. We also encourage and welcome ideas from every level of the organization, empowering individuals to contribute their AI insights.

We maintain a centralized view of AI initiatives across Microsoft Digital, including agents, workflows, and AI‑enabled solutions. That visibility allows our CoE team to identify duplication, surface opportunities to scale successful ideas, and align investments to enterprise priorities. This creates a shared intake and prioritization model.

One of our CoE strategy team’s most significant responsibilities is prioritizing the idea pipeline for AI solutions. All employees can feed ideas into the pipeline through a form that records important details. The strategy team then evaluates each idea, analyzing two primary metrics:

• Business value. How important is the solution to our business? Potential cost reduction, market opportunity, and user impact all factor into business value. As our business value increases, so does the idea’s position in the pipeline priority queue.
• Implementation effort. We focus on clearly defining the problem statement—what the problem is, why it matters, who the customer is, the baseline metrics, and the plan to attribute value pre‑production. This ensures we prioritize AI for the most critical business problems and can measure impact before and after deployment.

By anchoring AI work in business outcomes from the start, the strategy pillar helps ensure the organization’s energy is spent on the work that matters most.

Architecture

Our architecture pillar defines how we help teams scale AI solutions without creating security gaps, compliance issues, or technical debt they’ll have to unwind later.

“The CoE introduces a framework to enable design reviews in the early development phase. We help make sure teams are choosing the right platforms and thinking about security and compliance from the beginning.”

Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

Before solutions move into broader use, our architecture team helps think through data readiness, platform alignment, and governance requirements. The goal isn’t to prescribe a single architecture, but to make sure foundational decisions won’t limit scale or create risk down the line. Many times, this means doing things before development, while other times it means making improvements after the initial development is done and the product or scenario is launched and being used. We also track our efforts with measurable metrics like usage.

One common pitfall is that teams may gravitate toward the most flexible platforms with full control, without fully understanding the associated security and compliance implications. To address this, we publish clear guidance to help teams choose the right platform—one that strikes the appropriate balance between flexibility and the security and compliance effort required.

Our architecture pillar helps prevent that by reinforcing a set of common expectations. Teams still build locally and move fast, but they do so within a framework that supports reuse, interoperability, and responsible operation built on enabling teams and employees to experiment with guardrails that keep our production systems safe.

“The CoE introduces a framework to enable design reviews in the early development phase,” Wu says. “We help make sure teams are choosing the right platforms and thinking about security and compliance from the beginning.”

Teams are encouraged to build on recommended platforms and services that support enterprise‑grade security, observability, and lifecycle management. This helps ensure solutions can be monitored, governed, and supported over time.

Security and compliance are never treated as downstream checkpoints. Architectural guidance reinforces the need to design with identity, access controls, auditability, and responsible AI principles from the start.

When solutions prove valuable, we look for opportunities to reuse architectural patterns, components, or services rather than rebuilding them in isolation. This reduces duplication and accelerates future work.

Roadmap

Our CoE roadmap team examines our employee experience in the context of our AI solutions and governs how we achieve the optimal experience in and throughout AI projects. It focuses on how our employees will interact with AI. Getting the roadmap right ensures user experiences are cohesive and align with our broader employee experience goals.

We’ve recognized AI’s potential to impact how our employees get their work done.

Their experiences and satisfaction levels with AI services and tools are critical. Our roadmap pillar is designed to encourage experiences across all these services and tools that are complementary and cohesive.

We’re focusing on the open nature of AI interaction.

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

A key part of this approach is disciplined experimentation.

Rather than treating every idea as a long‑term commitment, the roadmap pillar helps teams validate value early. Our teams know when they’re in an experimental phase and when they’re expected to operationalize. This gives our leaders a more consistent view of progress and risk. The net result is that dependencies between teams surface earlier, when they’re easier to resolve.

Culture

Our culture pillar ensures that AI adoption across Microsoft Digital is intentional, responsible, and sustainable.

Culture underpins everything we do in the AI space. Ensuring our employees can increase their AI skillsets and access guidance for using AI responsibly are critical to AI at Microsoft.

“We’re driving a shift from ad‑hoc AI usage to intentional, outcome‑driven adoption,” Khetan says. “That requires clarity, education, and shared expectations.”

In practice, that means the culture pillar defines how our teams are expected to adopt AI and integrate it into their work, not just what tools they can use.

Our culture team works with AI champions across the organization to translate enterprise AI priorities into local execution. Those champions act as two‑way conduits, bringing real‑world feedback and blockers back to the CoE and carrying guidance, standards, and learnings back to their teams.

Without this structure, AI adoption tends to fragment as teams experiment in isolation.

Our culture team has published training, recommended practices, and our shared learnings on next-generation AI capabilities. We work with individual business groups at Microsoft to determine the needs of all the disciplines across the organization. That work extends to groups as diverse as engineering, facilities and real estate, human resources, legal, sales, and marketing, among others. 

Responsible AI is embedded throughout that work.

The CoE reinforces responsible AI practices as part of everyday decision‑making—during design, experimentation, and scale. Teams are expected to understand not just what they’re building, but the implications of how they build it.

In the AI CoE, culture isn’t abstract. It shows up in how teams propose ideas, how they design solutions and how they measure success.

Fostering agent innovation

The true value of the AI CoE is evident when strategy, architecture, roadmap, and culture come together around real work.

A clear example of that is how we addressed the rapid growth of AI agents across the organization.

“That’s the core problem we’re trying to solve. In the past, admins had to go to multiple portals just to understand how many agents exist, and they all give different answers.”

Garima Tiwari, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our teams were building agents in different platforms, for different scenarios, and at very different levels of maturity. That flexibility accelerated innovation, but it also made it difficult to answer basic questions.

• How many agents exist today?
• Which ones are in production?
• Which ones touch sensitive data?

The strategy lens helped clarify what mattered most. Our goal wasn’t to inventory every experiment. It was to gain visibility into agents that were active, scaling, or depended on by others, and to ensure those agents aligned to business priorities and Responsible AI expectations.

Architecture quickly followed.

As the CoE looked at how agents were built, we quickly discovered that information about agents was fragmented across tools. Different platforms showed different numbers. Ownership wasn’t always clear. And governance signals were hard to reconcile.

“That’s the core problem we’re trying to solve,” says Garima Tiwari, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital leading our internal strategy and adoption of Agent 365. “In the past, admins had to go to multiple portals just to understand how many agents exist, and they all give different answers.”

This is where Agent 365—which we use to govern agents here at Microsoft—became a critical enabler.

Agent 365 brings together signals from multiple agent‑building platforms into a single, consolidated view. That visibility allows the CoE and administrators to understand agent inventory, ownership, lifecycle state, and governance posture in one place.

“Agent 365 is really about accurate inventory and observability,” Garima says. “It provides one number we can trust and a way to see how agents are behaving, who they’re interacting with, and whether they’re compliant.”

That architectural clarity changed how decisions were made.

Instead of guessing what was safe to scale, the CoE could see which agents were production‑ready, which needed remediation, and which should remain in experimentation. Security, privacy, and compliance considerations moved to earlier in the lifecycle.

“We can’t scale what we don’t understand,” Wu says. “Agent 365 helps us see what’s actually running so we’re not scaling something blindly.”

The roadmap lens then brought structure to execution.

“What changed was the mindset. Teams started thinking about manageability, security, and scale much earlier, not after an agent was already deployed.”

Don Campbell, principal group technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

Rather than standardizing everything at once, the CoE helped teams sequence work. Some agents stayed in pilot. Others moved toward broader rollout, informed by architectural and governance signals surfaced through Agent 365.

Culture and enablement ran alongside that work.

Teams began factoring operational readiness into design decisions instead of treating governance as a final checkpoint. Agent 365 isn’t positioned as a control tool at the end of the process, but as part of building agents the right way from the start.

“What changed was the mindset,” Campbell says. “Teams started thinking about manageability, security, and scale much earlier, not after an agent was already deployed.”

The outcome wasn’t a single standardized solution.

It was a repeatable approach within a shared CoE framework, supported by platforms like Agent 365, that made scaling AI more visible, more manageable, and more intentional.

That’s what the AI CoE enables at Microsoft Digital.

Key takeaways

If you’re just starting to consider AI usage at your organization, or if you’re already creating a standardized approach to AI, consider the following:

• Start with outcomes, not tools. AI work scales faster when teams align on the business problem first and select technology second.
• Design for scale from day one. Early architectural decisions around data, security, and platforms determine whether solutions can grow—or need to be rebuilt.
• Make experimentation disciplined. Clear paths from prototype to production help teams move fast without committing to ideas that haven’t proven value.
• Treat governance as an enabler, not a gate. Visibility and manageability, supported by platforms like Agent 365, make it easier to scale AI responsibly.
• Create shared accountability. Standard metrics and automated reporting turn AI activity into measurable progress.

Try it out

Learn more about how Microsoft Agent 365 enables agent governance and manageability.

Related links

• Discover, create, and onboard an agent in Agent 365.
• Use and collaborate with agents in Agent 365.
• Learn about responsible AI at Microsoft.

The post Powering the technical veracity of AI at Microsoft with a Center of Excellence appeared first on Inside Track.

• The case for AI in employee assistance
• Chapter 1: Governance means getting your data right
• Chapter 2: Implementation with intention
• Chapter 3: Driving adoption by breaking old habits
• Begin your journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent

The case for AI in employee assistance

The advent of generative AI tools and agents has been a game changer for the modern workplace at Microsoft. And one of the foremost examples of how we’re reaping the benefits of this agentic revolution is our deployment of our new Employee Self-Service Agent across the company.

Thanks to the power of AI, agents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, our employees—and workers everywhere—are discovering new ways to be more productive at their jobs every day. Recent research shows that knowledge workers are increasingly seeing big gains from using AI tools for work tasks. According to our Microsoft Work Trend Index:

As an AI-first Frontier Firm, Microsoft is at the leading edge of a transformation that’s bringing this technology into all aspects of our workplace operations. With tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot providing “intelligence on tap,” we’re forging a human-led, AI-operated work culture that enables our employees to accomplish more than ever before.

Bringing AI to employee assistance

As part of this move to embed AI across our enterprise, it was a natural step for us to apply this burgeoning technology to a common pain point for us and many workplaces today—employee assistance.

Workers in organizations large and small face many common issues in their day-to-day jobs. Whether it’s a problem with their device, a question about their benefits, or a facilities request, our typical employee was often forced to navigate a bewildering array of tools, apps, and systems in order to get help with each specific task.

This confusion is reflected in research showing that most workers are dissatisfied with existing employee-service solutions.

Our studies show that most employees have trouble finding the appropriate tools and resources they need to address their workplace-related questions.

Realizing that this was an ideal opportunity for AI, we set out to develop a state-of-the-art agentic solution. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we partnered with our product groups to develop and deploy the Employee Self-Service Agent, a “single pane of glass” that employees can turn to any time they need help. The product is now broadly available in general release.

“With this employee self-service solution, we’re shaping a new era in worker support. With AI, every interaction is intuitive, every resource is within reach, and help feels seamless—creating an experience that empowers our people and accelerates business outcomes.”

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

Because Copilot is our “UI for AI,” the Employee Self-Service Agent is delivered as an agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot. If your employees have access to Copilot, you can deploy the agent at your company at no extra cost. If your employees don’t have a Copilot license, they can access it via Copilot Chat if it’s enabled by your IT administrator.

For the initial development and launch of our Employee Self-Service Agent, we decided to provide agentic help in three categories: Human resources, IT support, and campus services (real estate and facilities). Every organization will have to make its own determination for which functions to include in their implementation. Note that the agent is inherently flexible and expandable; we plan to add additional capabilities, such as finance and legal, in the future.

We learned many lessons in the almost year-long process of developing and implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent across our organization worldwide. The goal of this guide is to pass on what we learned—including how we used it to provide value to our employees and vendors—to help you prepare for, implement, and drive adoption of your own version of the agent.  

“With this employee self-service solution, we’re shaping a new era in worker support,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “With AI, every interaction is intuitive, every resource is within reach, and help feels seamless—creating an experience that empowers our people and accelerates business outcomes.”

Before you start: Developing your plan

As you embark on your Employee Self-Service Agent journey, make sure to establish a clear and structured plan. This was a critical step for us in our deployment, and we can say with confidence that it will help you avoid surprises and increase your chances of a successful outcome.

Based on our experience here at Microsoft, the below is a high-level outline of the steps you should consider as you prepare for deploying your agent.

1. Define prerequisites
Start by making sure that all foundational elements for the agent are in place.

• Assign licenses to your employees who will interact with the agent. They will need Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat.
• Verify readiness by configuring your Power Platform environments, applying Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, and setting up isolation (limited and controlled deployment with guardrails in place) where needed.
• Ensure connectivity with critical systems by confirming that you have appropriate APIs and connectors available and functioning for the essential workplace systems that your organization uses (e.g., Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and ServiceNow).

2. Identify your core team and responsibilities
Successful implementation of the Employee Self-Service Agent requires collaboration across multiple roles and departments in your organization.

• Business owners from the areas your agent will cover—such as human resources and IT support—can help you define requirements, priorities, success criteria, and telemetry needs.
• Platform administrators, particularly for Power Platform and tenant/identity teams, can manage your technical configuration.
• Content owners and editors are needed to identify the knowledge sources to surface in the agent, curate new knowledge sources, and maintain the data underpinning these sources on an ongoing basis.
• Subject matter experts can provide important “golden” prompt and user scenarios that the agent should prioritize and answer accurately.
• Compliance, privacy, and security leaders and their teams are needed to address risk considerations.
• Support professionals can help build a structure for live agent escalation and ticketing operations (in situations where the agent is unable to provide a solution).
• Focus groups of end users assist with validating requirements and scenarios, as well as help with testing the agent.

3. Establish a clear timeline
We found that creating a schedule for the creation, implementation, and adoption of the agent is crucial. This phased approach will help you maintain momentum and accountability over the duration of the project.

For example, here’s a rough implementation timeline that you might use to gauge your progress:

4. Articulate your vision

Communicate your rollout plan to your team, including timelines and phases, and adjust it based on feedback. Establish clear goals and meaningful success metrics to guide you and make sure your efforts are in alignment with your company objectives. (Note: You may want to consider key upcoming projects or events in your organization and link the agent roadmap to them. This will help you meet your project’s success criteria faster and encourage quicker agent adoption.)

5. Define your governance

This phase will allow you to define policies and standards and conduct a thorough content audit to ensure accuracy, relevance, security, and sustainability.

6. Implement your agent

This phase involves configuration and integration, followed by testing.

