As AI reshapes how we work and live, it brings with it both transformative potential and complex challenges. Across the industry, concerns about bias, safety, and transparency are growing.

At Microsoft, we believe that realizing AI’s benefits requires a shared commitment to responsibility—one we take seriously. As a result, we aren’t just creating AI solutions. We’re taking the lead on infusing responsible AI principles into our technology and organizational practices.

Prioritizing responsible AI across Microsoft

The most impressive AI-powered capabilities in the world mean nothing if people don’t trust the technology. Microsoft and many of our customers across all industries are working to strike the right balance between innovation and responsibility.

“We’re on a multi-year journey born out of the need to support innovation—and do it in a way that builds trust. Along the way, we’ve continued to iterate and evolve the program through a series of building blocks.”

Mike Jackson, head of AI Governance, Enablement, and Legal, Microsoft Office of Responsible AI

IT leaders and CXOs aren’t just deploying AI tools. They’re also thinking of the right guardrails to implement around those tools as their organizations mature. Meanwhile, developers and deployers want to be sure they’re building and implementing AI solutions within the bounds of responsibility.

As an organization that’s mapping the frontier of AI while creating business-ready tools for our customers, Microsoft is shaping the global conversation on responsible AI. We don’t only accomplish that through policy and governance, but also by embedding responsibility into the ways we build, deploy, and scale AI.

Laying the foundation for this work is the duty of our Office of Responsible AI (ORA). This team brings policy and governance expertise to the responsible AI ecosystem at Microsoft.

“We’re on a multi-year journey born out of the need to support innovation—and do it in a way that builds trust,” says Mike Jackson, head of AI Governance, Enablement, and Legal for the Office of Responsible AI. “Along the way, we’ve continued to iterate and evolve the program through a series of building blocks.”

ORA advances AI development, deployment, and secure and trustworthy innovation through governance, legal expertise, internal practice, public policy, and guidance on sensitive uses and emerging technology. The team focuses on empowering innovation while ensuring it falls within Microsoft’s governance, compliance, and policy guardrails.

ORA also partners closely with product and engineering teams as well as other trust domains like privacy, digital safety, security, and accessibility. The team created our Microsoft Responsible AI Standard, the cornerstone of our governance framework, and ensures internal AI initiatives align with it.

The Responsible AI Standard translates our six principles into actionable requirements for every AI project across Microsoft:

ORA reports into the Microsoft Board of Directors and collaborates with stakeholders and teams across the company to operationalize these principles, implementing policies and practices that apply to AI applications. They determined that every AI initiative should undergo an impact assessment to ensure it aligns with the standard.

If ORA is our compass for responsible AI, our companywide Responsible AI Council has its hands on the steering wheel.

The council, led by Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott and Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, was formed at the senior leadership level as a forum and source of representation across research, policy, and engineering. It provides leadership, strategic guidance, and executive support and sponsorship to advance strategic objectives around innovation and responsible AI.

“ORA has established clear principles and a step-by-step assessment framework and tool. Our responsibility is to rigorously follow this process and ensure compliance across our products and initiatives.”

Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager and co-lead, Microsoft Digital Responsible AI team

Under the council’s guidance, responsible AI CVPs, division leaders, and a network of responsible AI champions across the company operationalize the implementation of our Responsible AI Standard and compliance with our policies.

The structure of these teams is straightforward.

Every division has a designated CVP and division lead to steer the work and connect their team to the overarching Responsible AI Council. Within those divisions, each organization has a lead responsible AI champion or a set of co-leads to steer their team of champions. Those champions act as subject matter experts, reviewers for the impact assessment process, and points of contact for the teams developing AI initiatives.

Implementing AI governance within Microsoft IT

As members of the company’s IT organization, Microsoft Digital’s responsible AI division lead and champion team have a special role to play. They helped develop a critical internal workflow tool, which has now become a mandatory part of our responsible AI assessment process.

“The key is to ensure full alignment of responsible AI practices with ORA,” says Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager and co-lead for Microsoft Digital’s Responsible AI Team. “ORA has established clear principles and a step-by-step assessment framework and tool. Our responsibility is to rigorously follow this process and ensure compliance across our products and initiatives.”

This tool logs every project, guides AI developers through initial impact assessments all the way to final reviews, and facilitates those workflows for champions.

“As organizations develop a diverse ecosystem of AI agents, often created by multiple engineering teams, it becomes essential to establish a standardized evaluation process. This ensures every agent adheres to enterprise-level standards before we deploy and distribute it to end users.”

Thomas Po, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

By streamlining the process through a unified portal, the tool increases efficiency and minimizes errors that can arise from manual processes. It also encourages teams to make responsible AI part of the software development lifecycle (SDL) itself, not a hurdle or an afterthought.

“As organizations develop a diverse ecosystem of AI agents, often created by multiple engineering teams, it becomes essential to establish a standardized evaluation process,” says Thomas Po, a senior product manager working on Campus Services agents. “This ensures every agent adheres to enterprise-level standards before we deploy and distribute it to end users. That makes it more manageable in the long term, and having it all in one tool gives us more transparency.”

Our unified internal workflow looks like this:

• Project initiation and system registration: During the design phase for an AI initiative, the engineering team accesses the portal and registers a new AI system. From there, they fill out fields with crucial information, including a title, description, the developer team’s division, whether the project will include internal or external resources, the relevant champion who should review their initiative, and other details. Within this initial form, different scenarios will trigger different review parameters and requirements, for example, when a team intends to publish a tool externally or engage with sensitive use cases.
• Release assessment: After the system registration is complete, the team initiates the release assessment, a much more thorough review designed to ensure the AI-powered solution is ready to go live. At this point, the engineering team needs to provide detailed documentation. That includes the volume and kinds of data the system will use, potential harms and mitigations, and more. A release assessment includes experts in our Office of Responsible AI, Security, Privacy, and other teams, who review sensitive use cases or initiatives that include generative AI.

If the project clears all the requirements and reviews, it’s ready to go live. Crucially, we don’t think of these stages as a set of hurdles teams need to clear to complete their projects. Instead, the process guides engineering teams through the design elements they need to consider and provides opportunities for feedback from subject matter experts.

“The tool captures all the requirements from ORA and incorporates them into a developer-friendly workflow,” says Padmanabha Reddy Madhu, principal software engineer and responsible AI champion for Employee Productivity Engineering in Microsoft Digital. “It’s also a great way to pull AI champions into the design phase so we can support our colleagues’ work.”

With more than 80 AI projects currently underway across Microsoft Digital, logging and streamlining are essential. Teams are working on all kinds of ways to boost enterprise processes and employee experiences, like the following examples from Campus Services that users can access through our Employee Self-Service Agent:

• A facilities agent helps employees take action when they discover an issue at one of our buildings, like a burnt-out light, a spill, or physical damage. The agent creates a ticket to alert a Facilities team so they can resolve it and allows the submitter to follow up on progress.
• A campus event agent makes onsite gatherings like talks and Microsoft Garage build-a-thons more discoverable through simple queries. Using this agent, employees can more easily discover and plan around events that interest them, adding value to the in-person experience and incentivizing community.
• A dining agent addresses the challenges of multiple on-campus restaurants featuring menu options that shift daily. Employees can use natural language queries like “Where can I get teriyaki today?” The agent does the rest. This kind of agent can be especially helpful for employees with allergies or dietary restrictions, providing a boost to accessibility for the on-campus dining experience.

“AI is rapidly becoming a standard part of how we build and operate. As adoption accelerates, Responsible AI becomes imperative and enables teams to innovate at speed while maintaining safety and accountability at scale.”

Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our policies and practices have embedded a culture of responsibility and trust into our internal AI development processes. With that trust comes the confidence to experiment.

“AI is rapidly becoming a standard part of how we build and operate,” says Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “As adoption accelerates, Responsible AI becomes imperative and enables teams to innovate at speed while maintaining safety and accountability at scale. By embedding Responsible AI into our engineering practices, teams have the clarity and confidence they need to manage risk proactively and deliver value without compromising safety or trust.”

Far from thinking of responsible AI assessments as an administrative or policy burden that creates additional work, teams now recognize their benefits. They look at the process as an extra set of eyes from a trusted partner. By minimizing legal and compliance risks through our Responsible AI Council’s expertise, our teams save time and stress, and we avoid problems like delayed releases or rollbacks.

“What we’re doing is entirely novel in the tech world. Microsoft is really the lead learner here, and we have a passion for corporate citizenship that we’re embedding in our tools.”

Jamian Smith, principal product manager and co-lead, Microsoft Digital Responsible AI team, Microsoft Digital

Lessons learned: Embedding responsible AI into our development efforts

Throughout this process, we’ve learned lessons that will be helpful for other organizations just beginning their AI journeys:

• We empowered early adopters and enthusiasts as responsible AI champions. They act as anchors and resources for developers who use AI, so we made sure they had the knowledge and training they needed to unlock downstream value.
• Culture has been crucial to our success, especially our growth mindset and our focus on trust. Emphasizing these aspects of our company culture helped us embed responsible AI into core SDL processes and naturalize it on our engineering teams.
• Processes are one thing, and tooling is another. If your responsible AI assessment workflow isn’t attuned to your needs, simply building a review portal tool won’t get you the rest of the way. First, we thought about the process we needed to put in place to solidify responsible AI practices and support our teams’ work. Then we built a tool that supports those workflows as easily and seamlessly as possible.
• Accuracy is reliant on data, and data has a tendency to reflect the biases of the humans who organize it. It’s necessary to correct bias actively through introspection and testing.