7. Roll out the agent while driving adoption and measurement

We advise deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent using a phased, or ringed, approach. We started with a small group of employees, then gradually rolled it out to larger and larger groups  before finally releasing it to our entire organization.

We encouraged adoption with internal targeted communications and promotional efforts. Careful measurement enabled us to track impact and optimize agent performance. This type of concerted change management allowed us to share the latest product developments with our employees and to keep them excited and engaged with the tool.

By investing sufficient time and effort in the planning phase of your deployment, you’ll create a strong foundation for a secure, scalable, and successful self-service agent experience.

Chapter 1: Governance means getting your data right

When a Microsoft employee enters a query into an AI chat tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot, they know that they may not receive an individualized response that is directly specific to their situation. They are aware that they might need to verify the answer they receive with further research and additional sources.

But when it comes to our company-endorsed self-service agent, the stakes are different. Our employees expect to receive accurate and personally relevant responses when they ask for help. This is particularly true for queries related to important personal details, like HR-related questions about leave policies or benefits.

“People expect personally tailored and highly accurate answers, especially for HR moments that really matter. We designed the Employee Self‑Service Agent with that expectation in mind, pairing trusted data and deep personalization with strong governance controls so that privacy, security, and trust are built into every interaction.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

Although the Employee Self-Service Agent comes pretrained with basic HR and IT support data, we found that the quality of the responses that our employees receive is directly connected to the accuracy, currency, and depth of the information we provide to the tool. You’ll want to spend the necessary time and effort to make sure that your data governance process is well thought-out and thorough, so that your employees experience the best possible results.

“Employee self‑service has a higher bar than generic AI tools,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of HR strategy and innovation. “People expect personally tailored and highly accurate answers, especially for HR moments that really matter. We designed the Employee Self‑Service Agent with that expectation in mind, pairing trusted data and deep personalization with strong governance controls so that privacy, security, and trust are built into every interaction.”

Major considerations for governance

We learned that before you configure your agent, you need to establish guardrails that protect your data’s integrity and that build your employees’ trust. These considerations will form the backbone of your governance framework:

• Managing requirements: Define what the agent must deliver and align your stakeholders on clear, prioritized goals and objectives.
• Determining and managing resources: Ensure you have the right people, systems, and funding in place to support your full product lifecycle.
• Data security: Protect your sensitive employee information with strong controls, compliant storage, and least‑privilege access.
• User access: Establish who can use, administer, and update your agent, with appropriate permissions and guardrails.
• Change tracking: Monitor your updates to content, configurations, and workflows so your agent always reflects your current policies.
• Reviewing: Regularly evaluate your content’s accuracy, the agent’s performance, and your organizational fitness to help you keep your employees’ experience with the agent trustworthy.
• Auditing: Maintain traceability for compliance, incident investigation, and quality assurance across all of your data flows.
• Deployment control: Manage where, when, and how you roll out new versions of the agent to reduce disruption and ensure consistency.
• Rollback: Prepare a fast, safe path to reverting your changes if something breaks.

We found that addressing these considerations early in the process creates a governance structure that is proactive rather than reactive, increasing the quality of responses and setting your organization up for success.

Architecture essentials

Understanding the architecture of our agent helped our governance teams make informed decisions about our configuration and integration. To do that, they needed to review and understand its key architectural components. You’ll need to do the same.

Here’s a list of the different architecture components that our team assessed, to help you get started on your own process:   

• Topics: Structured intents (e.g., “view paystub”) that align to employee questions and drive consistent answers.
• Domain packages: Pre-curated bundles for different agent segments (like HR and IT support) that provide reusable patterns, prompts, and integrations.
• Knowledge sources: Documents, intranet pages, FAQs, and databases that ground responses in authoritative content.
• Connectors: Secure integrations to systems of record (like Workday or SAP SuccessFactors) can help enable read/write operations. (Because the Employee Self-Service Agent was built with Copilot Studio, it has access to more than 1,400 different connectors.)
• Instructions: Governance-approved rules and prompts that shape tone, guardrails, and escalation behavior.

Assessing and preparing your content

A key early governance step is to audit all relevant content in your knowledge bases. This process should include assessing, updating, and, if necessary, restructuring this information before it is ingested by the agent.

An important caveat here is that the agent’s ability to understand which policies and procedures apply to which employee relies on your content having consistent metadata, permissions, and content structure. We found that before feeding your data into the agent, you need to:

• Inventory existing content: Your content will incorporate many different types, such as SharePoint pages, Microsoft Teams posts, PDFs, intranet articles, and knowledge-base documents. The goal of the inventory process is to identify content that is complete rather than outdated, duplicative, or siloed; if there are issues with the content, they should be addressed before loading into the agent.
• Assign knowledge owners: The owners should be SMEs who can help validate, tag, and maintain the content going forward. Part of this process is training up knowledge owners to be able to prepare and maintain content in ways that make it easily consumable by both agents and people.
• Structure content for discoverability: All your content needs to have accurate metadata, well-defined topic pages, and consistent naming so that the agent can surface the right information at the right time.

We found that completing a thorough content audit helps us ensure that the Employee Self-Service Agent isn’t just chatting—it’s delivering trusted, up-to-date answers that save your workers time and effort as they go about their day.

Be aware of tone and conversational flow

Providing vetted and well-structured data to the agent is important, but it’s not the entire battle. You’ll also need to make sure your agent is given clear guidance on conversational tone and instructions on what to do in specific scenarios.

Make sure you incorporate:

• Global instructions: Define the agent’s voice, behavior, and escalation rules to ensure consistency and trust. 
• Topic-level triggers: Map natural language phrases to specific workflows (such as “reset password” or “check PTO”) so the agent routes these common queries correctly.
• Advanced knowledge rules: Prioritize which data sources to use in ambiguous scenarios, and define when the agent should ask clarifying questions.

Taking these steps gave our agent a better chance of being accurate, helpful, and aligned with our organization’s specific preferences.

Addressing common scenarios with “golden” content

Another vital aspect of your content audit is identifying the most frequently accessed information in each topic area.

A good example comes from the preparation of our IT support content for ingestion by the Employee Self-Service Agent. One of the focuses of this effort was on so-called “golden prompts:” the 20 or so topics that generate up to 80 percent of our employee queries (a version of the famous “80/20 rule”).

Our golden prompts are a curated set of scenarios that:

• Represent our critical user workflows and edge cases
• Possess clear, expected responses (golden responses)
• Cover core functionality that must never break

We made sure that the agent was providing high-quality responses for these common scenarios—we recommend you do the same.

Including “zero prompt” content

Another important aspect of your content process should be to develop “zero prompts.” These are preconfigured prompts in the agent that the user can simply click on to get an answer for a common issue or request.

For example, if one of your employees wants to understand how to set up a VPN, they simply click on the zero prompt provided for that topic. The tool then gives them complete instructions on how to set one up.

During our deployment of the agent, one case where we prepopulated the tool with content for a specific, high-demand scenario came when Microsoft made a major announcement regarding employees returning to the office. We knew this policy change would generate a lot of questions from our employees.

In preparation for this, we asked Microsoft 365 Copilot to create a single document that pulled in all the “return to office” material found in its verified HR content database. We then made this document available to the agent. Just by taking that simple step, we saw our user satisfaction ratings in the tool jump from 85 percent to 98 percent for that issue!

In your own deployment, think about what issues and topics generate the most questions from your employees. You can then prepare specific content to address these scenarios, which will increase your chances of success with the agent.

Data security and compliance

Data security was a high priority when we developed our agent, especially because it must necessarily access sensitive HR information on a regular basis. During product development, we made sure that the agent adhered to enterprise-grade security standards, including identity federation, least-privilege access, and encrypted storage.

Because the agent is built on Copilot Studio, it supports robust data-loss prevention features. The agent also complies with regulatory frameworks like General Data Protection Regulation through built-in auditing and data-retention policies.

One of the big advantages that an AI agent has over a static website or similar data source is the ability to personalize responses for each user. At the same time, we had to make sure that the agent had guardrails in place to avoid overexposing sensitive information. This included detailed disclaimers to help call out these kinds of responses and flag them for more careful handling.

Our agent complies fully with our accessibility standards as well. Like all Microsoft products and services, the tool underwent a rigorous review to ensure it was fully accessible for all users.

Responsible AI

Whenever a new AI application is launched, there may be concerns raised about potential challenges regarding bias, safety, and transparency. That’s why the Employee Self-Service Agent follows the Microsoft Responsible AI principles by default.

When you enable the sensitivity topic in your agent, it screens all responses for harassment, abuse, discrimination, unethical behavior, and other sensitive areas. We tested the agent thoroughly for objectionable responses before it was launched to a broad internal audience at Microsoft.

In addition, the agent includes an emotional intelligence (EQ) option. This feature is designed to make responses more empathetic, context-aware, and relevant for diverse user audiences. It analyzes the conversation’s context and tailors the agent’s replies to ensure that users feel understood and valued throughout their session (which could be particularly relevant for any conversations related to sensitive HR topics, such as family leave). The EQ option is customizable and can be turned off by your product admins.

Key takeaways

The following are important considerations for data governance when you deploy your Employee Self-Service Agent:

• Employee expectations regarding accuracy and relevance are high for employee self-service tools, which makes data governance a key aspect of your deployment.
• Consider which data repositories are best to incorporate into your agent, and make sure they are up-to-date and well-structured. This process requires a thorough content audit.
• Pay special attention to the so-called “golden prompts” that make up a large percentage of expected queries. The agent’s answers to these questions should be top-notch.
• Restructuring content can improve response quality. When we anticipated huge interest in a particular topic, such as workplace policy changes, we restructured our content on that subject and saw a significant jump in user satisfaction.
• Build your agent to meet or exceed high standards for data security, privacy, and Responsible AI. These are vital concerns for any product that has access to sensitive personal information.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re getting the most out of agents internally here at Microsoft with good governance. This story shares what our Microsoft Digital governance team learned while deploying AI-driven tools here at Microsoft.   
• Find out how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility internally with Microsoft Copilot Studio. This post explains how we’re empowering our employees to create and extend Copilot-based agents using Copilot Studio.
• Read about how we’re infusing responsible AI principles into all our AI tools and projects at Microsoft. An article that explores the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard and how it informs our work with AI technologies at Microsoft Digital.

Further guidance for you

• Explore Microsoft Learn documentation for Microsoft Copilot Studio to read about key concepts in governance and security.
• Examine Microsoft Learn content related to security and data protection in Power Platform.
• Conduct the Microsoft 365 Copilot Optimization Assessment to understand your level of AI adoption and chart your course.
• Access Microsoft Learn documentation for Microsoft 365 Copilot to learn about data, privacy, security, and Zero Trust principles.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

Deploying a powerful and versatile tool like the Employee Self-Service Agent is no simple task. It requires guidance and buy-in from top leaders at the company, as well as detailed planning and execution across disparate parts of your organization. Here, we identify some of the key steps that we took here at Microsoft that can help guide you when launching your own self-service agent.

Determine category parameters

One of the first major decisions around implementing the agent is deciding which business function—we call them agent starters—to choose for your initial implementation.

We recommend starting with HR support or IT help (we started with HR). Both agent starters can be deployed into a single Employee Self-Service Agent experience, but they must be deployed one at a time. 

So you know, we’ve built the Employee Self-Service Agent to be connectable with other first- or third-party Copilot agents, enabling a seamless handoff to these agents without having to navigate to other tools or interfaces.

Understanding your deployment steps

There were four essential stages involved in the deployment of our agent, each with multiple steps. Here’s a quick rundown that you can use at your company:

1. Preparation for deployment
   • Establish roles: Define who will manage, configure, and support the tool, assigning responsibilities to ensure accountability during deployment.
   • Set up your environment: Prepare the necessary hardware, operating system, and network configurations so the agent can run smoothly.
   • Set up third-party system integration: Ensure your infrastructure can securely connect and exchange data with external systems that the agent will need to integrate with.
2. Installation
   • Install the agent: Deploy the core Employee Self-Service Agent software on the designated servers or endpoints.
   • Install accelerator packages: Add any desired connectors that enable the agent to communicate with commonly used systems for HR, payroll, IT support, etc.
3. Customization
   • Configure the core agent: Adjust default settings to align with your organization’s policies and workflows.
   • Identify knowledge sources: Specify where the agent will pull information from, such as internal knowledge bases or FAQs.
   • Provide common questions and responses: Add employee FAQs to improve the agent’s ability to respond quickly and accurately.
   • Identify sensitive queries: Flag questions and responses that involve confidential or regulated information to ensure they’ll be handled securely.
4. Publication
   • Approve the agent: Complete internal reviews and compliance checks to confirm the agent meets your organizational standards before full rollout.
   • Publish the agent: Make the configured agent available to your employees in your production environment.

Customization

The Employee Self-Service Agent operates as a custom agent within Copilot Studio, using our AI infrastructure via the Power Platform. The agent is constructed on a modular architecture that allows you to integrate it with your own enterprise data sources using APIs, prebuilt and custom connectors, and secure authentication mechanisms.

To streamline this integration process, we provide a library of prebuilt and custom connectors through both Copilot Studio and Power Platform. Preconfigured scenarios include connecting to major enterprise service providers such as Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and ServiceNow. (View the full list of connectors offered by Copilot Studio.)

These connectors facilitate data exchange with the following systems and other agents in this ecosystem:

• HR information systems
• IT systems management
• Identity management
• Knowledge base platforms

We found that third-party integrations require setup effort and technical expertise across stakeholders in your tenant. Be sure to get buy-in and involve all relevant departments that will be impacted.

Rollout: A phased approach

As previously noted, we started our agent with HR content and then added IT support (we later expanded to include campus services help as well). We rolled the agent out to different groups of employees and geographic regions around the world over the course of months, adding new knowledge sources to the different categories at each step along the way. This gave us an opportunity to gather user data and refine performance of the tool as we went.

Adding campus support services required us to handle queries and tasks related to dining, transportation, facilities, and similar subjects. This was a challenging addition, because the facilities and real estate space—unlike the HR and IT support areas—doesn’t have many large service providers, which are easier to provide prebuilt connectors for.

One area that did lend itself to prebuilt connectors, however, was facilities ticketing.

Because many of our campus facilities vendors use Microsoft Dynamics 365, we were able to create an out-of-the-box connector in the agent for their ticketing process. You can take advantage of these kinds of preconfigured tools in your deployment.  

Key takeaways

Here are some things to remember when implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent at your organization:

• Decide which starter agent you will deploy first. We recommend starting with a single agent covering one area (vertical), such as HR or IT support, and then expanding from there.
• Consider a phased rollout to allow time to refine responses and ramp up the number of topic areas and knowledge sources installed in your agent.
• Use the prebuilt connectors to make it easier to integrate the agent with your existing systems.We developed customized connectors for major HR and IT service providers and a Microsoft 365 Dynamics connector to integrate with our many facilities vendors around the world.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Learn how we’re embracing this “agentic” moment at Microsoft. This post describes how we’re integrating agents into many of our workflows and processes at the company.
• Get our step-by-step guide to how we’re unleashing API-powered agents at Microsoft. This article describes what we’ve learned from deploying agents internally at the company.

Further guidance for you

• Learn how to prepare for a successful Microsoft Employee Self-Service Agent implementation. This Microsoft 365 Copilot Blog story includes a webinar video on the same topic.
• Discover a step-by-step guide to getting your organization prepared for the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Check out our Microsoft Learn content about deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Learn more about the customizable accelerator packs that come with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read our Microsoft Learn content about installing the agent.
• Explore Microsoft Learn content about customizing your agent.
• Dive into detailed information about integrating the agent with Workday, ServiceNow, and SAP SuccessFactors.
• Work through this learning path to discover how you can create agents with Copilot Studio.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption by breaking old habits

Once upon a time, when our employees needed help with a technical issue or an HR question, they literally picked up the phone and called the relevant internal phone number. That quickly evolved into an email-centered system, where employee questions were sent to a centralized inbox that would then generate a service request. Still later, chat-based help was introduced.

Using AI to handle employee questions and service requests is a natural step in this evolution, as large-language models were built to parse vast data repositories and return the right information (often with the help of multi-turn queries and responses). And by encouraging self-service, an AI agent can help meet employee needs faster while saving the organization’s staffing resources for other needs.

But getting employees to change their habits and use a tool like the Employee Self-Service Agent wasn’t going to be as easy as just flipping a switch. Here’s how we handled this important change management task at Microsoft.

Adoption across verticals

A key principle that we learned during the adoption process was that 80% of our change management activities for the agent are applicable to all our verticals (whether it be HR, IT support, campus facilities, or another category). We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel each time we added to the topics that the agent covered.

This allowed us to create a change management “playbook” that we could use each time we expanded to a new category. So, while roughly 20% of the strategies we used were specific to that vertical, the vast majority were the same, which saved time as we moved through onboarding the different categories.

Leadership is key

To get our employees to change the way they ask for help, we found it essential to get the support of our key leaders, something we refer to as “sponsorship.”

We found that good sponsorship doesn’t just come from your central product, communications, or marketing groups. It is equally vital to invest in relationships with local leadership in different regions as you roll out the agent (especially in multinational companies like ours).

Local leaders understand the various regional intricacies—including language, functionality, and the rhythm of the business—that can help inspire their segments of the workforce to adopt a new tool, and then evangelize it to others in turn. Working closely with these kinds of sponsors will help you pull off a successful adoption campaign.

If you have works councils, be sure to seek out your representatives and solicit their feedback on your agent experience early on. You can help them understand how the agent was developed and trained, then address any concerns they raise.

We’ve found that once our works councils are made aware of the careful processes we go through to protect user privacy, and to ensure compliance with our Responsible AI standards, they become enthusiastic supporters and can help promote agent adoption. (Read more about our experience with our works councils and the Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout.)

Defining your messaging

Work with your internal communications team to come up with a well-planned messaging framework for your agent rollout. Based on our experience, it’s likely you’ll need to communicate across a wide variety of teams and organizations like HR, IT, facilities, finance, and so on.

It’s important to be clear about how you’re positioning the product for your employees. This will allow you to develop both overall messaging for general use, but also content tailored to specific teams or employee roles. The more sophisticated your messaging, the more likely it is to be effective in encouraging user adoption of the agent in their regular workflow.

Listening to feedback

As Customer Zero for the company, our employees are our best testers and sources of feedback during our product development process. The Employee Self-Service Agent was no different, and we continue to gather crucial feedback and user data throughout the internal adoption process.

Because the agent is a tool centered on helping your workers resolve challenges and get quick answers to questions, you’ll want to set up your own systems for capturing their feedback and make sure the agent is meeting a high-quality bar.

We found that setting yourself up for success when it comes to listening to your employees involves two major aspects: Developing and deploying a system for gathering employee sentiment about the product, and then creating a system for analyzing that feedback and funneling the findings back to your IT team.

Some of the types of feedback and methods we used to gather it during the development process included:

• User-testing data
• User satisfaction ratings
• User surveys, interviews and other research
• Voice of the customer (in-product feedback)
• Pilot projects and focus groups (smaller segments of users)
• IT support incidents
• Usage data and telemetry
• Community-based early adopter feedback (similar to our Copilot Champs community)
• Social media feedback and comments

You can choose from among these options to set up your own feedback mechanisms, or come up with something customized to your implementation.

Calibrating your usage goals

Remember that the Employee Self-Service Agent is not an all-purpose AI tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot, which your employees might use a dozen times a day. Instead, they may only need assistance from HR or IT support, tools, and information sources a few times a week (or even less). Your usage targets should be calibrated accordingly.

At the same time, the more categories of assistance you add to the agent, the more your usage levels can grow—along with user expectations.

When we decided to add campus support (dining, transportation, and facilities-related needs and queries), one of the motivators was to provide information that users might need on a more regular basis. This addition helped us increase adoption and build daily usage habits for the agent among our employees.

Making the agent your front door for employee assistance

Your employees may have longstanding habits around the ways that they seek assistance, such as moving quickly to email a service request, or immediately engaging a live support technician. There might even be someone helpful in the office next to them that they lean on for IT support. We’re aware that breaking such habits can be a challenge.

That’s why we decided to change our own employee-assistance workflows. In the case of HR, we are planning to remove the option to email a centralized alias for help, which was the default in the past. This forcing function will instead prompt our employees to turn to the agent first for assistance, creating a “front door” for all our HR service requests.

For our IT support function, we are switching from a Virtual Agent chatbot to the Employee Self-Service Agent, which should provide users with a richer experience and a higher rate of resolution.

Of course, our main goal is for the agent to handle an employee’s issue without having to seek further assistance. But what happens when the agent cannot resolve their problem or handle their request? That’s why we’ve also implemented a “smooth handoff”—either to create a service request or connect the user to a live agent for specialized assistance.

There are three key steps in this process:

1. The Employee Self-Service Agent can identify when the user has reached a point where they need to move to a higher level of assistance via a live agent or a service request. (Note that we also allow the employee to make that determination for themselves.)
2. We then give them different options for how they want to connect to live support.
3. When the employee is transferred to a live technician, the Employee Self-Service Agent is able to pass on the chat history from its session with the user. That way, the technician or staff support can quickly get up to speed on the situation, see what the employee has already asked about and tried, and start helping them immediately.

Enabling the employee to quickly and smoothly transition to a higher level of support without leaving the chat increases user satisfaction and makes them more likely to return to the agent the next time they need assistance.

Strategic outreach to employees

Of course your workers, like ours, are busy with their day-to-day job functions. They may be resistant to trying a new tool or going through special training on how to access employee assistance. Or they may just not know about it.

Because of our regionally phased rollout of the agent, email was one of the most effective tools we used to connect with specific audiences and make them aware of the tool. With specific email lists, we could make sure that only employees in that phase of the rollout were seeing the message.

A key aspect of getting our employees to adopt any new tool is reinforcement—the process of sustaining behavior change by providing ongoing incentives, recognition, and support. Some of the reinforcement strategies we used for the agent included:

• Targeted communications: Emails and organizational messages invited employees to try the agent as they received access
• Multi-channel campaigns: Promotion of the agent via portals, newsletters, digital signage, and more to keep it at the forefront of employee minds
• Training: Workshops and micro-learning sessions about the agent
• Social campaigns: Posts highlighting the tool to increase awareness and gather employee feedback (see details below)
• Leadership support: Managers modeled usage of the agent and promoted it regularly
• Processes: The tool was part of regular employee workflows

One very important communications channel that we used in our adoption efforts was Microsoft Viva Engage. We set up a private Engage community for the Employee Self-Service Agent, then populated it with each new wave of users as they were given access to the tool (eventually all were given access when the tool went companywide).

We used this channel for various kinds of messaging:

• General product awareness
• Updates on new or changing functionality
• Answering questions or addressing frustrations (two-way dialogue between users and the product team)
• Fun and helpful “tips and tricks” that users could try (these could come from the product team, leadership, or individual product “champions”)

We also inserted messages about the new agent into our regular communications with different audiences, including HR professionals, IT support personnel, and internal comms staff at the company. And we regularly messaged company leaders about it, so they could encourage their teams and direct reports to support the effort and evangelize for the tool.

One thing we did was make clear to our employees that even though the agent was not able to handle an issue today, it might be able to in a month or two. That’s why ongoing communications to users was important.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

Of course, as a natural language chat tool, the Employee Self-Service Agent doesn’t require formalized training. The product itself is designed to guide users and allow them to experiment, simply by stating their needs in plain language. Most employees will already be familiar with AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, so effectively using an AI-powered employee-assistance agent should be a low bar to clear.

Managing expectations

Your Employee Self-Service Agent rollout will be an ongoing journey as you add topic areas, functionalities, and other product features. Your product roadmap will evolve as you learn more about what your employees need with this kind of AI solution.

One factor to consider is how to set realistic user expectations about what the agent can do while the product matures and improves. As we gradually rolled out the tool, we messaged that the agent was in “early preview,” which helped avoid employee disappointment when it couldn’t handle a specific request.

“One thing we did was make clear to our employees that even though the agent was not able to handle an issue today, it might be able to in a month or two,” Ajmera says. “That’s why ongoing communications to users was important, as new capabilities were added and speed and accuracy improved.”

We also created messaging for early users indicating that their testing was an integral part of making the tool more effective. This created a positive feedback loop while also keeping employee expectations reasonable.

How we measured success

Carefully tracking and analyzing your success metrics throughout your development and release of the product is a high priority. Without this step, you are working in the dark.

At Microsoft, we identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) for a particular product and then use them as our North Star for any internal release. But the specifics of those KPIs can vary from product to product.

For example, measuring the monthly average user (MAU) statistics might be extremely important for an all-purpose productivity tool like Microsoft 365 Copilot. But for an employee-assistance tool, the goal is not necessarily regular use, because employees aren’t constantly facing challenges that require help (we hope). Usage statistics may also be affected by certain events or cyclical needs, such as annual employee reviews or a major technology change (like a significant Windows update).

With this in mind, we identified certain key metrics for the Employee Self-Service Agent. In this case, the top KPIs included:

• Percentage of support tickets deflected
• Net satisfaction score
• Latency period
• Reliability
• Total time savings
• Total cost savings
• Identified and prioritized issues (reported back to product group)

Overall, we focused on the rate at which employees were able to resolve issues without opening a support ticket, as this would likely generate the greatest return on time and cost savings. We came up with an overall target across the different verticals of 40% ticket deflection, and we’re making solid progress toward this goal as we continue to refine and improve the agent.

Part of our measurement process is a monthly progress meeting of key project stakeholders, where all KPIs are evaluated to see if our targets are being met. If the results do not meet expectations, we identify the potential causes and discuss what adjustments need to be made to address these shortfalls.

Key takeaways

Here are some key things to remember when it comes to adoption efforts for your Employee Self-Service Agent:

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Most of your change management and adoption strategies for the agent will be the same across different regions and help categories.
• Line up product sponsors. Finding leaders and others across the organization to help you promote the Employee Self-Service Agent within their own groups, functions, and regions can make a big difference in gaining employee trust and encouraging adoption.
• Set up proper listening channels. You’ll want to gather as much feedback as possible from your employees as you roll out the agent so you can understand what is working well and what needs improvement. This kind of feedback loop can also make your employees feel heard and help them shape the tool.
• Make the shift to agent-first help. Employee habits for seeking assistance can be resistant to change. We decided that turning off the “email to create a service ticket” workflow was a great way to nudge our workers to recognize the agent as the first option for their assistance needs.
• Be strategic in your communications. Use tools like email, Viva Engage, and other appropriate communications channels to target your communications and encourage a two-way conversation with employees about the agent. Sharing fun tips and encouraging peer support are other ways to increase awareness and engagement with product.
• Identify your key metrics. We determined our benchmarks for success for this particular type of agent, then tracked them and made the results available to key stakeholders. This allowed us to measure the impact and effectiveness of the product.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

Although some of the blog posts below are about adoption efforts related to Microsoft 365 Copilot, they can give you ideas on how we promote internal adoption of agentic AI products at Microsoft.

• Find out how we’re reimagining campus support with the Employee Self-Service Agent. This post describes how we targeted popular employee queries—such as “What’s for lunch?”—to drive adoption of our new agentic tool in the facilities and real estate space.
• Read about how we drove Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva. This article explains how Viva provides a powerful suite of tools that can assist with your adoption efforts.
• Learn how we created an internal Microsoft 365 Copilot Champs community to help drive adoption of the tool. This article covers how we created a special community of Copilot enthusiasts at Microsoft, who provided peer training and support for their coworkers’ Copilot journeys.  
• Discover how we built an AI-powered continuous improvement culture at Microsoft. This article provides a detailed examination of how we use data to track adoption and continuously improve our products and processes within Microsoft.
• See how we’re supercharging our internal communications with Microsoft Viva. This post explains how we use tools like Viva engage to build trust and encourage two-way dialogue with our employees about important topics, company initiatives, and key product rollouts.

Further guidance for you

• Explore the formal Adoption Guide for the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read the product group’s guide for deploying an Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Check out our Microsoft Learn content about collecting usage data and feedback on the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Begin your journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent

Agentic AI offers incredible promise to transform employee productivity, giving individuals access to powerful tools that enable them to accomplish more. We believe the Employee Self-Service Agent is another step along that path, allowing workers to get instant help with tasks that used to be cumbersome and time-consuming.

“We’re excited to get the Employee Self-Service Agent out and into the hands of our customers, so that they can reap the same benefits that we’re already seeing from it. As we continue to refine the product and expand the number of verticals it can cover, we expect to realize exponential efficiency gains and capture even more cost savings across our entire organization.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

Now that you’ve read about our experience deploying the tool, it’s time to start your own journey. Successful implementation means your people will spend less time on the phone with support staff or hunting through web pages and other resources for help with routine employment tasks and more time devoted to their productive work, reducing job-related pain points and frustrations.

You can benefit from the lessons we’ve learned and the many helpful features and capabilities that we’ve built into this product, all of which are designed to make your implementation as fast, easy, and effective as possible.