“What we’re doing is entirely novel in the tech world,” says Jamian Smith, principal product manager and co-lead for Microsoft Digital’s Responsible AI team. “Microsoft is really the lead learner here, and we have a passion for corporate citizenship that we’re embedding in our tools.”

As your organization begins to experiment with its own AI projects, take these concrete steps to infuse responsibility into the solutions you create:

1. Establish a strong foundation based on core principles and standards that align with your organizational culture. The Microsoft Responsible AI Standard is a great place to start because it reflects our experience and the expertise we’ve built as AI technology leaders and providers.
2. Seek out the activators across your organization: people with a passion for AI, security, transparency, and other challenge areas, along with a willingness to learn and the ability to lead. Think about how to place them in both centralized and distributed positions.
3. With the rapidly evolving regulatory climate around AI, it’s crucial to have a broad understanding of compliance and continue to follow its developments. Involve dedicated regulatory, compliance, and legal professionals in researching and monitoring global standards while communicating that information to your organization, particularly through training and updates that help teams adapt new regulations into their core processes.
4. Create a process for responsible AI assessment. Consider ways to break it into stages that propel projects forward rather than hindering them. Enlist the right people to assess projects, and consider tooling that streamlines actions for both creators and assessors. Our AI Impact Assessment Guide can help you get started.
5. Benefit from pioneers in the space, including our experts at Microsoft. Our journey has produced ready-to-use resources that can accelerate your progress. Examples include our Responsible AI Toolbox for GitHub, hands-on tools for building effective human-AI experiences, and our AI Impact Assessment Template.

“It’s not about how fast you can move, but how prepared you are. Responsible AI processes might seem like speed bumps, but ultimately they’re accelerators.”

Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager and co-lead, Microsoft Digital Responsible AI Team

Building your capacity to create AI tools responsibly won’t happen without careful planning and strategy. As part of that process, embed responsible AI into your development workflows by emulating the practices we’ve pioneered at Microsoft.

“It’s not about how fast you can move, but how prepared you are,” Tripathi says. “Responsible AI processes might seem like speed bumps, but ultimately they’re accelerators.”

By prioritizing responsible AI, businesses of all kinds, all over the world, can ensure that the AI revolution is a truly human movement.

Key takeaways

These insights can help you as you begin your own journey through responsible AI:

• Realize that this isn’t just a technical transition. It’s also a gradual evolution and an ongoing journey.
• Work with people across your organization to establish goals and standards, because different disciplines bring different expertise and insights to the table. This will also align your responsible AI standards with your organizational values.
• Start with the basics and build from there. Establish principles, create processes, and construct tooling around those structures.
• A wide array of tooling is readily available in the world of AI. Seek out providers that model responsible values.
• Lean on your existing experts across privacy, security, accountability, and compliance. Their skills will be crucial in this new technological landscape.
• Conducting your own responsible AI groundwork is crucial, but you can also partner with Microsoft. We run on trust, and we’ve thought about these issues to pave the way for your success. Follow our lead, consider the best ways to adapt our lessons to your organization, and come to us with questions.

Try it out

Learn more about our responsible AI principles here at Microsoft.

Related links

• See how we’re responding to the AI revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.
• Learn how a data council is powering our unified data strategy at Microsoft.
• Read our guide to becoming a Frontier Firm in the age of AI.
• Explore ways that we’re accelerating employee support with our new Employee Self-Service Agent.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Responsible AI: Why it matters and how we’re infusing it into our internal AI projects at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At an organization the size of ours—with a global workforce, massive cloud footprint, and millions of identities to protect—relying on passwords wasn’t a sustainable security posture. We needed something stronger, simpler, and more secure.

This led to the introduction of Windows Hello for Business, which was first built into Windows 10 and then Windows 11. Windows Hello for Business replaces traditional passwords with hardware‑backed keys tied to a user’s device.

So, instead of typing a “secret phrase” that can be phished or leaked, our employees authenticate with biometrics or a PIN that never leaves the device. It’s fast, intuitive, and—most importantly—resistant to the kinds of attacks that plague password‑based systems.

“This wasn’t just a technology shift—it was a structural change in how we establish trust across the organization. The lessons we learned offer a practical blueprint for any organization looking to strengthen their security while also reducing friction for their workforce.”

Abu Kabir, director of IT service management, Microsoft Digital

Rolling out passwordless authentication at a large company like ours took more than just introducing new technology. It also required that we come up with a new way to onboard our employees securely, no matter where they work.  

The first step we took toward passwordless credentials was to create Identity Pass, which included an emphasis on Day 1 authentication (on a new employee’s first day at Microsoft). By combining strong identity proofing, a Temporary Access Pass (TAP), and automated onboarding workflows, we forged an identification system where employees could unbox their device, sign in securely, and register their credentials without ever needing a password.

The result wasn’t just a smoother user experience.

“This wasn’t just a technology shift—it was a structural change in how we establish trust across the organization,” says Abu Kabir, a director of IT service management in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The lessons we learned offer a practical blueprint for any organization looking to strengthen their security while also reducing friction for their workforce.”

How we launched passwordless authentication

To understand how we worked through the details of passwordless authentication, it’s helpful to explain how it was implemented in the first place.

Our passwordless security system includes several components, including face or fingerprint, a PIN tied to their device, and a physical security key (like a YubiKey), but this story focuses these on two:

• Identity Pass: the internal system for secure, passwordless onboarding and recovery
• Windows Hello for Business: the phishing‑resistant credential that Identity Pass helps users register

Identity Pass

Identity Pass, which is only used internally here at Microsoft, uses several tools to “bootstrap” the user, which is the first step in establishing trust among a user, a device, and an identity system. It’s the moment when you go from “nothing trusted” to “something trusted.” Everything that happens afterward depends on getting that moment right.

Identity Pass relies on three core elements:

• Verified ID is what we use internally to establish proof of identity. It’s an initial step and is valid for 30 days.
• Temporary Access Pass (TAP) establishes authentication.
• Conditional access enforces policy.

Identity Pass is where risk signals matter most, because onboarding and recovery are the moments when identity assurance is weakest. Those risk signals include:

• Authentication behavior detection: If a user tries to redeem a TAP or Verified ID from an unusual location, device, or pattern, Authentication Behavior Detection can flag a sign in as risky. Identity Pass can then require stronger identity proofing or block the flow.
• Global high‑risk detection: If our threat intelligence determines the user is likely compromised, Identity Pass will not allow TAP issuance or passwordless registration until the risk is remediated.
• Strong fraud indicators: If the user’s session or token shows signs of fraud (token replay, hijacking, malicious infrastructure), Identity Pass will force remediation and block bootstrap flows.
• Risk‑based identity assurance: This is the decision engine that takes security signals and determines what level of assurance is required. For example:
  • Low risk = allow TAP issuance
  • Medium risk = require Verified ID reproofing
  • High risk = block and escalate

Identity Pass is essentially the front door where these signals decide whether a user can even begin the passwordless journey.

Windows Hello for Business

Windows Hello for Business is the strong, phishing‑resistant credential that Identity Pass helps users register. Once this is in place, the risk signals listed above continue to influence authentication.

• Authentication behavior detection: Windows Hello for Business sign‑ins are evaluated like any other. If the user suddenly authenticates from an impossible location or unusual device, this system flags it as a sign‑in risk.
• Global high‑risk detection: If our detects a high‑confidence compromise, Windows Hello for Business sessions can be revoked via Continuous Access Evaluation. The user then reregisters through Identity Pass.
• Strong fraud indicators: If a Windows Hello for Business token is replayed or misused, this system triggers immediate revocation and forces secure recovery.
• Risk‑based identity assurance: This determines whether Windows Hello for Business alone is sufficient, or whether the user must step up to a stronger method based on risk.

Windows Hello for Business is the credential, but the risk signals determine whether that credential is trusted at any given moment.

What we learned: Rollout and implementation

While our toolsets and protocols offer a clear path for any organization moving toward passwordless authentication, transferring users from a typical user/password security setup can have a variety of challenges—especially at the outset.

Devices, environments, and remote work all matter

When an organization adopts identity‑based, passwordless authentication, one of the first realities it confronts is that the onboarding experience isn’t uniform. Employees don’t all show up with the same hardware, the same operating system version, or the same security capabilities. That diversity has a direct impact on how smoothly a user can complete the initial Day 1 setup and register a strong, phishing‑resistant credential.

“It’s not one-size-fits-all. The onboarding experience can be different by platform, version, and device. The further away you get from a homogenized environment, the more complexity you introduce.”

Matt Scott, senior IT service manager, Microsoft Digital

Device and platform diversity is one of the defining factors in designing a successful passwordless onboarding experience. Any organization adopting identity‑based authentication needs an onboarding system that can adapt to a wide range of hardware, OS versions, and security capabilities while still enforcing a consistent, high‑assurance security model.

Identity proofing and credential registration don’t look the same across platforms. A laptop might support credential setup directly at the login screen, while a mobile device might require an app‑based flow, and a non‑traditional platform might rely entirely on browser‑based enrollment. The underlying model stays consistent, but the user experience varies depending on where the user begins.

“It’s not one-size-fits-all,” says Matt Scott, a senior IT service manager in Microsoft Digital. “The onboarding experience can be different by platform, version, and device. The further away you get from a homogenized environment, the more complexity you introduce.”

Support volume

With Identity Pass in place, we have seen dramatic reductions in password reset volume (80%), onboarding delays, and help desk tickets related to account access. At the initial rollout stage, however, most organizations should anticipate a temporary spike in support needs.

“We expected an increase in volume, because we had recently gotten to 99% in terms of users being identified through Phish-Resistant Multi-Factor Authentication,” Scott says. “In reality, what’s happening is you have a lot of users who are unhappy with the experience as part of the move to a passwordless environment.”

No matter how solid the argument is for a passwordless approach or how cleanly an organization implements it, our experience shows that organizations should expect initial confusion from employees and increased pressure on support teams.

“Moving into a passwordless environment is obviously good for everyone, but we needed to make it easier for users to get the information they needed,” Scott says. “It’s not just one fell swoop of moving from password to passwordless. It’s truly a journey. And it’s very important that change management is part of that journey.”

Helping employees help themselves

Another key learning during our implementation of passwordless authentication was the importance of accessible documentation. This gives users who have yet to establish their identity credentials a way to get unblocked without having to immediately call IT support.

That documentation must stay accurate over time, so it’s crucial to build a governance strategy that ensures updates are made quickly as new devices, platforms, and scenarios emerge.

“During onboarding, if there’s a problem and a user is locked out, they may not have access to the corporate network,” Kabir says. “Having a site that they could access, with actual instruction based on which device they’re using and that shows them how to get past key blockers, was very helpful.”

Maintaining a direct line to leadership in order to help unblock lingering change requests also proved to be essential. In one case, bugs lingered in the engineering queue for days, even weeks, because the escalation path was limited (by design).

“Approval requests were blocked, and so approvals needed to be accelerated to the skip-level approver,” Kabir says. “We were able to move fast to fix that, because we had a clear understanding of the pain that folks were feeling on our side and could effectively communicate that to leadership.”

Short-term pain, long-term gain

The impact has been significant. Instead of spending long cycles troubleshooting forgotten passwords or manually verifying user identities, IT teams can focus on higher‑value work: strengthening identity protection, refining automation, and improving the user experience. This shift not only reduces operational overhead, it also aligns with our Zero Trust principles by removing weak authentication steps from the identity lifecycle.

For employees, the experience is equally transformative. New hires can unbox a device, authenticate using a TAP delivered through a secure Verified ID workflow, and immediately register passwordless methods like Windows Hello for Business. Although the onboarding journey may vary across platforms and devices, the process is fast and intuitive.

For existing users who lose access—whether due to a forgotten PIN, a lost device, or a credential reset—Identity Pass provides a self‑service recovery path that avoids the delays and security risks of traditional reset processes.

Our experience demonstrates that when these processes are redesigned around strong, hardware‑backed, phishing‑resistant credentials, organizations gain both security and efficiency. The result is a more resilient identity foundation that supports the realities of modern work.

Key takeaways

Here are some suggestions for getting started with Windows Hello for Business and Day 1 onboarding:

• Passwordless authentication start with strong identity proofing. Establishing user identity up front is essential to creating a secure foundation for all future authentication.
• Day 1 onboarding is the riskiest moment. The initial bootstrap step is where trust is first established, and risk signals matter most.
• Temporary Access Pass replaces temporary passwords. TAP provides a secure, time‑bound way for users to authenticate and register passwordless credentials without exposing the network to attack.
• Device and platform diversity shapes the user experience. Different hardware, operating systems, and compute environments require flexible onboarding paths that still enforce consistent security.
• Support demand spikes before it drops. Organizations should expect short‑term confusion and increased help‑desk volume before passwordless security benefits fully materialize.
• Long‑term gains are significant. Once deployed, passwordless authentication reduces operational overhead, strengthens security, and improves the user experience across the identity lifecycle.

Try it out

• Explore Windows Hello for Business.
• Check out Microsoft identity and access management services.

Related links

• Learn more about implementing strong user authentication with Windows Hello for Business.
• Read about phishing-resistant authentication with Microsoft Entra ID.
• See how Microsoft is using AI to reinvent network security.
• Discover how we developed a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft.
• Find out how Windows Hotpatch transformed security and compliance at Microsoft.
• Learn how Microsoft hardened our defenses with Microsoft Baseline Security Mode.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Getting started with Windows Hello for Business and Day 1 authentication at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Maybe you’re a product manager with a backlog that you can’t ever get to. Perhaps you’re a designer who can never seem to get engineering resources assigned to you. Or maybe you’re a program manager who routinely gets stuck copying data between systems by hand.

These are common challenges knowledge workers face everywhere, including here at Microsoft. A year ago, AI enthusiasts knew agents with tools could fix these problems—they just didn’t know where to start.

Some of our employees in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization and Customer Zero for the company, took a grassroots approach to solving this problem. They built something called the Frontier Forge, our pro‑code “harness” that enables our less-technical employees to get work done with agents. They use it to quickly build agentic instructions and instantly share their solutions with peers, which accelerates our productivity across the company.

The Frontier Forge represents a cultural shift in how our product managers, designers, program managers and other “I’m not an engineer but I want to build stuff” employees now apply AI tools directly to their work.

What first began as a hackathon experiment has evolved into a thriving Microsoft-internal community with nearly 100 engaged contributors, an active Teams channel, and a GitHub repository filled with templates, learning modules, and ready-to-use AI agents. The impact is measurable: Forecasting, backlog grooming and communication tasks that collectively took weeks now take hours or minutes.

“I saw myself and others spending too much of our time on data wrangling and admin tasks when we wanted to be strategizing. Nobody was building what felt truly agentic. So, we did it ourselves.”

Brett Reifers, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Employees who never saw themselves as technical are now building sophisticated data visualizations, automating workflows, creating prototypes, and generating learning modules. These were capabilities previously reserved for specialized engineering teams.

The “Forge” is where it’s all happening now.

From a hackathon to a movement

In early 2025, Brett Reifers, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, spotted a problem he couldn’t ignore. His peers, smart and driven product managers, kept asking the same question: “How do I use agents for my actual work?”

Beginner tutorials about prompt engineering felt trivial. Advanced agents with tools assumed engineering expertise. The middle ground, where AI meets real jobs, didn’t exist.

“I saw myself and others spending too much of our time on data wrangling and admin tasks when we wanted to be strategizing,” Reifers says. “Nobody was building what felt truly agentic. So, we did it ourselves.”

So, Reifers partnered with colleague Humberto Arias, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital whose work explores the intersection of AI and productivity. Arias had been independently researching agentic solutions that could click through interfaces, open applications, and complete tasks autonomously.

The insight that unlocked everything came from a deceptively simple observation:

“Everything on the internet is a form—every site, mobile app, every click,” Reifers says. “If agents could fill out my forms in Azure DevOps, they could handle any web-based task.”

They pitched the concept of Copilot fulfilling form-based processes as an entry for Microsoft’s annual hackathon to Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management in Microsoft Employee Experience. MacDonald immediately recognized its potential.

“My reaction was simply, ‘This sounds amazing,’” MacDonald says. “This solution was exactly what we needed.”

The event proved agents could automate PM workflows: managing Azure DevOps items, generating summaries, and querying data systems. After the hackathon validated the concept, Arias suggested pushing the project to GitHub for wider exposure. Reifers then used GitHub Copilot itself, recursively using the very tools they were building, to open source the first Frontier Forge repository in 15 minutes.

A pro-code environment with natural language accessibility

The Forge combines GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and MCPs into a framework that makes professional development tools easily accessible to non-engineers.

“The Frontier Forge is a place where you can learn regardless of your skill level. You can adopt what’s out there, even if you don’t know where to start.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Employee Experience

The core idea: Give employees a workspace seeded with community-created templates, learning modules, and custom agents tailored to Microsoft Digital contexts. Then let them build from there.

For MacDonald, the Forge has proven to be an accessible entry point for almost anyone, regardless of experience.

“The Frontier Forge is a place where you can learn regardless of your skill level,” MacDonald says. “You can adopt what’s out there, even if you don’t know where to start.”

An architecture for context-first AI

The technical architecture of The Frontier Forge leverages three layers simultaneously:

• VS Code provides the enterprise managed workspace where everything happens.
• GitHub Copilot offers chat functionality and AI assistance, with access to multiple models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini.
• Tools like Model Context Protocols (MCPs) act as standardized connectors that let agents access tools, data, and services locally. This unlocked what Copilot could decide and do with user approval.

“With GitHub Copilot and MCPs, there are literally no boundaries. It’s hard to explain just how transformational this can be for a product manager. Whatever you ask is transformed into code with a purpose, allowing you to do something you couldn’t before.”

Humberto Arias, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The MCPs connect to services like Azure DevOps (for roadmap planning and backlog management), Microsoft Documentation, Figma (for design work), and dozens of other platforms that are essential to product manager workflows. New MCPs appear daily, expanding capabilities organically as the community builds them.