“We’re excited to get the Employee Self-Service Agent out and into the hands of our customers, so that they can reap the same benefits that we’re already seeing from it,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “As we continue to refine the product and expand the number of verticals it can cover, we expect to realize exponential efficiency gains and capture even more cost savings across our entire organization.”

Key takeaways

Here are some of the essential top-level learnings we gleaned from our deployment of the Employee Self-Service Agent, which you should keep in mind as you start out on your own deployment path:

• Identify and engage the right people. You’ll need buy-in and advocacy from leaders across the organization; the involvement of key stakeholders from HR, IT, legal, and compliance; and technical guidance from admins, license administrators, environment makers, and knowledge-base subject matter experts.
• Develop your plan. Understand the major phases of governance, implementation, and adoption of the tool, and make sure that you have adequate resources and support for each phase.
• Verify the quality of your content. Your chances of success will be better if you undertake a thorough content assessment to address the currency, accuracy, and structure of all relevant knowledge bases. Pay particular attention to the topics and tasks that are in greatest demand by employees when they access help services.
• Consider a phased rollout. Releasing your Employee Self-Service Agent to progressively larger groups of workers across your organization allows you to gather data and feedback and improve the performance and relevance of the agent over time. You can also expand the number of categories that your agent covers as you go, increasing the impact and appeal of the tool.
• Communicate strategically to promote adoption. Convincing employees to break longstanding habits when seeking help is a challenge. Email is helpful for targeting specific groups of employees, but be sure to use tools like Viva Engage to create community, answer questions, provide fun tips and tricks, and announce new capabilities and options.
• Set clear goals and measure against them. Come up with a targeted set of KPIs that reflect your organization’s needs and aspirations, then develop a plan to capture data for each of these indicators and a regular reporting cadence to keep stakeholders informed of progress toward your goals.

Learn more

How we did it at Microsoft

• Read the official Employee Self-Service Agent product release announcement.
• Learn how we’re accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• View a series of Microsoft Learning Community videos about deploying the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Explore the Microsoft Learn content related to the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Discover how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Explore our leaders’ guide to enterprise AI maturity in five steps.
• Watch a video from the Understanding Microsoft Agents series devoted to the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Try it out

• Learn more about how you can begin your own journey with the Employee Self-Service Agent.

The post Deploying the Employee Self‑Service Agent: Our blueprint for enterprise‑scale success appeared first on Inside Track.

He didn’t plan it.

Yet somehow, he became a Viva Engage superstar.

“Modern leadership is about kindness, it’s about empathy, and, frankly, it’s about authenticity. With Engage, I get to talk to my 1,000-plus-member team every day. I get to know them, and they get to know me.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

When Vedula looks back at why he first started posting on Microsoft Viva Engage, it was because he wanted to connect with a team that was too big to meet with one-on-one. The team also spans multiple continents and time zones.

It was about being real and accessible.

“Modern leadership is about kindness, it’s about empathy, and, frankly, it’s about authenticity,” says Vedula, a corporate vice president of engineering who leads our IDEAS (Insights, Data, Engineering, Analytics, and Systems) team here at Microsoft.

“With Engage, I get to talk to my 1,000-plus-member team every day,” he says. “I get to know them, and they get to know me.”

That’s the “why” in this story.  

The “what” is how Vedula became a Viva Engage superstar—he is now arguably the most influential person on the platform here at Microsoft.

Connecting with your employees

For many leaders, the challenge isn’t deciding what to say to their team—it’s figuring out how to build visibility and trust with employees spread across regions and time zones. At Microsoft, that challenge has reshaped how leaders like Vedula think about communication, presence, and influence in a digital workplace.

Traditional leadership communication models based around periodic team meetings and carefully phrased messages don’t always scale. They can inform, but they rarely invite participation. And when communication stays unidirectional, leadership presence can begin to feel distant, even invisible.

“What stands out about Ravi’s use of Viva Engage is how naturally he connects with his stakeholders. He brings technical depth without losing the human element, and this combination has expanded his reach across the organization.”

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president of Viva Engage

That’s why more leaders are rethinking not just what they say, but how they show up. Leadership presence isn’t about volume or polish. It’s about showing up consistently, in ways that invite participation and dialogue.

The journey that Vedula took from new Viva Engage user to influencer offers a clear example of how leadership presence can scale without becoming impersonal.

“What stands out about Ravi’s use of Viva Engage is how naturally he connects with his stakeholders,” says Murali Sitaram, a corporate vice president of Viva Engage. “He brings technical depth without losing the human element, and this combination has expanded his reach across the organization.”

Leadership with Viva Engage

Download the eBook to learn more about Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey—and to chart your own course.

Sitaram says his colleague’s goal has always been about creating a dialogue with employees to give them a closer connection to their work and our company mission.

“Ravi does this with transparency and openness, qualities that are accentuated by his use of the Engage platform,” Sitaram says.

From broadcast to conversation

Vedula first started using Engage because he wanted a way to show up consistently for his team, to build trust, and be visible, and he wanted to do this without relying on one‑directional broadcasts or infrequent all‑hands meetings.

Engage gave him a place to speak directly and listen openly.

“Every Engage post is a statement of culture. It’s like a culture flare we’re sending up every time.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

What makes Vedula’s approach distinctive isn’t a communications plan or a carefully curated feed. It’s the decision to treat Engage as a place for conversation rather than corporate messaging. Instead of polished announcements, he uses storylines to recognize milestones, celebrate people, share personal anecdotes, reflect on lessons learned, and respond directly to employee comments.

Those everyday moments become signals—not just of what leadership values, but of how leaders can participate alongside their teams. “Every Engage post is a statement of culture,” Vedula says. “It’s like a culture flare we’re sending up every time.”

“Ravi’s use of Viva Engage shows exactly why we built deep integrations across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. By sharing openly through storylines, he’s created a trusted channel that meets employees where they work. That’s the kind of leader‑driven communication ecosystem we envisioned.”

Jason Mayans, vice president of product management, Viva Engage

Today, he posts consistently—often multiple times a week with lots of engagement. His team doesn’t just read his posts; they respond to them.

Meeting employees where they work

Using Viva Engage to meet employees inside the flow of their daily work enable Vedula to be persistently present to his employees.

“Ravi’s use of Viva Engage shows exactly why we built deep integrations across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365,” says Jason Mayans, vice president of Product Management for Viva Engage. “By sharing openly through storylines, he’s created a trusted channel that meets employees where they work. That’s the kind of leader‑driven communication ecosystem we envisioned.”

When communication shows up in the flow of work, leadership presence shifts from an event to a rhythm—something employees experience regularly, not just during major announcements or all‑hands meetings.

Over time, that rhythm of consistent communication shapes culture.

“Customers often ask what great leadership communication looks like in Viva Engage. Ravi is one of the examples I point to. His storylines feel real, relatable, and useful—and employees respond. It’s the kind of engagement I hope other leaders are inspired to model.”

Steve Nguyen, principal program manager, Viva Engage Customer Experience

Recognition feels authentic. Participation feels safe. Leadership becomes something employees experience consistently, rather than something reserved for formal moments. Comments and reactions aren’t afterthoughts; they’re part of the conversation—and part of how trust is built.

For Vedula, that visibility isn’t about scale for its own sake.

“It’s about ensuring people feel seen, heard, and connected to the work they do and the mission they support,” he says. “Consistent, everyday engagement reinforces that I’m present as a leader—I’m not just observing from a distance.”

Putting leadership principles into practice

From a customer perspective, Vedula’s journey offers a practical model for what effective leadership communication can look like with Viva Engage.

“Customers often ask what great leadership communication looks like in Viva Engage,” says Steve Nguyen, a principal program manager for Viva Engage Customer Experience. “Ravi is one of the examples I point to. His storylines feel real, relatable, and useful—and employees respond. It’s the kind of engagement I hope other leaders are inspired to model.”

What stands out in Vedula’s approach to using Viva Engage isn’t polish or personality.

“In the era of hybrid work, one of the biggest challenges in employee communications is helping leaders stay connected at scale. Viva Engage is a powerful tool to help leaders stay connected to their employees in the daily flow of work, rather than only during big events like an all-hands meeting.”

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications

It’s consistency, authenticity, and a willingness to treat communication as a shared space rather than a broadcast channel. Different leaders will bring different styles—but the underlying principles remain the same.

Crucially, Vedula’s approach doesn’t rely on personality or scale.

It relies on trust.

“In the era of hybrid work, one of the biggest challenges in employee communications is helping leaders stay connected at scale,” says John Cirone, a senior director of global employee and executive communications. “Viva Engage is a powerful tool to help leaders stay connected to their employees in the daily flow of work, rather than only during big events like an all-hands meeting.”

Leadership in digital spaces is cumulative. Each interaction either reinforces or weakens credibility. Scaling leadership isn’t about saying more—it’s about listening well and showing up consistently in the places where conversations already happen.

“I can’t be in every room… but the impact of what I’m saying can be felt in every room when I post on Engage.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

Vedula’s evolution from first Engage post to superfan favorite illustrates a broader lesson: when leaders treat communication as an opportunity for participation instead of a performance, employees feel empowered to help shape that culture.

Digital workspaces deserve the same care and intentionality as physical ones. The conversations that unfold there—day by day—send powerful signals about trust, recognition, and belonging.

As Vedula puts it, “I can’t be in every room… but the impact of what I’m saying can be felt in every room when I post on Engage.”

Key takeaways

Here are some insights that leaders can use to strengthen connection and trust in their organizations:

• Leadership presence is harder, and even more important, at scale: As teams spread across locations and time zones, visibility and trust don’t happen automatically. Leaders need deliberate ways to stay present so employees continue to feel seen, heard, and connected to the work.
• Dialogue builds trust faster than broadcast communication: Two‑way conversations signal openness and respect in ways one‑directional announcements cannot. When leaders invite participation and respond in the same spaces as their teams, trust compounds more quickly.
• Consistent, everyday engagement reinforces culture: Recognition, reflection, and small moments of interaction add up over time. Regular participation helps culture become something employees experience daily, not just during major events or when reading formal communications.
• Meeting employees in the flow of work increases connection: Communication that surfaces alongside the tools employees already use feels more natural and accessible. When leadership presence shows up in the flow of work, engagement becomes a habit rather than a special effort.
• Leadership communication is most effective when practiced consistently and intentionally: Impact comes less from polish and more from purpose. Leaders who communicate thoughtfully and consistently—focused on connection rather than performance—create spaces where trust and participation can grow.

Try it out

Download the eBook to learn more about Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey—and to chart your own course.

Related links

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Viva Engage at your company.
• Read how we supercharged internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Engage.
• Learn how our Copilot Champs helped us drive Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption internally with an assist from Viva Engage.
• Learn how Microsoft 356 Copilot in Viva Engage connects employees with insights.

The post Leadership at scale: The organic rise of a Viva Engage superstar at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track.

That’s where the promise of AI transformation comes in.

We at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, have developed and implemented a diverse portfolio of agentic, AI-driven capabilities that are now embedded directly in our day-to-day IT operations. These agentic systems—AI solutions that can reason across data, recommend actions, and, in some cases, execute workflows with human oversight—turn telemetry and insights into action, making our IT infrastructure and processes more resilient, auditable, and proactive.

“We’ve crossed an important threshold in the evolution of AI for IT. We’re now using the capabilities these technologies provide to transform all our core IT services, making everything we do on that side more efficient and secure.”

Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital

While your organization’s IT infrastructure may not match our size or complexity, we believe any company can benefit from the AI-driven innovations that we’ve implemented in recent years.

We focus our AI investments across three core areas:

• Network management and infrastructure
• Tenant and device management
• Employee and engineering productivity

We’re also using AI across our IT systems to increase security, both as a standalone initiative and an integrated priority. This principle is baked into all our compliance, vulnerability response, and governance scenarios.

“We’ve crossed an important threshold in the evolution of AI for IT,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We’re now using the capabilities these technologies provide to transform all our core IT services, making everything we do on that side more efficient and secure.”

Pillar One: AI in network management and infrastructure

We have applied AI throughout our global network and IT infrastructure, enabling us to keep up with the ever-increasing demands for capacity and services while reducing disruptions and incidents.

The different innovations we’ve made that fall under this pillar demonstrate the breadth of the opportunity to reimagine IT services with AI.

Supporting enterprise IT at Microsoft: Our three pillars

Network management with AI

• AIOps
• Network infrastructure Copilot (NiC)
• Vuln.AI
• Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant

Tenant and device management with AI

• Digital Asset Management Copilot
• Works councils and tenant trust review
• Enterprise vulnerability management
• IntelLicense
• myDevice AI Agent

Employee and engineering productivity with AI

• ADO Copilot
• ADO Work Item Assistant
• Automation Hub/Automation Catalog

The impact of AI technologies on enterprise IT operations at Microsoft can be divided into three main areas: network management, tenant and device management, and employee and engineering productivity.

AIOps: Transforming network management with operational excellence

AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, involves the application of machine learning, big data analytics, and automation to streamline and improve IT operations processes. In Microsoft Digital, we use AIOps to help us to manage our complex global IT infrastructure.

Our AIOps solution leverages sophisticated data insights to detect and remediate network issues before they become impactful. We use our internally developed AIOps tools to turn raw signals and institutional know-how into guided actions that have led to major time and cost savings.

AIOps benefits include:

• Enhanced productivity: AIOps reduces cognitive load by automating routine tasks, allowing teams to focus on more strategic activities.
• Proactive issue resolution: AIOps executes automatic troubleshooting and remediation, minimizing downtime and reducing incident impact.
• Improved decision-making: AIOps leverages advanced analytics and machine learning to provide actionable insights, which enhances our decision-making capabilities.

The impact of our AIOps work is huge: thousands of hours of engineering time saved and a significant reduction in total disruption time for employees across the company’s global workforce.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure AI Services

NiC: A network engineer’s companion

Our Network Infrastructure Copilot (NiC) serves as an everyday companion for our network engineers and field IT professionals. With NiC, our IT pros can use natural-language queries to gain quick, accurate insights into network health, configuration states, documentation, troubleshooting resources, and live device data—all in one place.

Some of the typical use cases for NiC include:

• Summarizing syslogs for specific devices
• Recommending circuit upgrades
• Checking deployment status
• Listing devices missing required controls (such as AuditD)

In aggregate, NiC streamlines network device lifecycle management and operation, delivering significant time savings while improving the consistency of operational decisions.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Data Explorer

Vuln.AI: Proactively keeping our systems safe

Leaving just a single connected device unpatched could put our entire enterprise at risk. That’s why we developed Vuln.AI (Vulnerability Management Copilot), our intelligent agentic system that has transformed the way we identify, prioritize, and resolve these vulnerabilities across our enterprise network.

Vuln.AI coordinates two agents that enable our network engineers to gather, analyze, and respond to vulnerabilities proactively using AI insights. The research agent maps the vulnerability to the Microsoft infrastructure, significantly increasing accuracy and reducing manual effort and time involved. It then feeds this information to an interactive AI agent, which becomes a gateway for a security engineer or device owner to interface with the data, ask detailed questions, and gather the required information.

Thanks to Vuln.AI, we’ve been able to accelerate infrastructure compliance, reduce exposure windows, streamline security operations, improve endpoint hygiene, and lower operational risk. Our data show thousands of hours of engineering time saved and meaningful improvement in the accuracy of impacted-device identification.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Data Explorer

Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant: Scaling support to meet demand

Engineering disciplines across Microsoft rely on production-like Azure lab environments for testing Windows updates, investigating incidents, and building customer demos. We created the Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant to enable the rapid creation and management of these lab environments in the face of increasing user demands across our operations. This tool uses AI to help speed tasks such as the development and testing of Windows updates, investigating security incidents, and creating prototypes for customer demos.

Time is a critical component for all lab scenarios, whether it be resolving a customer support issue or testing a Windows Update ahead of a patch release. Our goal is to reduce “Customer Pain Time” (CPT), which measures the amount of time it takes to solve a customer’s problem. Every hour saved in the support process represents a multi-hour reduction in customer pain.

Our most recent data shows that Managed Cloud Labs AI Assistant reduced tickets submitted to our Tier 1 teams by 50% and saved 500 hours by leveraging support chats, configuration guides, and other artifacts In addition, new user onboarding training tickets were reduced by 90%, and individual support interaction time was reduced from an average of 20 minutes to 30 seconds.

Related products:

Azure OpenAI, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Bot Framework, Azure Adaptive Cards

Pillar Two: Tenant and device management

One of the most complicated dimensions of managing IT services at Microsoft is our tenant. This refers to the internal instance of all our cloud services, including Teams channels, SharePoint sites, Power BI workspaces, apps, and email accounts, as well as the millions of devices used by our global workforce.

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a number of AI-powered tools and solutions to help us manage this gigantic management challenge.

Digital asset management with AI: Governing the tenant

Microsoft empowers our employees to create assets—apps, groups, sites, Power Platform environments, Power BI workspaces—at self-service speed, and our governance must match that pace. Our Digital Asset Management Copilot is a multi-agent solution that surfaces risk and policy violations, recommends fixes, and enables self-service remediation.

Our employees can access a Copilot-like experience to self-manage their assets and ensure app compliance accountability. The agent surfaces insights and recommendations related to asset compliance like oversharing of sensitive documents, highlights tenant assets that pose a security risk, offers remediation mechanisms, and can execute compliance tasks with end-user or admin validation.

The benefits include a more secure enterprise tenant and an embedded culture of compliance: Simplify compliance responsibilities, making them intuitive and seamless for our employees. Success is gauged through end user NSAT scores from our compliance solutions.

The scope of this tool spans more than 1.5 million digital assets in the tenant. The benefits include a more secure enterprise tenant and an embedded culture of compliance. With the help of the Digital Asset Management Copilot, we aim to reach our overall goal of 90% compliance with policies covering ownership, labeling, oversharing, and periodic attestation across the tenant.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service, Power BI Copilot

Works councils and tenant trust reviews: Optimizing tenant onboarding

In the past, fragmented and manual processes around works councils and tenant trust reviews consultations in the European Economic Area  could result in delays to our product launches by as much as four to six months. Our AI-driven optimization program streamlines the end-to-end process, improving submission quality and routing and providing other efficiency recommendations.

The result of these efforts is significant: We’ve managed to reduce the average works councils and tenant trust review cycle times from 133 days to 40—about a 70% improvement—while strengthening trust and transparency across roughly 17 European Economic Area countries.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service, Power BI

Enterprise Vulnerability Management: Reducing risk to our device fleet

Our extensive companywide Windows device fleet is exposed to vulnerabilities for extended periods after remediations (patches) are applied, increasing the risk of security breaches and operational inefficiencies. Relying on manual processes can lead to slow response times.

Enterprise Vulnerability Management (EVM) is a multi-phase strategy that uses AI technology in combination with Microsoft first-party vulnerability management solutions to proactively secure and maintain the fleet. While Vuln.AI helps us keep our enterprise infrastructure safe and secure, EVM does the same for our fleet of Windows devices.

EVM minimizes risk and reduces manual effort by integrating advanced detection, automated remediation, and compliance acceleration, minimizing risk and manual effort. This holistic approach ensures our devices stay secure and compliant with minimal IT intervention, delivering resilient, self-healing endpoints across the enterprise.

AI-driven EVM delivers measurable impact across our security, compliance, and IT efficiency. Our goal is to reach 95% compliance within a week of a major patching event while reducing operational overhead and enhancing enterprise resilience.

Related products:

Windows Autopatch, Intune, Windows Update

IntelLicense: Our AI-driven license optimization and audit readiness

Managing a software estate the size of ours—including 28 disconnected systems, 400,000 software assets, and more than 800 suppliers—requires license intelligence. IntelLicense is a set of advanced, AI-driven solutions we’ve developed to help us revolutionize our software discovery and acquisition processes.

These solutions optimize our software asset management throughout the enterprise software lifecycle, reducing fragmented data, lowering audit risk, and accelerating decision-making. These changes have delivered substantial cost savings and efficiency improvements. One standout example: Our external vendor audits that previously took an average of 154 days are targeted to drop to about 15 minutes, thanks to IntelLicense changes.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Service

myDevice AI: Transforming our IT asset management

Ensuring the security of our physical assets requires a unified and accurate inventory. Fragmented IT asset data leads to inconsistent policies and exposes vulnerabilities, making it difficult for security teams to quickly isolate threats and limit potential impact.

The myDevice AI Agent advances an AI-native approach to IT asset management across our IT tenant. The agent automates our high-volume employee requests, clarifies inventory, and streamlines our procurement. While this is occurring, the agent’s recommendation engine matches devices to our users’ needs to improve satisfaction and security.

Early results from myDevice AI include an approximately 50% reduction in time and costs in asset management (eliminating thousands of hours in manual processes annually), as well as improved security and a more personalized device-procurement experience for employees. In time, we will broaden this impact as agentic workflows expand to include labs, printers, conference rooms, and Internet of Things devices.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Service

Pillar Three: Our employee and engineering productivity

Building the software and systems needed to power Information Technology at Microsoft is a time-intensive job. Our engineers have been hard at work building AI-powered solutions that make building and maintaining those systems more efficient and streamlined, answering the question, “How can we apply AI to make this more efficient?”

Here are a few of the solutions we’ve found to help cut down the time and effort involved in some of the routine, day-to-day IT procedures that help keep our systems running smoothly.

ADO Copilot: AI with Azure DevOps

ADO Copilot empowers all our developers and product managers by providing instant, AI-driven insights and automation within Azure DevOps (ADO). This AI-driven assistant seamlessly integrates into ADO and acts as a “trusted copilot” with natural-language capabilities that automate workflows; enhance productivity, compliance, and velocity; and amplify decision-making across the planning, building, and deployment phases.

This agentic solution reduces the time we spend searching for information, managing permissions, planning sprints, summarizing KPIs, and resolving engineering friction points. It enables our engineering teams to move from planning to execution faster and with greater quality and consistency.

The early results from our use of this tool show extensive time savings, which projected over a full year would mean 73,000 fewer hours of engineering time required for the same output.  We’ve also seen greater developer satisfaction and faster movement from planning to execution.

Related products:

Azure DevOps, Azure AI Service

ADO Work Item Assistant: Automating our ADO processes

Building consistent, high-quality ADO work items manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Our ADO Work Item Assistant is a generative AI-powered tool that streamlines the creation and understanding of Azure DevOps work items, including features, user stories, tasks, bugs, and custom item types.

The benefits of our assistant include:

• Greater efficiency: The potential to cut the amount of time it takes to craft an ADO feature or user story in half (50%).
• Project delivery enhancement: A streamlined approach mitigates errors and inconsistencies.

By leveraging the power of AI within Azure DevOps, we can significantly simplify and accelerate the work-item authoring process for our product management and engineering teams, improving quality and reducing workload.

Related products:

Azure DevOps, Copilot Studio, ES Chat

Automation hub and catalog: Solving task fragmentation

Large enterprises face major productivity challenges stemming from scattered information, fragmented systems, and reliance on numerous disconnected apps. This fragmentation leads to increased meetings, duplicative effort, and significant time spent on lower-level tasks.

Automation Hub/Automation Catalog is our customizable Teams app—built on Power Platform and Power Catalog—that addresses this challenge by applying AI-powered automation solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems. Common automations include a daily consolidated task list, cancelled-meeting alerts, flags for important emails, and nudges on unanswered messages. The app streamlines workflows and jump-starts productivity gains, enabling you to enhance operational efficiency while maximizing your ROI.

Related products:

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform

The future of AI in IT

As enthusiastic as we are about our progress so far, we’re even more excited about the great potential that AI agents show in terms of lowered costs, time saved, and boosted productivity across our IT operations.

“The advent of AI agents is the next big step in AI-powered innovation. We are actively working towards our vision of deploying, governing, and managing a fleet of agents across our IT organization, pushing Microsoft to the boundaries of the AI Frontier.”

Monika Gupta, partner group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

We’re anticipating that these solutions will continue to scale up as we further optimize and standardize large language models and agent patterns in our engineering organizations. Multi-agent orchestration will make an impact on governance and vulnerability response, and autonomous actions will become more common in everyday IT workflows. Measurement rigor will continue to sharpen, ensuring that value is tracked and amplified as AI tools and technologies proliferate across the enterprise.

“As exciting as it’s been to see the many practical applications of AI across our IT portfolio the last two years, 2026 is shaping up to be even more exciting,” says Monika Gupta, partner group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “The advent of AI agents is the next big step in AI-powered innovation. We are actively working towards our vision of deploying, governing, and managing a fleet of agents across our IT organization, pushing Microsoft to the boundaries of the AI Frontier.”

Key takeaways

Here are some important factors to consider as you contemplate adding AI tools and innovations to your IT operations and workflows:

• Think holistically: Evaluate the major categories of your IT organization where AI can drive transformation—network management, tenant and device governance, and employee productivity.
• Leverage AIOps for resilience: Use AI-driven operational tools to automate troubleshooting, reduce downtime, and improve decision-making across your network infrastructure.
• Embed compliance into workflows: Implement AI-fueled governance solutions that make compliance intuitive and self-service, reducing risk while fostering a culture of accountability.
• Accelerate vulnerability response: Adopt multi-agent AI systems to proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities, minimizing exposure windows and operational risk.
• Boost productivity with AI assistants: Deploy AI Copilots and automation hubs to streamline engineering tasks, reduce cognitive load, and eliminate inefficiencies caused by fragmented systems.
• Plan for scale and autonomy: Prepare for the next wave of AI in IT—multi-agent orchestration, autonomous workflows, and rigorous measurement frameworks to amplify value across the enterprise.

Try it out

Learn more and sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Azure AI apps.

Related links

• Learn how we’re enhancing our network reliability with AIOps and Network Infrastructure Copilot.
• Find out more about our AI-powered leap into vulnerability management at Microsoft.
• Check out our playbook for becoming a Frontier Firm in the AI era.
• Explore our 5-step guide to enterprise AI maturity.
• Discover how we’re transforming the employee experience at Microsoft with AI.
• Read about how we’re using AI to reinvent our network security practices.

The post AI at scale: How we’re transforming our enterprise IT operations at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track.

Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best.

Powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI, Viva enables our employees—and anyone who uses it—to hone their skills and acquire new ones. It gives our managers data-driven insights that help them make better decisions. And with new Copilot Analytics integration, Viva is enabling leaders to measure and optimize the impact of AI across the organization. Ultimately, Viva helps us—and organizations like yours—build inclusive, thriving cultures where people can achieve their full potential.

Our team, Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources (HR) and our leadership, deployed Viva across Microsoft to accelerate our evolving growth-mindset culture and help ensure that our employees thrive.

Supporting employee engagement

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to power, protect, and transform Microsoft. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. In partnership with HR, our internal business partner and customer, our team obsesses over every dimension of an employee’s experience, from early on when they are a candidate for employment to when they become an alumnus of the company. We steward employees’ digital experience across all aspects of their work, ensuring that they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure they need to be productive on the job, regardless of what they do or where they do it.

Continuing to improve the experience our employees have with Viva requires a steady company-wide effort to build awareness of improvements being made on the platform, including the integration of Copilot and AI, and to drive usage. It’s an effort that’s both technical and cultural, driven by Microsoft HR in partnership with our team and the Viva product group.

Evolving our culture

Microsoft HR is an important driver of organizational culture at Microsoft, helping our employees thrive in a growth mindset culture with a focus on being customer-centered, diverse and inclusive, and unified as One Microsoft. Microsoft leadership and the HR team sponsor and advocate for Viva as our internal experience platform.

The HR team’s collective expertise, developed in HR centers of excellence, has been a key influence on Viva’s development and implementation. HR centers of excellence are groups of experts and leaders in areas such as culture, talent management, people analytics, learning, and other people practices. They help drive company-wide HR programs and processes using evidence-based research and external benchmarks. HR teams serve as experts in the employee life cycle, providing insights into core HR functions such as onboarding, wellbeing, recruiting, and career growth.

From the start, our teammates in HR have been Viva advocates, always on the lookout for opportunities to streamline work using Viva for existing HR programs and processes and recommending new HR employee-experience scenarios that shape the future of Viva product design. As our team in Microsoft Digital and HR deployed and drove adoption of Viva internally, we found new inspiration for product features and improvements.

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

At Microsoft Digital, we are early adopters of our own technology. We believe in our products, and we obsess over making them better for our customers. This all happens within a culture and practice we think of as being Customer Zero for the company.

Customer Zero is our internal journey to make our products better using our own business experience. Across our company, we respect employee privacy, data-access regulations, and the laws of the countries and regions where we operate while using powerful tools to understand how work gets done. By acting as Customer Zero for Viva, our team in Microsoft Digital provides valuable feedback that enables the product team to develop features and experiences that further benefit our employees and our customers.

Throughout the Viva adoption process, our Customer Zero relationship has included the Viva product team—as they have developed new modules and features, we in Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR have been their first customers.