Employees can even ask GitHub Copilot to build custom MCPs for services lacking official integrations. When Arias needed a PowerPoint creator that didn’t exist, he asked GitHub Copilot to create one.

“With GitHub Copilot and MCPs, there are literally no boundaries,” Arias says. “It’s hard to explain just how transformational this can be for a product manager. Whatever you ask is transformed into code with a purpose, allowing you to do something you couldn’t before.”

The shift from prompt engineering towards context engineering is another reason why the Forge works. Its workspace settings, agent instructions, skills and hooks provide a harness with guardrails that help colleagues adopt and use this.

The Forge provides a curated starting point: Microsoft Digital-specific templates, governance frameworks, security guidelines grounded in Microsoft’s Responsible AI framework, and working examples employees can immediately use and modify.

Transformational impact

The productivity gains generated by The Frontier Forge are very real. Our employees report saving weeks or even months on certain projects, especially those that previously required extensive manual work or specialized technical skills.

Case in point: Laura Oxford, a senior content program manager in Microsoft Digital, had four years’ worth of Excel files and communication metrics reports. She had always intended to use the data to create marketing forecasts, but she could never find the necessary time or resources to perform the analysis.

“The key to creating the agent was going deep into the context. It was an iterative conversation, going back and forth to fine-tune the agent until I was consistently getting the output I wanted. But it truly was just a conversation—no tech skills needed.”

Laura Oxford, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

Through iterative, conversation-based prompting, Oxford’s agent analyzed patterns, created projections, and produced visualizations. Oxford now has a robust historical analysis that enables prediction of future campaign performance.

“The key to creating the agent was going deep into the context,” Oxford says. “It was an iterative conversation, going back and forth to fine-tune the agent until I was consistently getting the output I wanted. But it truly was just a conversation—no tech skills needed.”

Drafting clear, executive-ready communications for complex initiatives was what brought Mark Stratford, a senior product manager with the email and calendaring service team in Microsoft Digital, to the Forge.

Before the Forge, communicating status updates to leadership meant he had to manually synthesize data from CSVs, track several approval chains at once—often in messy emails—and iterate on visualizations for what seemed like days and days.

Put more succinctly, these tasks are time-consuming chores that are perfect for AI.

“The Forge’s architecture changes how you think about the problem,” Stratford says. “Instead of iterating on prompts, you declare intent and desired outcome. The Forge’s architecture handles the rest.”

Using this pattern, Stratford created:

• Over a dozen interactive dashboards for portfolio roadmaps, migration tracking, and service health monitoring.
• Approval matrix visualizations mapping multi-stakeholder sign-off dependencies.
• Data analysis pipelines transforming raw telemetry into executive-ready narratives.

“I didn’t need to fight ambiguity or handhold the model. The architecture gave the agent a stable, skills-driven foundation from the start, which dramatically accelerated development time and improved clarity.”

Mark Stratford, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Forge’s clean separation between intent, constraints, tools, and data inputs eliminated the prompt-tuning loop. Stratford mapped his objectives into the agent framework once, relying on built-in structure and guardrails.

His analysis and drafting time dropped from days to minutes. Outputs like roadmaps and data visualizations went directly into decision workflows with no manual cleanup required.

“I didn’t need to fight ambiguity or handhold the model,” Stratford says. “The architecture gave the agent a stable, skills-driven foundation from the start, which dramatically accelerated development time and improved clarity.”

Building community and sharing knowledge

A simple continuously improving repository has grown into something larger: a community of nearly 100 enthusiasts. Contributors are building templates, learning modules, and specialized MCPs tailored to their job functions. Teams are sharing wins and unlocked achievements.

“At its core, The Frontier Forge is an open-source, community‑driven experience. It’s a safer environment that will help people learn and apply Microsoft’s AI at work.”

Brett Reifers, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Forge succeeds because of its emphasis on community and knowledge sharing. Its GitHub repository serves as collaborative workspace where employees contribute agents, templates, and learning resources.

This sharing culture creates a compounding cycle. One employee’s outcome becomes another’s starting point. Contributors share useful agents immediately, without lengthy approvals. This grassroots approach lets innovation spread at the pace of curiosity.

“At its core, The Frontier Forge is an open-source, community‑driven experience,” Reifers says. “The Forge is a safer environment that will help people learn and apply Microsoft’s AI at work.”

Building a safe-to-fail path

For IT leaders looking to replicate something like the Forge, MacDonald’s guidance starts with reframing the challenge.

“Find the people who are super curious and who want to learn. They will be the ones who drive innovation with AI agents and other newly developed tools.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Employee Experience

The barrier to agent adoption for non-engineering roles isn’t access to tools. It’s all about giving them the confidence needed to build them and then put them to work. Providing a safe, hands-on environment where people can learn at their own pace, regardless of skill level, has been an essential key to success.

Another key has been to empower the people in your organization who are eager to innovate and try new things. The Forge began with two curious product managers who decided to experiment and then shared their idea with peers.

“Find the people who are super curious and who want to learn,” MacDonald says. “They will be the ones who drive innovation with AI agents and other newly developed tools.”

For IT leaders currently trying to prepare their organizations for an AI-driven future, the story shows that the answer isn’t to wait around for perfect tools or comprehensive employee training.

“The leaders that create safe spaces for non-engineers to build with AI now will compound that advantage for years,” Reifers says. “The ones that wait will spend 2027 trying to catch-up.”

Our knowledge workers don’t need to wait for help any longer, now they can forge their own path with an agent or other AI tool they build themselves.

Key takeaways

Here are some insights your leaders can use to build grassroots-led, AI-forward communities in your organization:

• Start with volunteers, not mandates. The Forge grew to 100 contributors with zero top-down requirements. Organic growth from curious employees creates sustainable adoption.
• Highlight your quick wins. Reifers’ and Arias’ live demos of MCPs, Oxford’s 90-minute forecast and Stratford’s 20-minute drafts became the recruiting pitch for the next wave of adopters. Show your people results like these, then hand them the tools.
• Lower barriers without lowering standards. Accessibility and quality aren’t mutually exclusive. Governance and security are non-negotiable. Configure it all into the harness.
• Prioritize knowledge sharing and attribution. When one person solves a problem and shares it, dozens benefit immediately. Reward provenance.
• Ship fast, improve later. The Forge repo was built in 15 minutes. Four months later, it contained 50+ templates and agents. As much of 80% what is produced in the Forge is rewritten every other week as tools evolve. Ship MVPs and evolve based on real usage.
• Reframe outcomes > tools. Shifting from “developer tool” to “Copilot workspace” helps knowledge workers see they belong.

Try it out

Start building and sharing AI agents today with GitHub Copilot.

Related links

• See how we enable Microsoft employees to build AI agents that help them complete important tasks.
• Learn more about GitHub Copilot for Azure.
• Discover how we’re transforming our employee experience with AI. 
• Take a course on building AI agents for beginners in GitHub Copilot.
• Follow our step-by-step guide to building API-powered agents. 
• Find out how continuous improvement helps us identify agentic opportunities, and how it can help your company, too. 

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post The Frontier Firm: How knowledge workers are forging their own AI tools at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Until now.

To address this challenge, the Microsoft Teams product group worked with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, to create Microsoft Teams Rooms Express Install for compact meeting spaces. This “room-in-a-box” solution quickly transforms small spaces into versatile, modern collaboration hubs.

And now the product group is working with our commercial partners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to extend this small meeting room solution to all customers.

Express Install is a modular meeting room solution that requires little to no physical modifications to a room, which makes it more affordable. Installation involves putting lightweight hardware into a room, turning it on, and connecting it to our Teams Room technology that comes baked in.

Optimizing for efficiency

The Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms story began in 2019. That’s when the product group and our team here in Microsoft Digital used The Hive, our 20,000 square-foot innovation lab, to engineer, architect, and design all the variations of our Teams Room product that are now available.

We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

After tackling high-end executive conference rooms, meeting halls used for all-hands and major company gatherings, and large “workhorse” rooms where typical team meetings are held, it was time to take on the plethora of small rooms at Microsoft. These are the rooms where individuals and small groups of people go to collaborate and do the work that powers the company.

However, the huge number of these types of rooms here at Microsoft (and at other enterprises) often made them too expensive to invest in upgrading.

“We knew we needed to find a way to solve this, to come up with an affordable, modular solution that was easy to install,” says Roy Sherry, a principal, technical program manager for AI-Enabled Meetings in Microsoft Digital. “We worked with the product team to build and test a solution that became Express Install. We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

As Customer Zero for the company, the role for Sherry and the rest of our team is to not only be the first to deploy the technology and services that we sell to customers, but in some cases to help our product teams build them—including these Teams Rooms and our Express Install solution.

We initially installed Express Install 70 times as part of a pilot, and after seeing extremely positive results, we expanded to 700 more rooms across the company. Now our plan is to gradually install it in all of our suitable small rooms.

Bringing the solution to customers via OEMs

After we got Express Install working internally here at Microsoft, we shifted to extending it to our customers.

We wanted to give them the same features and benefits we were seeing here at Microsoft, including:

• OEM availability: Customers can now access Express Install through trusted hardware partners, expanding reach and accessibility.
• One-hour deployment: They can get their small rooms up and running quickly with a streamlined process.
• Enhanced, AI-enabled audio visual (AV) rooms: We’re bringing the full Microsoft Teams experience to Express Install, so even the most budget-conscious organizations can outfit small spaces with the latest meeting technology.

Our partnerships with OEMs have produced a range of Microsoft Teams Rooms products, packages, and systems.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings. They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

Raven Vasquez, senior IT service manager, Microsoft Digital

These designs were created by different OEM partners for a variety of scenarios. So, if a customer has a specific preferred hardware partner, they can work with them to build an Express Install room.

Because the rooms are simpler and easier to build, even organizations with fixed budgets can set up more rooms. That sentiment is reflected in the feedback we get from customers.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings,” says Raven Vasquez, a senior IT service manager in Microsoft Digital. “They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

The Microsoft Teams product group began to work with OEMs who specialized in mounting and furniture solutions. Together, they developed stands and housing kits for Teams Room Express Install, giving customers flexible modular options to create intelligent AV and hybrid meeting experiences.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable. Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Sarika Kesavan, senior program manager, Microsoft Teams

Customers who have started using Express Install are starting to see some of the same efficiency gains that we saw here at Microsoft, which were significant.

“We saw a 40% savings in our cost and time,” says Sarika Kesavan, a senior program manager in the Microsoft Teams product group whose role includes bringing solutions that the company builds at The Hive to customers.

The big wins were that it could be installed in an hour and it wasn’t necessary to pay general contractors to modify rooms or pull cables through walls.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable,” Kesavan says. “Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Traditional conference room setups and upgrades often require permits, construction, specialized wiring, and weeks (or more) of disruptions. As a result, we and many customers have been hesitant to deploy advanced meeting technology, especially for small spaces.

With Express Install, that complexity disappears.

Deploying Express Install

Each Express Install kit is pre-engineered for fast delivery and setup, with flexible configurations for different scenarios and OEM devices.

 For smaller rooms, the package typically includes:

• Teams-certified compute device and camera, combined into a single unit for compact spaces
• Modular display or monitor, sized to fit the room
• Integrated microphone and speaker-bar system
• Simplified tabletop or freestanding mounting solution (no wall-mounting required)
• Pre-installed, preconfigured Teams Rooms software

“Express Install reduces the complexity of a traditional room setup while providing the same experience as a typical Teams Room scenario, but at reduced cost,” Kesavan says.

Gaining insights with the monitoring portal

There’s nothing more disruptive than discovering the in-room technology isn’t working just minutes before a meeting. That’s why it’s vital to be able to check whether your Teams Room is online at any time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity. If I can receive an alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

Divya Tiwari, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal allows you to monitor the compute device and all connected peripherals (such as the display and camera) in a meeting space, giving you full visibility into room status.

Instead of discovering issues only when someone tries to use the room, the portal proactively sends alerts—for example, if a display stops working—so problems can be resolved ahead of time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity,” says Divya Tiwari, senior product manager within Microsoft Digital. “If I can see the alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

The portal also provides insights into room usage and component performance, highlighting underused spaces and helping organizations improve meeting room efficiency.

Accelerating the future of meeting spaces

We launched the initial pilot of Express Install after recognizing a clear gap in the market: organizations needed a smarter, faster way to equip small meeting spaces for collaboration. And we continue to innovate as we roll out this solution to all Microsoft customers.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them. This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Roy Sherry, principal, technical program manager AI enabled meetings, Microsoft Digital

The simplified Express Install design gives organizations the power to scale quickly. If our customers have meeting rooms that need to be up and running fast, Express Install offers a cost-effective path to a fully AI-enabled Teams Room. Their AV budget goes further without sacrificing the modern, Copilot-powered experience that elevates every meeting.

“When we began working with OEMs to bring channel partners and AV integrators on board, we started with small rooms,” Kesavan says. “The value and the cost savings are even greater in larger spaces, so our next phase is to develop solutions for medium- to large-room setups.”

This is just the beginning.

Express Install is opening the door to a new era of fast, scalable, AI-powered collaboration, and we’re excited for our customers to see what’s possible.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them,” Sherry says. “This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms:

• Teams Rooms are for everyone: Express Install makes it easy to deploy interactive, hybrid-friendly features at scale. 
• Explore Express Install options through trusted OEM partners: Review room-in-a-box kits from trusted OEMs to find modular setups that fit your needs.
• Standardize small‑room designs with pre‑engineered kits: Adopt Express Install kits as a repeatable blueprint to scale modern meeting experiences quickly across multiple locations.
• Identify underutilized rooms and optimize space planning: Leverage usage analytics from the Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal to make data‑driven decisions about which rooms to refresh, repurpose, or scale up or down.
• Plan ahead for larger meeting rooms: As OEM partnerships grow, customers can start planning broader deployments that bring the sar.me simplicity and savings to larger spaces.

Try it out

For a closer look at the solution, visit the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience.  

Related links

• Take a virtual meeting room tour.
• Check out Microsoft Teams Rooms: Express Install video.
• Read more about Express Install on the Microsoft Teams blog.
• Watch Microsoft: The Hive 101 video.
• See how we developed the “room-in-a-box” approach of Express Install.
• Explore Microsoft Teams Rooms devices on the Microsoft Showcase site.
• Read about meeting room guidance for Teams on the Microsoft Learn site.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post A one-hour solution: Scaling Microsoft Teams Rooms in small spaces with Express Install appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re embracing this as Customer Zero for the company.

What does that mean?

It means that we’re testing and shaping new Windows 11 features before they ship to customers. And as such, we’re helping the company reimagine what the OS can do for enterprise users in an AI-first world. We’re also helping the company transform the tools and processes we and our customers use to manage the Windows devices that our employees use to do their work.

“Windows 11 is our foundation for the future of work. We’re helping to build an OS that’s not just reactive—it’s predictive. It understands context, adapts to users, and helps IT teams stay ahead of the curve.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Digital

When we rolled out Windows 11 across Microsoft in 2021, we wanted to modernize the Windows experience for our global workforce. That meant moving beyond the legacy of Windows 10 and building a platform that’s smarter, more secure, and easier to manage. It also meant working closely with engineering teams to ensure that what we deploy internally reflects what customers need externally.

“Windows 11 is our foundation for the future of work,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management at Microsoft Digital. “We’re helping to build an OS that’s not just reactive—it’s predictive. It understands context, adapts to users, and helps IT teams stay ahead of the curve.”

This transformation isn’t happening in isolation. It’s part of a broader organizational commitment to AI across Microsoft. From the integration of Copilot into dozens of Microsoft products to intelligent device management, we’re aligning every layer of the stack to deliver smarter experiences.

And we’re doing it because the time is right. The end of Windows 10 support is here, and Windows 11 is the essential solution for organizations seeking the enhanced productivity, security, and personalized experiences that AI makes possible.

Embracing a secure and efficient update environment

Keeping Windows 11 secure and up-to-date has evolved into a streamlined, intelligent process.

With Windows Autopatch, we’ve automated the deployment of updates across our enterprise.

But automation doesn’t mean losing control. The management tools available across Microsoft Intune and Windows allow us to exercise complete control over updates. We can leave Autopatch to make patching decisions, or we can dictate how any part of the process works—evaluate and select which updates to perform, define the rollout structure and schedule, and monitor the updates.

“Autopatch update readiness takes us to a new level with Windows 11 updates. It allows us to be proactive, rather than reactive in ensuring our Windows devices are in a ready state to seamlessly update, which minimizes disruptions and distractions to our employees.”

Dave Rodriguez, principal product manager, Windows team, Microsoft Digital

Autopatch lets us tailor rollouts to match our business structure. We’ve created custom Autopatch groups of up to 50 rings so we can deploy updates to the right people at the right time.

This flexibility is critical. It means we can schedule around sensitive periods like year-end close, define grace periods, and even choose which updates to deploy—feature, driver, or quality.

But the real magic happens behind the scenes.

With Windows 11 and Autopatch, we’re not just reacting to issues—we’re anticipating them. That’s where the Autopatch update readiness (AUR) comes in. It adds a new layer of resilience to our update management strategy.

Update readiness continuously monitors device health and update compliance across the enterprise.

By analyzing real-time telemetry, update readiness flags irregularities early and recommends targeted fixes.

“Autopatch update readiness takes us to a new level with Windows 11 updates,” says Dave Rodriguez, a principal product manager on the Windows team in Microsoft Digital. “It allows us to be proactive, rather than reactive in ensuring our Windows devices are in a ready state to seamlessly update, which minimizes disruptions and distractions to our employees.”

“Hotpatching has been a game-changer for keeping our devices secure without disrupting work. Security updates take effect immediately—no reboot required. That’s a big deal.”

Harshitha Digumarthi, senior product manager, Windows team, Microsoft Digital

One of the biggest wins?

Hotpatch, which allows us to apply most of our monthly security updates without our employees needing to restart their devices, which has been huge for our productivity.

“Hotpatching has been a game-changer for keeping our devices secure without disrupting work,” says Harshitha Digumarthi, a senior product manager on the Windows team in Microsoft Digital. “Security updates take effect immediately—no reboot required. That’s a big deal.”