Our Customer Zero approach requires involvement from all three contributors—Microsoft Digital, HR, and our product groups. This involvement creates dependency among the three contributors for successful deployment, adoption, and testing. It also creates a cycle of benefits that positively affects all three contributors and, ultimately, Microsoft’s customers:

• Microsoft Digital. As the team responsible for implementing and supporting Viva within Microsoft, our team has direct access to the product group. This provides us with:
  • Access to preview features and capabilities on a controlled rollout schedule.
  • Direct support from the Viva product team for software updates and testing.
  • Support from Microsoft HR for driving cultural change and adoption and encouraging feedback from Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft HR. Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital technology teams have been partnering to drive Viva adoption to accelerate culture and business outcomes. This gives us:
  • The ability to guide feature development in Viva for specific use cases and scenarios within Microsoft.
  • The ability to contribute thought leadership in Viva’s product roadmap and overall design.
  • Assurance that the Viva product team is building a platform designed to meet business needs and evolve culture.
• Microsoft product groups. Our product groups have in-place test and feedback environments that consider both technical and cultural perspectives. Practically, they get:
  • Enterprise testing conducted by our team in Microsoft Digital in real-life scenarios within the global Microsoft context. Input from Microsoft subject matter experts in crucial Viva subject areas such as employee experience, HR processes, learning, and knowledge management.
  • Access to existing tools and capabilities across Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR tools that are already in place. We’ve developed a wide variety of apps and tools used for HR processes. The code and capabilities in these tools can be used in Viva modules and components.
  • A controlled feedback loop: As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR directly communicate with the product group.

Customer Zero is our way of improving our products and services before we release them to our customers, and it reflects our commitment to making Viva—and all our enterprise apps and services—the best they can be, based on our own internal usage at Microsoft.

Enriching our employee experience

We’ve had great success driving usage and adoption of Viva across Microsoft through structured, globally relevant change-management activities. Enabling employees to thrive and be their best from anywhere by bringing knowledge, learning, resources, and insights together into the flow of work is always the central focus of our larger Viva adoption. At the same time, much of the practical implementation happened at the individual Viva module level, where each module supports culture evolution and employee experience at Microsoft.

Viva Engage

We use Viva Engage to build community with purpose across Microsoft—bringing our employees together across our organization to connect with our leaders, their coworkers, and our communities. It provides an experience that enables our employees to crowdsource answers and ideas, share their work and experience, and find belonging and connections at work. Engage also supports peer-to-peer knowledge sharing with dedicated Microsoft 365 AI adoption communities where employees can ask questions, get support from peers and administrators, and learn best practices for using Copilot effectively.

Viva Engage home feed

Engage has become the primary platform we use for enterprise social communication at Microsoft, supporting large-scale campaigns such as Copilot boot camps that help employees build shared understanding of AI and develop confidence using it. These campaigns activate communities and strengthen leader visibility, helping leaders to engage employees at-scale. We also use the integration of Copilot with Engage to refine our posts and to suggest where employees can post their updates to maximize their effectiveness and reach their intended audience.

Viva Amplify

Viva Amplify empowers organizations’ communication teams and leaders to elevate their message and energize their people. The app centralizes communication processes in a single space and offers writing guidance to help messages from leaders, corporate communications, and HR to resonate with employees. Communicators can orchestrate messages across multiple channels, manage their campaigns from a single coordinated workspace, and use engagement insights to refine and improve future communications.

At Microsoft, we use Amplify to organize and streamline our internal communications workflows, centralizing campaign management while simplifying publishing and reporting. Amplify helps us ensure that messages land consistently across audiences by using AI to optimize messaging and measure engagement. Business leaders at Microsoft use Amplify and Engage to run large, structured campaigns—such as Copilot adoption efforts—that reach employees across regions and roles, meeting people where they are and helping build shared understanding at scale.

Viva Amplify overview

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to guide organizations toward better work habits and norms to improve wellbeing and productivity. Viva Insights respects employee privacy while leveraging Microsoft 365 data to measure the day-to-day actions that contribute to our culture and success, like how employees use their time, their collaboration habits, and how they operate across team, business, and geographic boundaries. Viva Insights has also become a valuable tool for helping managers understand how employees are adopting AI.

Viva Insights dashboard

At Microsoft, we use Insights to promote a more productive workplace culture across all levels of the company using capabilities like Copilot Analytics, teamwork habits, and operational insights:

• Copilot analytics: Copilot Analytics integration with Insights enables managers to observe how employees are engaging with AI technology and agents and offer actionable insights into adoption patterns and usage trends. This data helps leaders identify opportunities for further AI-driven innovation and support within their teams.
• Teamwork habits: Insights promotes productive teamwork habits by using team-level insights to help managers maintain regular 1:1 personal interaction and keep up with outstanding tasks to unblock the team and recognize strengths and accomplishments.
• Operational transformation: Insights helps managers and business leaders focus on streamlining operations and improving productivity, including such areas as meeting effectiveness and AI-driven improvements in process efficiency. Insights has helped us to measure the shift in meeting culture at Microsoft: thanks to AI-powered recaps and summaries, employees who aren’t central to a meeting can now catch up asynchronously, saving time and improving productivity.

By aggregating and evaluating this kind of data at the highest levels of the company, we’re able to use organizational trends to make changes that help us improve our employees’ experience while respecting individuals’ privacy.

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

Glint and Pulse are voice-of-employee solutions that we use to transform feedback into action, at scale. The all backed by deep people-science rigor, Copilot-assisted insights, and native integrations across Microsoft 365.

We’re using these tools for multiple purposes while we navigate our AI transformation:

• Benchmarked org-wide sentiment: Glint enables our functional leadership teams to assess org-wide employee sentiment and drive targeted action—including via Employee Signals, our twice-yearly HR-led employee sentiment survey, our annual global Communications community survey. This enables our leaders to compare how AI is affecting workflows across different teams, functions, and parts of Microsoft, rather than looking at one org in isolation.
• Democratized local insights: Pulse enables our business leaders to send brief surveys in a local capacity, outside of the standardized org-wide programs. Our leaders use our Copilot templates to understand how their teams are getting the most value from AI—and where they still need help learning!
• Strategic initiative tracking: For key transformations like Copilot adoption, Glint and Pulse integrate seamlessly into our broader, companywide change management efforts with native experiences easily available in Copilot Dashboard to gather feedback from employees on additional change management support needs, highlight breakthrough success stories, and understand how Copilot adoption is driving changes in employee experience

Surveying our employees

Together, these tools help enable leaders throughout our organization keep up to date with how our employees are feeling as they navigate culture and technology transformations. This ensures our leaders get the critical, timely feedback needed to accelerate and achieve success in bringing their employees along in times of change.

Like Insights, Glint and Pulse include built-in privacy safeguards such as aggregation and differential privacy, so our HR teams can honor compliance obligations while gaining a better sense of the current status and needs of their organization and then share anonymized reports with business leaders.

Viva Learning

We’re using Viva Learning for high-value learning experiences, a part of which is creating a single front door for the wide variety of learning experiences available to Microsoft employees. Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets our employees seamlessly integrate learning and skill building into their day. With Learning, our teams can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by the organization and content recommended by peers. And they can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Viva Learning modules

At Microsoft, we use Viva Learning to:

Accelerate Copilot adoption with upskilling: Microsoft Copilot Academy provides our employees with structured, role-based learning paths and hands-on exercises that help them build their Copilot skills and confidently apply Microsoft 365 Copilot in their daily work.

Deliver organization-driven learning experiences: Viva Learning enables assigned compliance training and supports custom academies created by the organization, helping our employees improve their skills in their domains while aligning learning with business priorities.

Encourage peer-to-peer learning: Our employees can curate and share learning collections with peers, fostering collaboration and sharing knowledge across teams.

We also have launched a Learning Agent, which is currently in public preview for some customers. It delivers AI-powered, personalized learning experiences to our employees that complement what their Viva Learning experience. It helps our employees discover tailored content and accelerate skill development.

Bigger picture, Viva Learning reduces learning-resource isolation, and it provides our employees with a single portal to discover opportunities to build their skills and manage required training. Consolidating these experiences into a single environment, where learning can be discovered and shared within the flow of work, is a significant value of Viva Learning for us here at Microsoft.

AI-based content recommendations and peer-recommended learning enable our culture of learning, encouraging our employees to be full-time, lifelong learners in whatever areas they choose to pursue. Together, these capabilities support continuous learning at scale, empowering employees to upskill themselves, adapt, and contribute to business outcomes.

What’s next

At Microsoft, we’ve achieved over 97 percent employee usage across Viva as a suite, and adoption continues to grow. As we continue to drive additional usage, we’re providing our product teams with insights that help improve the experience for our customers. Based on our own usage and feedback from our customers and partners, we continue to help the product team build out new capabilities that deliver additional value and help ensure that Viva is the centralized, digital platform for staying productive, connected, and supported in the hybrid workplace.

Our employee-experience evolution with Viva has been underway now for over five years, but we aren’t finished. We’re continuing to refine the capabilities, and we’re committed to improving Viva for our customers and for our employees, and we look forward to sharing our future innovations with you as Customer Zero.

Key takeaways

As you evaluate the employee experience and learning management features of Viva and its newest AI-powered capabilities, here are some practical steps you can take to ensure you get all the benefits it has to offer:

• Use AI-powered analytics to optimize employee engagement: Surface actionable recommendations, automate routine tasks, and deliver tailored learning and wellbeing experiences that meet employees where they are.
• Centralize communications and feedback with modern platforms: Adopt solutions such as Viva Amplify to streamline campaign management, gather real-time feedback, and ensure consistent, impactful messaging across your organization.
• Align organizational goals and employee development with strategic business outcomes: Use AI-enhanced tools like Viva Learning to connect daily work to broader objectives and support continuous upskilling.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, inclusion, and knowledge sharing: Empower employees to connect, share expertise, and build community through platforms like Viva Engage, using its AI features to break down silos and amplify voices across the organization.
• Adopt a “Customer Zero” mindset to drive continuous improvement: Pilot new technologies internally, gather feedback, and iterate quickly, using your own organization as a testbed to ensure solutions are effective before broader rollout.
• Measure impact and adapt using data-driven insights: Track adoption, engagement, and business outcomes with AI-powered analytics, and use these insights to refine strategies and maximize the return on your digital transformation investments.

Try it out

Try out Microsoft Viva today to see how you can drive cultural change and AI adoption in your organization.

Related links

• Learn how Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft.
• Read about how we’re supercharging our internal communications with Viva Engage.
• Step through our guide—based on our internal experience here at Microsoft—for transforming your business with Microsoft Viva.
• Find out how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage at Microsoft.

The post Accelerating our cultural transformation at Microsoft with Viva and AI appeared first on Inside Track.

We’re taking this challenge head-on today, working to build trust between leaders and employees using all the communications strategies at our disposal. One of the most effective tools we employ to meet this goal is Microsoft Viva Engage, a powerful platform that facilitates two-way communication on the front end and provides rich analytics and insights on the back end.

Viva Engage is integrated with Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint, which allows us to better connect with our employees in the flow of their work.

Another key internal communications channel is Ask Me Anything (AMA) events, which give our senior leaders the opportunity to have an authentic dialogue with employees. These events take full advantage of the combined power of Viva Engage and Teams to produce outstanding results.

“When we look at our most effective channels for informing and connecting with Microsoft employees, Viva Engage and AMAs are among the top,” says John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications. “Those channels didn’t really exist three years ago, so that’s a sign of how our internal comms practices continue to evolve as we lean more into a social-first, two-way dialogue approach to our communications.”

As the company embraces its role as an AI-first Frontier Firm, we are connecting with our employees more deeply than ever before, keeping them tightly engaged with our mission and overall goals.

“Trust has proven to be this magical, key ingredient in driving change and strengthening engagement between employees and leaders. Viva Engage and Ask Me Anything events are extremely valuable in helping us foster trust, encourage authenticity, and listen to our employees at scale.”

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications

Building trust to change our culture

When Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO in 2014, he shifted our company culture from being siloed and internally competitive to more open, agile, and collaborative. This has led to a lot of change over the last decade, a shift that has been compounded by the AI revolution.

That’s why Cirone and other senior leaders have identified building trust and facilitating two-way communication at Microsoft as linchpin goals of our internal comms strategy.

“Trust has proven to be this magical, key ingredient in driving change and strengthening engagement between employees and leaders,” Cirone says. “This dynamic has only increased in recent years, as studies show that trust is declining across the board in society and within companies worldwide. Viva Engage and Ask Me Anything events are extremely valuable in helping us foster trust, encourage authenticity, and listen to our employees at scale.”

That’s why we’ve diversified our internal comms strategy, going from an approach centered on one-way communication channels (like email) to one that incorporates two-way tools like Viva Engage, a platform that allows employees to express themselves, connect with others, and build community across the company. It also enables our leaders to communicate at the scale of the enterprise with incredible reach.

Nadella himself uses Viva Engage to communicate regularly with the entire organization, posting about twice a month and covering everything from major company news and strategic shifts to more fun, practical content. A recent post by Nadella with ideas for prompts to use in Microsoft 365 Copilot generated more than 2,200 employee reactions. (Viva Engage also allows communicators to easily access detailed analytics, which make it simple to track messaging impact.)

Similarly, holding regular AMAs and Town Hall events with Microsoft leadership in recent years has been a big part of building trust and keeping the company informed and engaged.

“An AMA event is all about trying to address the questions that are most on our employees’ minds,” Cirone says. “It’s a chance for our leaders to demonstrate listening and responding at scale, by tackling key topics in a timely manner. I see it as part of our overall company belief in the importance of listening and commitment to two-way dialogue.”

“One of the most important shifts in our strategy for Viva Engage is the deep integration of the community experience into Teams. It’s not just a technical integration—it’s a fundamental change in how leaders and employees connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build trust in the flow of work.”

Jason Mayans, vice president of product management and analytics, Viva Engage

Reaching employees in the flow of work

Another powerful aspect of Viva Engage is that it works seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams, allowing communicators and admins to reach employees where they spend most of their time working.  

“One of the most important shifts in our strategy for Viva Engage is the deep integration of the community experience into Teams,” says Jason Mayans, vice president of product management and analytics for the Viva Engage product group. “It’s not just a technical integration—it’s a fundamental change in how leaders and employees connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build trust in the flow of work.”

Evolving communication with Viva Engage

This is a huge step, because so many of our employees use Teams as their main communications hub. Viva Engage community content and conversations can now be brought directly into their daily work experience, side by side with their other chats and channels.

For communicators, this means they can create one announcement and send it out across Outlook, Teams, and Viva Engage (or whichever subset of channels they prefer). Then, they can use the AI-powered analytics provided by the software to monitor engagement at different levels.