Hotpatch works by modifying in-memory code to silently apply updates in the background. It’s especially valuable for operations that require high availability.

“We’re seeing a shift from device-centric recovery to user-centric personalization. It’s not just about getting the machine back—it’s about getting the person back to work.”

Markus Gonis, senior service engineer, Microsoft Digital

Together, hotpatch, update readiness, and Autopatch are helping us transform how we manage updates. We’re not just deploying tools—we’re reshaping business critical processes.

Protecting data using Windows Backup and Restore for Organizations

With Windows 11, we’ve redefined what backup and restore means for enterprise users with Windows Backup and Restore for Organizations. It’s not just about getting a device back online—it’s about restoring the user’s experience.

When a user signs into a new device with their Entra ID, they can select a backup to automatically restore their Microsoft Store app configurations, settings, and preferences. It’s seamless. It’s secure. And it’s fast.

“We’re seeing a shift from device-centric recovery to user-centric personalization,” says Markus Gonis, a senior service engineer on the Windows team in Microsoft Digital. “It’s not just about getting the machine back—it’s about getting the person back to work.”

This matters. Especially in large organizations where device turnover is constant and downtime is costly.

With Entra ID, we can automatically enroll devices into Microsoft Intune for management. That means IT policies, security configurations, and compliance settings are applied instantly. No manual setup. No waiting.

And because the restore process is tied to the user’s identity, it works across devices. Whether it’s a laptop refresh, a lost device, or a hardware upgrade, users get their familiar environment back—apps, layout, even their desktop background.

“Windows 11 is designed for fast deployment and compatibility,” Gonis says. “We’ve seen up to 25 percent faster deployment times compared to Windows 10. That’s a huge win for IT teams.”

This isn’t just about convenience. It’s about resilience.

By combining Entra ID with modern device management, we’ve built a recovery system that’s secure by default. Data is encrypted. Access is conditional. And IT retains full control over who can restore what, when, and where.

Capturing the power of AI-enabled apps and experiences

Windows 11 is bringing intelligent experiences to the forefront, and we’re seeing it firsthand at Microsoft Digital. From productivity to security, AI is transforming how our people work.

Windows Recall is an opt-in AI-powered feature built directly into Copilot+ PCs with Windows 11. It’s designed to solve a problem every person knows too well: Finding something you’ve already seen.

Recall allows you to search across time to find the content you need. Just describe how you remember it, and Recall retrieves the moment you saw it. Once opted-in snapshots are taken periodically while content on the screen is different from the previous snapshot. The snapshots of your screen are organized into a timeline. Snapshots are locally stored and locally analyzed on your PC. Recall’s analysis allows you to search for content, including both images and text, using natural language.

Here are its core capabilities:

• Semantic AI-powered search. No need to recall exact filenames. Just describe what you remember—like “blue sustainability slide from last meeting”—and Recall uses on-device AI to surface images or text that match the description.
• Full user control and privacy. IT admins have a full set of controls to manage security and privacy when enabling the Recall feature for the enterprise. Once enabled by enterprise admins, you as the end user then have the choice to opt in to enable snapshots on your machines.
• Explore content with a visual timeline. Recall periodically captures screenshots of your active window and displays them in an interactive, chronological timeline. When you need to revisit something, you can simply scroll through your past activity or jump directly to the specific moment you remember seeing it.
•  Granular snapshot management. You choose which apps and websites to include or exclude. You can pause snapshot capture, delete past captures, and set retention limits (e.g., 30, 60, 90, or 180 days) to manage storage and privacy. And IT admins can control how these capabilities work for the entire organization.
• All snapshots, indexing, and AI processing occur on-device. Recall runs completely locally—no data leaves your PC.It never shares your data with Microsoft or third parties, nor across different user accounts on the same device.

Recall doesn’t just remember—it protects. IT admins can control snapshot storage, retention policies, and even filter which apps and websites are recorded.

That’s where enterprise-scale controls come in.

“We helped define these controls. We tested them to validate they worked as expected.”

John Philpott, principal product manager at Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Digital partnered with the Purview and Intune product teams to help build a rich set of controls that give IT full visibility and governance over Recall’s data store. That includes sensitivity labels, data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and tenant trust reviews—all designed to keep enterprise data safe.

Purview and Intune provide the level of control that IT admins need to ensure that Recall respects the security and privacy concerns of the enterprise and the end user.

If a document is labeled “Highly Confidential,” Recall won’t index it. If a meeting is tagged “Recipients Only,” it won’t be captured. Purview admins can decide exactly which sensitivity levels are allowed in Recall and which are excluded.

Recall’s content redaction feature automatically detects and removes highly confidential information from screen snapshots based on Purview sensitivity labels. Users can work with both sensitive and non-sensitive documents on the same screen without risk of accidental exposure.

“We helped define these controls,” says John Philpott, a principal product manager within Microsoft Digital. “We tested them to validate they worked as expected.”

Implementing Windows 11 for the enterprise

Windows 10 support officially ended on October 14, 2025. Still, many companies have not yet made the needed move, something that Microsoft would like them to do as soon as possible.

At Microsoft Digital, we’ve already made the leap. We’ve deployed Windows 11 across our internal fleet, and we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t.

The most important thing? Have a plan and a phased approach.

“We didn’t try to do everything at once,” Digumarthi says. “We went slow, monitored help desk calls, and paused when needed. It wasn’t about speed—it was about getting it right.”

That phased approach helped us avoid surprises. We used security groups to segment users, deployed in waves, and ran parallel communication campaigns to keep everyone informed. “We built tech web pages, sent individual emails, and used Viva Engage for direct outreach,” Gonis says. “We wanted users to know what was coming and why.”

Organizations have options. They can upgrade to Windows Pro to Windows Enterprise. They can subscribe to Windows 365, which provides access to Windows 11 in the cloud. And they can extend the life of Windows 10 devices with Extended Security Updates (ESU).

Windows 365 lets you keep older hardware while giving users a modern experience. You get ESUs at no extra cost, and you don’t have to manage license keys or deploy images.

With tools like Autopatch and Intune, deployment is faster and easier. Compatibility is strong. And support is built in.

Looking ahead

We’re just getting started.

At Microsoft Ignite, we’re unveiling new capabilities that push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and automation. Expect deeper integration between Windows and Microsoft Defender, new agentic workflows, and expanded support for AI-driven security operations.

We’re expanding the update readiness initiative, introducing carbon-aware updates in Autopatch, and expanding privacy capabilities in Recall.

Baseline Security Mode is growing, too, with more features, better reporting, and stronger baselines coming soon.

And we’ll keep telling the story. Start with the tools. Lean on the community. And let us help you make the leap to a more intelligent and secure enterprise powered by AI and Windows 11.

Key takeaways

Here are several practical steps you can take right now to maximize your transition to Windows 11 and harness the full potential of its AI-powered capabilities:

• Understand Windows 11’s AI-driven transformation. Learn how Windows 11 leverages artificial intelligence to enhance productivity, security, and user experiences across your organization.
• Discover new enterprise features and deployment strategies. Explore the latest tools and best practices for rolling out Windows 11 efficiently, including advanced management and security capabilities tailored for businesses.
• Learn from Microsoft Digital’s role as Customer Zero. Benefit from Microsoft Digital’s firsthand insights and lessons learned as the initial adopter of Windows 11 within a large enterprise environment.
• Explore migration options. Review your choices for upgrading to Windows 11, such as moving to Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise, subscribing to Windows 365, or leveraging Extended Security Updates for legacy devices.
• Prepare for what’s next. Stay ahead by planning for upcoming features, security enhancements, and innovations that will continue to shape the future of Windows in the enterprise.

Try it out

• Learn more about moving to Windows 11 and download our onboarding kit.
• Start using Windows Autopatch.

Related links

• Check our Microsoft Ignite Windows news announcements.
• Learn more about AI improvements to Windows that we’re announcing at Microsoft Ignite.
• Learn how we’re accelerating workplace productivity at Microsoft with Windows Recall.
• Find out more on how we’re transforming security and compliance at Microsoft with Windows Hotpatch.
• Check out how we’re hardening our defense at Microsoft with Baseline Security Mode.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Supercharging our enterprise with Windows 11 and AI PCs appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Recall on Copilot+ PCs can help. It uses whatever details you remember about the missing item to find it for you.

Our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has deployed Recall, giving our employees access to its AI-powered memory in a secure and managed environment. Recall now integrates with Microsoft Purview, which layers enterprise-grade security and compliance controls on top of Recall’s local AI capabilities.

How Windows Recall works

Windows Recall is an AI-powered feature built directly into Copilot+ PCs with Windows 11. It’s designed to solve a problem every person knows too well: Finding something you’ve already seen.

Here are its core capabilities:

• Explore content with a visual timeline. Recall captures periodic screenshots of your active window and visualizes them in an explorable, chronological timeline. When you need to revisit something, you can scroll through your activity or jump straight to the moment you remember seeing it.
• Semantic AI-powered search. No need to recall exact filenames. Just describe what you remember—like “blue sustainability slide from last meeting”—and Recall uses on-device AI to surface images or text that match the description.
• Full user control and privacy. IT admins have a full set of controls to manage security and privacy when enabling the Recall feature for the enterprise. Once enabled by enterprise admins, you as the end user then have the choice to opt in to enable snapshots on your machines. Only your device stores them, and they’re encrypted locally via BitLocker or Device Encryption. Access requires Windows Hello biometrics (your face or fingerprint), which ensures only you can view them.
•  Granular snapshot management. You choose which apps and websites to include or exclude. You can pause snapshot capture, delete past captures, and set retention limits (e.g., 30, 60, 90, or 180 days) to manage storage and privacy. And IT admins can control how these capabilities work for the entire organization.
• All snapshots, indexing, and AI processing occur on-device. Recall runs completely locally—no data leaves your PC.It never shares your data with Microsoft or third parties, nor across different user accounts on the same device.
• Jumping back in. Windows Recall doesn’t just help you find something you saw before, it helps you pick up where you left off, getting right back to the page, slide, or chat in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams, as well as in an app, document, or webpage.

It’s like having a photographic memory for your digital life. Recall is a productivity booster. But it’s also a security-first, enterprise-ready feature.

“We’ve been working for over a year with Microsoft Digital to understand how Windows Recall will function best in the enterprise environment. They helped us get it ready for our customers.”

Adam Wayment, principal product manager, Windows product team

To ensure security, privacy, and governance, the Windows product team turned to our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, to test Windows Recall. This happened after early users of the feature suggested that better controls needed to be put in place. Our team helped the product group design and deploy better enterprise controls.

This collaboration helped shape Recall into a feature that works for everyone—from individual users to global enterprises.

“We’ve been working for over a year with Microsoft Digital to understand how Windows Recall will function best in the enterprise environment,” says Adam Wayment, a principal program manager lead for Windows Recall. “They helped us get it ready for our customers.”

Establishing security and privacy for the enterprise

Recall doesn’t just remember what you’ve seen. It remembers what it should—and forgets what it shouldn’t.

That’s where enterprise-scale controls come in.

Comprehensive controls are at the center of deploying Recall to the enterprise.

Microsoft Digital partnered with the Purview and Intune product teams to help build a rich set of controls that give IT full visibility and governance over Recall’s data store. That includes sensitivity labels, data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and tenant trust reviews—all designed to keep enterprise data safe.

Purview and Intune provide the level of control that IT admins need to ensure that Recall respects the security and privacy concerns of the enterprise and the end user.

“We helped define these controls. We tested them to validate they worked as expected.”

John Philpott, principal product manager at Microsoft Digital

If a document is labeled “Highly Confidential,” Recall won’t index it. If a meeting is tagged “Recipients Only,” it won’t be captured. Purview admins can decide exactly which sensitivity levels are allowed in Recall and which are excluded.

That means no screenshots of HR portals. No copies of credentials. No risk of sensitive data lingering on a user’s device.

Recall’s content redaction feature automatically detects and removes highly confidential information from screen snapshots based on Purview sensitivity labels. Users can work with both sensitive and non-sensitive documents on the same screen without risk of accidental exposure. Only permitted content is captured during multitasking or collaborative activities. That Excel document with employee salary information? It never becomes part of the snapshot.

IT admins also have policy controls to manage access to Recall. They can set retention limits. They can restrict access by role, ensuring Recall is only available to the right people. And they can block specific apps and websites from being captured.

“We helped define these controls,” says John Philpott, a principal product manager within Microsoft Digital. “We tested them to validate they worked as expected.”

“Security is at the center—data is encrypted on the device. Recall uses the latest technology for security, from all the controls on the backend right up to user authentication, including Windows Hello with face or fingerprint recognition required to access the data.”

Adam Wayment, principal product manager, Windows product team

This wasn’t just about building features. It was about building trust.

We worked to identify the key scenarios and apps—including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and Edge—to prioritize what needed protection. We made sure Recall could handle the real-world complexity of enterprise data.

It was a massive undertaking, requiring collaboration between Microsoft Digital, the Recall product team, and the products teams from all the apps with which Recall interacts. It came down to creating useful functionality while protecting our data.

“Security is at the center—data is encrypted on the device,” Wayment says. “Recall uses the latest technology for security, from all the controls on the backend right up to user authentication, including Windows Hello with face or fingerprint recognition required to access the data.”

These controls were built in collaboration with the product team, with our Microsoft Digital team acting as Customer Zero. We helped define tenant trust requirements and test every scenario—credentials, certificates, internal portals, and more. And now Recall is stronger because of it.

Moving forward

Our team in Microsoft Digital learned a lot helping the Windows product team build and test Recall.

Some lessons were technical. Some were strategic. All of them made the product better.

One of the first challenges we tackled was credential protection. We wanted to make sure passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data wouldn’t be captured. The product team agreed, and we helped them build the exclusion logic that ensures Recall ignores credential-related content.

Another lesson came from deployment.

Recall is disabled by default in enterprise builds. That meant we had to work through IT policy hurdles to get it up and running. We hit race conditions. We found bugs. But we fixed them. And we made the deployment smoother for everyone.

We also learned the value of centering enterprise needs early in the deployment.

When Recall first launched, we focused on consumers. But customer feedback reinforced how powerful the tool could be for information workers in enterprises like ours. We built tenant trust requirements. We ran evaluations. We created a checklist of what needed to be done. And we did it.

That process changed the conversation, and we’re not done. We’re still listening, still improving, still building.

Key takeaways

Here are four actions you can take right away as you consider deploying Windows Recall in your organization:

• Test at scale. Roll out Windows Recall to a wide group to uncover complex issues—especially those that don’t show up in smaller test environments.
• Start with enterprise needs and roles. Engage enterprise stakeholders early review which roles should have access and shape feature requirements such as tenant trust and data-handling policies.
• Collaborate for improvement. Test controls early to ensure that they are configured to provide the level of security and privacy required by your organization.
• Build confidence for adoption. Use thorough evaluations and checklists to ensure readiness, leading to greater trust among users, partners, and teams.

Try it out

Retrace your steps with Windows Recall.

Related links

• Learn more about Windows Recall.
• ‘Click to Do’ in Recall: find out how to do more with what’s on your screen.
• Ensure privacy and control over your Windows Recall experience.
• Learn how the NPU is paving the way toward a more intelligent Windows.
• Learn how we’re supercharging our enterprise with Windows 11 and AI.
• Check our Microsoft Ignite Windows news announcements.
• Learn more about AI improvements to Windows that we’re announcing at Microsoft Ignite.  
• Find out more about our Microsoft Purview-related news from Microsoft Ignite. 

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Accelerating workplace productivity at Microsoft with Windows Recall appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Previously, when our employees had a question or a problem—whether it be a technical issue, an HR query, or just wanting to know what’s for lunch—they had to navigate through a variety of different apps, tools, and SharePoint sites to find the answer or get help with their task.

It was a time-consuming and frustrating experience. But the advent of generative AI has given us a new opportunity.

Microsoft 365 Copilot and the power of agentic AI have created a world where people simply type in questions or requests to get prompt and helpful assistance. Now we’re applying the capabilities of Copilot and agentic technology to the ongoing challenge of employee assistance.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to transform the employee experience with AI solutions that provide personalized and seamless interactions for our employees throughout the workday. What we’ve created with the Employee Self-Service Agent is a powerful example of a solution doing just that.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

The result is the new Employee Self-Service Agent, a “one-stop shop” providing vetted and personalized solutions to our workers across a range of high-demand topics and tasks, including human resources (HR), IT support, and facilities and real estate.

The agent combines the help functions for human resources, IT support, and facilities and real estate into one tool, allowing our employees to handle a range of tasks, such as requesting parental leave, resolving a problem with their device, or getting something fixed in their office. The Employee Self-Service Agent is available to all Microsoft employees worldwide and is also now available to customers.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to transform the employee experience with AI solutions that provide personalized and seamless interactions for our employees throughout the workday,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Employee Experience. “What we’ve created with the Employee Self-Service Agent is a powerful example of a solution doing just that.”

The power of a ‘single pane of glass’

The essential premise of the Employee Self-Service Agent is that it serves as the one place for Microsoft employees to go when they need assistance. This means that they don’t have to remember what tool or website offers the best way to handle their question or task—it’s all available in one seamless, AI-powered interface.

“With this agent, we wanted a ‘single pane of glass’ for our employees and managers,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager for Employee Experience in Microsoft HR. “The idea is that they can come in and get all their questions answered, rather than have to go to multiple tools or URLs in different areas.”

Employee-Self Service screenshot

The workflow is simple—launch Microsoft 365 Copilot, select “Employee Self-Service,” and type in your query. The agent then orchestrates an authoritative response and/or offers a form that can be used to carry out the desired action (auto-populating the form with details from the chat where possible).

“Many support tools that could benefit employees go unused because of limited awareness and the friction involved in completing tasks. This tool gives employees a new way to access that helpful information.”

Prerna Ajmera, general manager, HR digital strategy and innovation

If the question or task can’t be resolved by the agent, it hands the employee off to the appropriate tool, subagent, or support person.

The Employee Self-Service Agent is driving usage of support tools that our employees often overlook.

“Many support tools that could benefit employees go unused because of limited awareness and the friction involved in completing tasks,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager for HR digital strategy and innovation. “This tool gives employees a new way to access that helpful information.”