“In the analytics tool you can see the types of engagements that your people are having, and through what interface—Viva Engage for the web, Teams, and Outlook,” Mayans says. “You can see how they’re interacting. You can monitor sentiment and theming to give you deeper insight into what people are talking about. You can see a summary view, or you can drill down to see analytics on individual conversations. It’s incredibly powerful.”

Engaging employees through major campaigns

This year marked Microsoft’s 50^th anniversary, and our internal communications team wanted to honor the occasion by building both awareness and engagement across the company. So, they developed a “50 Change-Making Moments” countdown campaign to highlight major company milestones over the years.

Viva Engage was an integral part of this effort, providing a central platform for storytelling across the company, allowing both leaders and employees to share their reflections.

The results spoke for themselves.

“Over the course of several months, the campaign ended up reaching almost the entire company and had an 89% net positivity rating,” Cirone says. “The leaders’ posts sparked employees to share their own memories, which generated super-strong engagement and a great lead-up to the all-company anniversary celebration.”

Another major campaign we do every year at Microsoft centers around our Employee Giving Program, which began more than four decades ago and has been a long, sustained success story. Over the history of the program, Microsoft and its employees have contributed more than $3.4 billion to support charitable causes.

“We leveraged Viva Engage to help promote the Giving Campaign across the company, which produced a ton of enthusiasm. Leaders and employees could post about their favorite nonprofit causes, and we were able to highlight some great stories about how the campaign is making a difference in the world.”

Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand

As part of this campaign, Microsoft matches every dollar our employees give to eligible nonprofits. When employees volunteer their time for an approved cause, the company also donates $25 per volunteer hour to the nonprofit.

Since giving is such a significant part of our company culture, we’ve used Viva Engage extensively for the past two years to help employees rally around the annual campaign.

“We leveraged Viva Engage to help promote the Giving Campaign across the company, which produced a ton of enthusiasm,” says Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand. “Leaders and employees could post about their favorite nonprofit causes, and we were able to highlight some great stories about how the campaign is making a difference in the world.”

Balancing dialogue with respect and accountability

The growth of two-way internal employee communications in Viva Engage has built trust and increased engagement, but it’s also driven the need for more robust communications governance. We’ve had to implement comprehensive safeguards that ensure digital safety, respect, and accountability on Viva Engage.

Our employees have strong opinions on topics ranging from cafeteria menus to the latest political news. Our goal is to ensure that sensitive conversations stay in places where those who wish to participate can opt into them, rather than spilling out into the company at large.

“You have to balance the risks and rewards of creating this open, transparent space for employees to communicate,” Morris says. “We’ve learned quite a bit in the last couple years, and we’ve developed systems for monitoring employee sentiment on different hot-button issues and moderating content on Viva Engage.”

Making sure the right governance protocols are in place allows us to listen to our employees while protecting their colleagues and the company as a whole.

“We want a corporate communication space that is vibrant, yet remains respectful and safe. The goal is balance. That’s why we’ve partnered across IT and other teams at Microsoft to establish the right protocols and tools that help us maintain digital safety companywide.” 

Ife Kolawole, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Ife Kolawole is a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. One aspect of his work centers around driving the development and improvement of content moderation tools for Viva Engage, which are a crucial part of creating a safe and supportive environment at Microsoft.

“We want a corporate communication space that is vibrant, yet remains respectful and safe,” Kolawole says. “The goal is balance. That’s why we’ve partnered across IT and other teams at Microsoft to establish the right protocols and tools that help us maintain digital safety companywide.” 

With nearly 5,000 different Viva Engage communities across the company, moderators need help identifying sensitive posts in a timely way. Kolawole, who also serves as a moderator for the platform, appreciates the power of AI in helping him do that work proactively at scale.

“Viva Engage features an AI-powered moderation tool that intelligently detects sensitive themes and keywords before a potentially problematic post can gain traction,” he says. “It helps us preserve respectful, productive dialogue at scale and fosters a trusted collaboration and communication space.”

Communicating for meaningful change

Internal communications is a huge part of what we do at Microsoft—and it’s not something masterminded by just a few people at our corporate headquarters. That’s why Cirone and Morris lead Global Employee & Executive Communications (GEEC), a community of more than 1,000 communications professionals scattered throughout our global operations.

The GEEC organization works collaboratively to align messaging, elevate executive voices, and build trust across the company. Its members are constantly deploying new tools—like Viva Engage and Microsoft 365 Copilot—and strategies that increase engagement and strengthen Microsoft’s company culture through communications.

“Our goal is never to just adopt a new IT tool—our goal is to change the company,” Cirone says. “We don’t do internal comms for the heck of it. We do it to create dialogue, to listen, to inform, and to drive cultural change for the entire organization, so that our employees can to do their best work.”

Key takeaways

Here are a few principles to be aware of as you consider your own internal communications strategy:

• Prioritize building trust between company leaders and employees, which can pay big dividends in the long run. We’ve made this the cornerstone of our internal comms philosophy.
• Two-way communication channels are becoming the best way to connect with employees internally. Tools like Viva Engage and Ask Me Anything events promote dialogue, encourage authenticity, and help employees feel heard.
• Measure your internal comms impact. Viva Engage allows you to capture detailed analytics around reach, engagement, and sentiment so you can understand what topics and types of content are resonating with your employees.
• Leverage integrated tools to communicate across multiple channels. We use the Viva Engage integration with Teams and Outlook to reach employees in the flow of their work, so they don’t have to launch a dedicated outreach tool to stay informed.
• Companywide campaigns are great opportunities to build engagement. Having leaders share their thoughts about company milestones and community-focused initiatives are feel-good moments that encourage employees to share their own experiences.
• Balance openness with safety and respect. Take advantage of built-in moderation tools—including AI-driven features—to flag potentially sensitive posts and limit negative fallout on your comms platforms.

Try it out

• Check out how your organization can benefit from Viva Engage.
• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Viva Engage.

Related links

• Learn more about our Global Employee & Executive Communications (GEEC) community at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re accelerating a cultural transformation at Microsoft through Viva and AI.
• Discover how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage.
• Read about how Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft.
• See how we’re driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with help from Viva Engage.

The post Supercharging our internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track.

It’s where our employees go to have two-way dialogue, our leaders use it to engage with their teams, and it’s how we listen and respond to our employees at scale.

It was a major milestone internally at Microsoft when we brought Microsoft 365 Copilot to Viva Engage, first launched in the spring and expanded in September.

“Copilot in Viva Engage is allowing us to bring the power of generative AI to our employees where they are,” says Ife Kolawole, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Our employees are using it to more easily discover conversations and topics that they’re interested in.”

With Copilot added in, it has become even more useful to our employees.

“It used to be that staying informed meant manually scrolling through updates to piece together what mattered,” says Soumik Maji, who leads customer feedback and go-to-market efforts for Copilot in Viva Engage for the Microsoft Viva product group. “As a user, I’d need to manually scroll through all the posts, pick communities I’m interested in, and try to keep up. Even with prioritization, it could be overwhelming.”

That’s no longer the case with Copilot in Engage.

“The Copilot feature enables users to get a quick summary of the conversations and comments across all communities.”

Soumik Maji, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

Now employees can quickly catch up on all the communications they have access to across their community feeds, home feed, and posts from leaders. Copilot gives them real-time, comprehensive summaries of what’s most relevant to them, eliminating hours of manual scrolling and reading.

And because the process is fully automated, people can surface key insights with just a single click.

“The Copilot feature enables users to get a quick summary of the conversations and comments across all communities,” Maji says. “For example, if Satya Nadella shares a post about a major company initiative, Copilot helps me quickly understand the sentiment of all the comments and highlights the main themes being discussed.”

Read our Viva Engage guide

Community with purpose: Deploying Viva Engage at Microsoft in three chapters

The leader’s perspective

Here at Microsoft, leaders use Viva Engage to connect and listen to employees. However with the volume and scale of information that is shared, they also need a way to listen and respond to what matters most.  

“Now with Copilot in Engage, I can instantly see what’s trending, understand how it connects to my team’s priorities, and communicate authentically. I can address feedback from employees based on these conversations from Copilot in our next All hands, or with a post in our community.”

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president, Viva Engage

Staying connected required scrolling through feeds and piecing together context.

That’s changing.

“Now with Copilot in Engage, I can instantly see what’s trending, understand how it connects to my team’s priorities, and communicate authentically,” says Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president for Viva Engage. “I can address feedback from employees based on these conversations from Copilot in our next All hands, or with a post in our community.”

It’s another effective way that we’re bringing Copilot to where our employees—and our customers—are living at work.

“Powered by organizational data, Copilot is evolving from a helpful assistant into a true strategic partner-one that helps me inspire, inform, and engage at scale,” Sitaram says.

Powering Corporate Communications with Viva Engage

Community engagement in Viva Engage started with thoughtful, but manual processes that built strong connections. Now Copilot in Engage elevates those efforts with intelligence and time-saving tactics.

“We would have to dig through hundreds of comments and posts to get an idea of what employees were engaging with. It was a lot of effort, especially when trying to respond or adjust strategy in real time.”

Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand, Microsoft

Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand, and John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications, describe how challenging and resource-intensive it was for their Corporate Communications team to connect with employees across the company.  

“We would have to dig through hundreds of comments and posts to get an idea of what employees were engaging with,” Morris says. “It was a lot of effort, especially when trying to respond or adjust strategy in real time.”

Morris and Cirone oversee global communications for all employees across the company and lead the Global Executive and Employee Communications team (GEEC), which supports communicators throughout Microsoft as they work to scale the company’s internal communications. They invested time thoughtfully reviewing conversations and tracking sentiment to understand what mattered most to employees.

This often left Viva Engage community managers relying on intuition and scattered anecdotal feedback. Decisions about content and engagement were slow, driven by guesswork, and difficult to scale. Now Copilot accelerates that process with AI.

“Before Copilot, we had manual efforts for community management, like analyzing trends and themes, which meant a lot of manual effort for community management,” Morris says. “But now Copilot helps by providing insights from community conversations, sentiment analysis, and content suggestions for leaders. We can easily see what’s trending, which helps us be more responsive.”

Staying connected to what matters most

Community managers must stay closely connected to the audiences they serve, and one of the most effective ways to achieve this is by providing accurate and thoughtful responses to the questions that matter most to them.

“As a community manager, I can appreciate a huge time savings, since Copilot helps by surfacing answers to frequently asked questions,” Morris says. “It gives a first-pass answer based on the resources available in the community and has been a huge help in reducing manual work.”

With Copilot in Viva Engage, much of this responsiveness is seamlessly automated.

“The insights we get from Copilot, like understanding what employees are discussing, have been incredibly useful. They help us tune into the conversations that matter most, and with real-time feedback, we can adjust our strategy quickly. It’s all about listening and responding at scale to employees.”

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications, Microsoft

Copilot also helps leaders create content by suggesting relevant topics based on community sentiment. This is a major time-saver and helps our teams focus their content creation efforts on what employees are most engaged with.

“The insights we get from Copilot, like understanding what employees are discussing, have been incredibly useful,” Cirone says. “They help us tune into the conversations that matter most, and with real-time feedback, we can adjust our strategy quickly. It’s all about listening and responding at scale to employees.”

For communicators working across multiple platforms, Copilot offers a seamless way to pull together the information they need to create posts that are timely, relevant, and meaningful. Its ability to tailor content for the right audience is especially helpful for leaders sharing updates with their teams or the broader organization.

“We want to be able to find those conversations and use that feedback to make improvements.”

Eva Etchells, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

Still, one of the biggest hurdles is often just getting the first words on the page.

“Employees often experience writer’s block when trying to craft a message,” Maji says. “Copilot helps by pulling together the relevant information from your Microsoft Graph, your emails, meetings, and Teams chats, and uses that data to generate a tailored post. Whether you’re summarizing your week’s work or sharing a company initiative, Copilot gives you the structure and content you need.”

IT Communications and community content

In Microsoft Digital, we often run marketing campaigns and promotions in Viva Engage to let employees know about new features that we’d like them to try or other similar updates. For example, we might encourage them to try a new Copilot feature or inform them about an upcoming change that they will need to make to their PCs.

Our goal is always to raise awareness and encourage adoption, but we also want feedback. While employees do provide feedback within apps, they also often go to Viva Engage to post about their issue or complaint.

“We want to be able to find those conversations and use that feedback to make improvements,” says Eva Etchells, a senior content program manager within Microsoft Digital.

Copilot in Viva Engage is also helping the IT Communications team identify important trends that they should respond to.

“Copilot’s features can help us track trending topics and identify common questions. It gives us a better understanding of what people are asking about and helps us provide more targeted responses.”

Sarah Lundy, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

For example, Sarah Lundy, a senior content program manager for Microsoft Digital, is currently working on communications for the Employee Self-Service Agent that supports HR, help desk, and campus services.

She’s using Copilot in Viva Engage to gather community feedback on the agent, to quickly consolidate that feedback into actionable insights, to summarize the top themes that it calls out, and to generate content based on those insights.

“It’s a huge time-saver,” Lundy says.

Lundy also manages a community called “TechConnect,” where employees can bring their questions about Microsoft Digital.

“Copilot’s features can help us track trending topics and identify common questions,” Lundy says. “It gives us a better understanding of what people are asking about and helps us provide more targeted responses.”

With faster, more accurate insights, the IT Communications Team and the individual employees who lead Viva Engage communities can both more easily stay responsive to the needs of each community at the company.

“If I need to create an FAQ or a content piece based on what’s trending in a particular community, Copilot can help pull all that information together and save me time,” Lundy says. “I’m excited to see how it will help me stay on top of community conversations, especially as things ramp up.”

Key takeaways

Keep in mind the following crucial considerations when implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage to improve your enterprise’s internal communication at scale:

• Start with clear objectives: Define what Copilot should help solve—content creation, summarization, trend detection, or feedback consolidation.
• Be specific with prompts: The more specific and detailed your request, the better results you’ll get, and clear prompts lead to clearer insights.
• Treat Copilot as a collaborator: AI works best with humans-in-the-loop, where users iterate, refine, and build on its suggestions.
• Promote adoption through real examples: Leaders should use Copilot publicly and share their results and learnings to inspire employees.
• Create your own Microsoft 365 Copilot community: Having a centralized Copilot community helps your employees get access to the latest updates and serves as a knowledge base for questions, answers and experts.

Try it out

Microsoft 360 Copilot in Viva Engage is available to customers with the appropriate Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The functionality, which includes easy-to-use catch-up features and content generation tools, is now a central part of our employee experience.

• Read our guide for deploying Viva Engage.
• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Related links

• Learn how we’re elevating our internal communications at Microsoft with AI.
• Find out how we’re delivering communications internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Amplify.
• Discover how we’re transforming internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage.
• Read more about Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Get started with Microsoft 365.

The post Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track.

Microsoft Digital stories

We didn’t just hope Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales would make a difference for our sales team here at Microsoft—we measured it.

The results were outstanding.

In the first few months after adopting Copilot for Sales, our sellers experienced the following:

• Per-seller revenue went up 9.4 percent
• Opportunity per seller grew by 5 percent
• Individual win rates jumped by 20 percent

These aren’t projections or pilot estimates. They’re real results from real usage across our sales teams.

These numbers reflect more than just efficiency. They show that when AI is embedded in a sales workflow, it doesn’t just save time—it drives outcomes. Our sellers aren’t hunting for data, they’re capitalizing on leads and closing deals.

The impact is clear.

Copilot for Sales is helping Microsoft sellers focus on what matters most: building relationships, understanding customer needs, and winning business.

Understanding the need for AI-driven transformation

For years, our sellers have worked with a patchwork of tools—MSX (our internal sales platform), Dynamics 365, Outlook, Teams, pipeline trackers, and more.

Each serves a purpose, but together they created friction.

“We have great data across our tools. But it’s a ton of information to drill into while you’re going from call–to–call and you really just need to have a quick answer on something. That hasn’t been easy to do in the past.”

Jeremy Dollar, principal technology specialist, Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions

In the past, sellers had to jump between systems to update forecasts, respond to customers, and satisfy internal reporting. The result was a fragmented experience that slowed them down.

Sellers often felt they spent more time updating systems than engaging with customers.

“We have great data across our tools,” says Jeremy Dollar, a principal technology specialist with Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS). “But it’s a ton of information to drill into while you’re trying to work with the customer. You’re going from call–to–call and you really just need to have a quick answer on something to know in the moment what’s going on with that customer. That hasn’t been easy to do in the past.”

Dollar spends most of his time working in the Microsoft sales pipeline, helping Microsoft customers understand how they can benefit from Microsoft products and finding solutions to match their needs.

Our sellers also have the responsibility of updating sales data and maintaining CRM records.

It isn’t anyone’s favorite task. Whether it’s MSX, Dynamics, Salesforce, or a myriad of other systems, manual data entry feels like a tax on their time. Forecasts lag. Pipelines go stale. And the tools meant to help end up getting in the way.

This complexity creates friction. Sellers have to jump between systems to find customer data, update opportunities, or prepare for meetings. The lack of integration can slow them down and pull focus away from customers.

“It’s the mundane work that nobody likes to do, but we all have to do it. It’s always been a sort of ‘sales tax’ that we all associate with the CRM,” says Bob Lincavicks, a principal technical specialist with Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions.

The challenge isn’t just technical—it’s behavioral. Many sellers rely on personal systems like notebooks or spreadsheets to track contacts and deals. CRM becomes inconsistent, and data quality suffers as a result. Without a unified experience, sellers are left to stitch together their own workflows.

Moving into modern sales management with Copilot for Sales

Enter Copilot for Sales.

Copilot for Sales is our AI-powered assistant built specifically for sellers. It brings CRM data, productivity tools, and generative AI together—right inside the Microsoft 365 apps sellers already use every day, like Outlook, Teams, Word, and Excel.

It’s not just another chatbot. It’s a deeply integrated experience that helps sellers:

• Prepare for meetings with AI-generated summaries, recent email threads, and opportunity insights.
• Draft emails with CRM context and BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) analysis.
• Update CRM records directly from Outlook or Teams—no more switching tabs or searching through systems.
• Create tasks and follow-ups from meeting recaps with just a couple of clicks.
• Collaborate in real time using adaptive cards, deal rooms, and shared spaces in Teams.

Copilot for Sales is designed to proactively surface the information and capabilities that sellers need when they need it, in the flow of their work.

It’s built on the same infrastructure as Microsoft 365 Copilot, meaning it benefits from enterprise-grade security, Microsoft Graph data, and seamless integration across the Microsoft ecosystem. And it works with multiple CRM systems like Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, so sellers can stay in the flow of work—regardless of their CRM

The result is less time spent on admin tasks and more time selling.

Keeping sellers in the flow

Copilot for Sales isn’t just a new tool. It’s a new way of working—one that’s built around the seller, not the system.

Copilot for Sales transforms how Microsoft sellers work by delivering high-impact features directly into their daily flow. These aren’t just enhancements—they’re game changers.

Copilot for Sales is there for sellers in the tools they already use—Outlook and Teams. Instead of toggling between systems, they’re seeing customer emails, account insights, opportunity data, and meeting history all in one place.

When a seller opens an email, Copilot surfaces the full conversation thread, shows related opportunities, and highlights recent meetings. During calls, it captures insights and follow-ups. Afterward, it prompts sellers to log notes, create opportunities, and assign tasks—without ever opening the CRM.

This integration saves time and reduces friction. Sellers no longer jump between apps or lose momentum. They work where the action is.

“Copilot for Sales connects all the disparate tools our sellers use. Before, all of that information was spread out and tedious to find. Now it’s readily accessible in the context of where a seller is working, whether in Outlook, Teams, Word, or otherwise.”

Denise Mills, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

Our sellers use natural language to interact with CRM data. They can ask questions like “What’s the latest with this opportunity?” or “Summarize my last meeting,” and get instant, contextual answers. This cuts down on prep time and helps sellers stay focused.

They can also summarize long email threads with a single click, capture leads from Outlook, and draft replies using CRM insights. Meeting prep is faster, follow-ups are automated, and CRM updates happen in the background.

One standout feature is the ability to create and edit CRM opportunities directly from Outlook. Sellers no longer need to switch tools or re-enter data—they do it all in the moment, in the app they’re currently using.

“Copilot for Sales connects all the disparate tools our sellers use,” says Denise Mills, a senior business program manager with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Before, all of that information was spread out and tedious to find. Now it’s readily accessible in the context of where a seller is working, whether in Outlook, Teams, Word, or otherwise.”

 Copilot for Sales helps sellers to quickly get ready for an upcoming customer engagement. It captures and summarizes the main points from recent interactions, helping sellers focus on the key points and make the meeting meaningful.

These features don’t just make work easier—they make sellers more effective.

Copilot for Sales: a day in the life

Microsoft sellers are using Copilot for Sales to streamline their day from start to finish—and the impact is showing up in every part of their workflow.

When preparing for meetings, sellers are reviewing summaries of past interactions, opportunity history, and forecast comments—all surfaced automatically in Outlook or Teams. They’re walking into customer conversations with full context, without having to dig through CRM records or email threads.

During meetings, Copilot is capturing action items, identifying sentiment, and tagging key participants. Sellers are staying focused on the conversation instead of scrambling to take notes.

After meetings, they’re turning those insights into tasks and CRM updates with just a few clicks. Follow-up emails are being drafted automatically. Opportunities are being created or updated in real time. Sellers are staying in the flow, and nothing is falling through the cracks.

“I don’t feel like I have to spend 90 percent of my call taking notes,” Lincavicks says. “I can be much more present and involved in the call itself.”

Deploying Copilot for Sales at Microsoft

Our journey began with a pilot. Microsoft launched Copilot for Sales inside our small, medium, and corporate (SMC) sales organization, where sellers were managing high account volumes and needed faster, more efficient ways to stay on top of their work. The pilot wasn’t small—eventually, it included the entire SMC group.

From the start, the focus was on learning. The team ran learning days, hosted academies, and delivered demos to help sellers understand how to use Copilot for Sales in their daily flow. These sessions weren’t just about training—they were about listening. Feedback from SMC sellers helped shape the product and guide future development.

That early momentum laid the foundation for broader adoption. It provided real-world insights, real usage data, and a clear sense of what sellers needed most.

Moving to enterprise scale

After proving success in SMC, we began expanding Copilot for Sales across the enterprise. The early pilot gave the team a head start—an audience that was already engaged, trained, and providing feedback. That momentum made it easier to scale.

The rollout wasn’t just technical—it was strategic. We in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, partnered with Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS), a global organization within Microsoft that brings together customer-facing teams and partner-facing teams to drive customer success and grow the business.

The MCAPS team worked with our IT change management teams to build a global adoption plan. They ran learning days, hosted demos, and worked closely with adoption leads in every region. The goal was to meet sellers where they were and show them how Copilot could fit into their daily workflows.

Creating real change and improvement as Customer Zero

As the first and most active adopters of Copilot for Sales, our internal sales teams are acting as Customer Zero. By putting Copilot into the hands of our sellers first, we can collect honest, in-depth feedback that the Copilot for Sales product team uses to rapidly iterate on new features based on genuine user needs.

Customer Zero means that the organization is not only adopting the technology but also shaping it, stress-testing workflows, and surfacing opportunities for improvement before sharing with the broader market.

“Our sellers are co-creators, actively influencing the future of Copilot for Sales,” Mills says. “The Customer Zero approach ensures that by the time Copilot for Sales reaches external customers, it’s already been refined by some of the most demanding and insightful users in the industry.”

Mills and her team work as a bridge between Microsoft sellers and the Copilot for Sales product team. They drive feedback loops, gathering insights from internal users—primarily sellers—and deliver that feedback directly to the product teams. This includes organizing research sessions, facilitating direct interactions between sellers and product managers, and ensuring feedback reflects global perspectives. Feedback from regions such as Japan, China, and Europe was crucial, especially in contexts involving language challenges or compliance with local regulations.

One of the primary ways Mills and her team capture feedback is through structured, role-specific listening circles. These sessions bring together our sellers, product specialists, and managers to share what’s working, what’s not, and what they need next from Copilot for Sales.

Each session is guided by a whiteboard framework and includes interactive polls, open discussions, and targeted prompts. We’re asking sellers about their workflows, their friction points, and how Copilot fits—or doesn’t fit—into their day. The goal is to surface barriers to adoption, identify unmet needs, and gather ideas for improvement.

Nurturing an active user community

We’re driving Copilot for Sales adoption through hands-on, role-specific enablement. It started with learning days and live demos across SMC and enterprise teams. These sessions are continuing today, helping sellers see how Copilot fits into their daily flow.

In one session, sellers walk through how to use Copilot to prep for a meeting, capture notes, and update CRM—all without leaving Outlook. In another, they practice using natural language prompts to summarize email threads or generate follow-up tasks. These aren’t just demos—they’re working sessions that show real value.

Champions are playing a key role. Microsoft is identifying early adopters who are enthusiastic about Copilot and equipping them with deep-dive resources. These champions are hosting office hours, answering questions, and sharing tips with their teams.

This grassroots approach is building momentum. Sellers aren’t just learning Copilot for Sales—they’re teaching it, sharing it, and embedding it into how they work.

Creating seller-focused benefits

The result is that Microsoft sellers are going beyond using Copilot for Sales—they’re relying on it.

“The CRM used to feel like a tax. Now it delivers value,” Lincavicks says. ”Copilot for Sales has made CRM data feel alive. For the first time, I feel like there’s the ability for my data to meet me wherever I want to do my work.”

It’s a recurring sentiment across our sellers and it’s a signal that the relationship between sellers and their tools is changing.

We’ve reached a turning point. When we first introduced Copilot for Sales, we were optimistic. We had a vision of what AI could do for sellers, but we didn’t yet have the proof. Now we do.

This isn’t just a story about new features. It’s about measurable impact. Sellers are seeing real gains in productivity, pipeline, and win rates. And they’re doing it without having to change how they work.

While Copilot for Sales certainly provides convenience to sellers, the biggest benefit is confidence.

“Copilot for Sales is incredibly helpful for getting ready for any type of customer engagement,” Dollar says. “It’s incredibly valuable to have that information proactively brought to your attention. It’s not about saving time at the end of the day, it’s about being able to be better and do more with the time that I have.”

The feedback is clear; Copilot for Sales isn’t just helping sellers work faster, it’s helping them work smarter, with more focus, more clarity, and more impact.

“It’s not just about making sellers more impactful—it’s about simplifying their world. They can create opportunities, update contacts, and capture meeting insights—all without leaving their flow of work. Simplification and ease of use drive impact.”

Kevin Wooldridge, senior director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

That’s a big deal. Especially in a company like Microsoft, where the sales ecosystem is notoriously complex. If we can simplify the experience here, we can do it anywhere.

This moment matters because we’ve moved from promise to performance. From pilots to platform. From hoping AI would help to knowing it does.

“It’s not just about making sellers more impactful—it’s about simplifying their world,” says Kevin Wooldridge, a senior director of business programs within Microsoft Digital. “They can create opportunities, update contacts, and capture meeting insights—all without leaving their flow of work. Simplification and ease of use drive impact.”

Looking forward

We’ve moved from promise to proof with Copilot for Sales. Now we’re building what’s next.

We believe the future of Copilot for Sales is agentic. We’re evolving from a conversational assistant to a proactive partner that can act on behalf of the seller. The approach is less “tell me what to do” and more “I’ve already done it.”

We’re piloting Lead Intelligence Agents that research prospects, draft outreach, and follow up automatically. Opportunity Intelligence Agents summarize recent interactions, flag risks, and suggest next steps. And Meeting Prep Agents surface possible objections, key stakeholders, and action items before a seller even joins the call.

We’re also integrating Copilot more fully into the tools sellers already use. In Outlook, sellers can now update CRM records directly from email banners, share CRM data with a simple @mention, and generate follow-ups with context-aware prompts. In Teams, meeting recaps now trigger opportunity creation and task assignments—even less jumping between systems.

The next generation of sellers won’t just use AI—they’ll rely on it. And they’ll outperform those who don’t. Sellers using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales are already closing more deals, faster. They’re saving time, staying in the flow, and focusing on what matters.

Key takeaways

If you’re looking to successfully adopt Copilot for Sales, here are some practical actions you can take to maximize its advantages:

• Integrate Copilot for Sales into your sellers’ daily workflow. Encourage your team to start using Copilot for Sales within Outlook and Teams to seamlessly manage CRM updates, generate follow-ups, and complete tasks without leaving your core platforms.
• Leverage productivity-boosting features. Utilize the automation and smart suggestion features of Copilot for Sales to streamline sales activities, reduce manual effort, and dedicate more time to building strong connections with customers.
• Hold enablement sessions. Participate in live demos and training events and explore role-specific resources to quickly develop expertise and unlock the full value of Copilot for your team.
• Prepare for future capabilities. Stay updated on new innovations like Lead Intelligence Agents and Meeting Prep Agents so you can adopt emerging features that will further enhance your sales strategy.

Try it out

Take a guided tour of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

Related links

• Find out how we are measuring the business impact of Copilot on sales at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Check out these seven things we Learned deploying Microsoft Copilot for Sales at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re using AI-powered Copilot for Sales at Microsoft.

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