An early focus on HR and IT Support

In developing the Employee Self-Service Agent, we initially identified two main categories of employee assistance to focus on: HR and technical support. These are areas that generate millions of internal queries and support cases (help tickets) from our employees every year, which means the potential for a significant return on investment (ROI). (We subsequently added real estate and facilities later in the process.)

In the case of human resources, this meant looking at all the HR experiences that employees need help with and figuring out what could be handled with AI. Whether it was a question or task related to personal time off (PTO), performance, compensation, learning, internal job listings, well-being, or something else, we needed to make sure that the information the agent returned was relevant and helpful to that employee.

This is what distinguishes the Employee Self-Service Agent from Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which provides a more general answer that may not apply to that particular worker’s situation, and can’t access all relevant information about that employee.

“When it comes to HR, you need to make sure the answers are coming from authoritative sources, because HR is a very sensitive and vital part of how a company runs.”

Rajamma Krishnamurthy, principal PM architect manager, Employee Experience, Microsoft HR

With Copilot, you might ask for an overview of everything to do with a given project. But when it comes to employee-assistance topics, casting a wide net is not the desired outcome. An employee doesn’t want to hear about HR policies in India when they work in the U.S., or to get Mac-focused tech help when they use a PC. The needs of each of our employees are different, and so we built the agent to reflect that.

A major task in developing the agent was making sure that all the content that it draws from is accurate and up to date. This was especially important for HR-related responses, which sometimes deal with sensitive topics. We’ve carefully thought through privacy and security issues, are following our company Responsible AI principles, and making sure the agent adheres to regulations for each country or region.

“When it comes to HR, you need to make sure the answers are coming from authoritative sources, because HR is a very sensitive and vital part of how a company runs,” Krishnamurthy says. “Our new agent was built so that only vetted sources are responding to these questions.”

One advantage of the Employee Self-Service Agent is its ability to provide real-time assistance. Rather than having to file a ticket and then wait 24 to 48 hours for a response, the employee can get on-demand help and hopefully resolve their problem without waiting. 

“Previously, resolving an HR help request could take a couple of days,” Ajmera says. “These delays often came from the back-and-forth of traditional support channels—‘OK, you told me this; now, what’s the policy for that? What’s next?’ With the agent, employees can get answers in minutes. That’s the beauty of it.”

“The agent’s content is specifically grounded in our authoritative IT service sources, and it also knows relevant details about you as a user. All of this context makes it better at guiding employees to solve their own support issues.”

Trent Berghofer, general manager, Microsoft Digital Modern Support

Agentic assistance to accomplish more

Another differentiator from previous employee assistance tools is that the Employee Self-Service Agent enables task completion, not just information retrieval.

For example, consider technical support (such as dealing with an audio issue on an employee’s device). Our workers are now able to get detailed, contextual, and specific help with their technical issues, helping them solve the issue without having to engage with assisted support and get a ticket created.

An agentic solution for employee assistance

Retrieve

The agent retrieves information from authoritative sources and delivers responses based on contextual data about the employee.

Take action

The agent helps the employee take action right from the chat and avoid having to navigate multiple tools and workspaces.

Extend

The agent is designed to be flexible and customizable, based on the organization’s existing software workflows and third-party solutions.

The Employee Self-Service Agent retrieves authoritative information with natural-language queries and enables users to take action from within the chat.

“The agent’s content is specifically grounded in our authoritative IT service sources, and it also knows about you as a user—that you have this particular device, and the compliance state of that device, and what country you’re located in,” says Trent Berghofer, general manager of the Microsoft Digital Modern Support team. “All of this context makes it better at guiding the employee to solve their own problem, versus doing a generic search on the issue.”

If the employee does have to connect to live support via phone or chat, the technician will have access to their conversation with the agent. This way, the support professional can view details the user has already provided and the solutions that have already been tried. This saves time and decreases frustration.

Task completion is a primary gauge of return on investment (ROI) for the Employee Self-Service Agent. The overall goal across all help categories is for the agent to result in at least 40% fewer support tickets.

Each ticket represents a significant cost to any organization, and those costs add up, especially at large companies. With more than 2 million IT support interactions (via Virtual Agent, chat, and phone) across Microsoft annually, we project that the Self-Service Agent will produce substantial savings in tech support alone.

HR is another area where we hope to generate impact, as employees meet their needs with the Employee Self-Service Agent. Our specific goals include:

• Reduce monthly HR tickets by 44% by mid-2026 through expanded self-service capabilities
• Save employee time with rapid, frictionless fulfillment of requests 
• Boost overall discovery and use of HR programs to deliver increased ROI
• Increase business agility and reduce end-to-end process time

“Once it’s fully adopted, we’re expecting the agent to manage somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 employee interactions a year that used to result in an HR support ticket,” Ajmera says. “That’s a significant shift and learning curve for our organization, in terms of how employees get help. Scaling the agent up to have this major business impact has been one of the biggest challenges for us.”

Saving time with AI support

Employee time savings is another significant driver of ROI. This is a key part of the third vertical we’ve targeted with the Employee Self-Service Agent—real estate and facilities.

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was kind of fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks. The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

With hundreds of office buildings around the world, including dozens of cafés and other specialized sites, Microsoft must handle a constant stream of employee inquiries and activities related to real estate and facilities. These include things like:

• Transportation – calling a shuttle for a ride between buildings
• Dining – learning where your favorite dish is being served (and ordering it to go)
• Booking a room – locating a space to relax or connect with colleagues
• Lobby and visitor services – registering a campus guest
• Facilities tickets – getting help with a repair or other building issue
• Parking registration – recording where your car is parked
• Maps – finding your way around a building or a campus

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was kind of fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks,” says Becky West, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place. Now our employees can ask questions in natural language, and it guides them through whatever campus experience they need to do—invite a guest, find dining options, create a ticket, etc.”

The number of working hours currently spent by our employees trying to find the answer to their facilities-related question or filling out a form to complete a task is difficult to quantify precisely across such a large organization. But consider just one common exercise: registering a visitor at a Microsoft building.

According to Digital Workplace Services data, in 2024 there were 2 million registered visitors at Microsoft buildings worldwide, with roughly 1.2 million of these considered business-related.

Previously, employees had to email or talk to lobby hosts (front-desk staff) to invite guests to Microsoft; the host would then enter the guest details into the Guest Management System.

Now, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides a simple form within the chat, asking for details like guest name, email, purpose (business or personal), building number, and date. Once the form is submitted, the system generates a confirmation and sends a QR code directly to the guest via email. That alone has the potential to save us 50,000 hours of employee time per year.

“One benefit of this is that anything you can do with Copilot Studio in terms of a custom engine agent, you can do in the Employee Self-Service Agent. Our product documentation goes into detail on how to configure it based on your particular needs.”

Kyle von Haden, principal group product manager, Microsoft 365 Copilot product group

Another great example is a common facilities request, like replacing a light bulb, reporting broken furniture, or workspaces that require cleaning. Instead of having to figure out which tool to use to report the issue and then filling out a request, the individual can go straight to the Employee Self-Service Agent and upload a photo.

“The agent detects the problem based on the image, fills in details, and enables the user to file their service request right from the chat,” West says.

Customizable and extensible

The Employee Self-Service Agent was built with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a tool that enables users to create and extend AI agents. The product is intentionally designed so that our customers can customize it to fit their own business needs using preconfigured workflows and accelerator packs that come with the agent.

“One benefit of this is that anything you can do with Copilot Studio in terms of a custom engine agent, you can do in the Employee Self-Service Agent,” says Kyle von Haden, a principal group product manager for the Microsoft 365 Copilot product group. “Our product documentation goes into detail on how to configure it based on your particular needs. We’re even including code samples that show you how to extend the agent further than what you get right out of the box.”

For instance, many of our customers rely on third-party solution providers such as Workday, SAP, or ServiceNow. So, our development process included producing connectors for some of these third-party offerings, making it easier for customers to integrate the Employee Self-Service Agent into their existing workflows.

This extensibility is an advantage of adopting the Employee Self-Service Agent, according to von Haden.

“The beauty of this product is that it comes with all these accelerators that help customers jumpstart their ability to deliver AI-driven employee assistance, because there’s no inherent limitations,” he says. “They have all the same flexibility they’d get by building a solution from scratch, but they get to build on this Copilot Studio foundation that offers powerful capabilities and will continue to grow as we invest more in it.”

The role of Customer Zero

With a new product like the Employee Self-Service Agent, having Microsoft employees use it as part of their everyday work and then provide detailed feedback was a valuable aspect of the development process. This is the essence of the company’s commitment as Customer Zero.

“For the Employee Self-Service Agent, the role of our internal users as Customer Zero has been incredibly important—in this case, doubly so,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences. “Because not only are we learning how to deploy the product in a real, complex environment, but we’re doing it in a world that’s completely new, given all of the changing variables around AI.”

To that end, we began rolling the agent out to employees more than a year ago in a geographically phased approach—first to the United Kingdom and Canada, then India, then to the United States and the rest of the world. Regular communications to employees—via email, Microsoft Viva, and other channels—raised awareness and encouraged use of the agent. And a sophisticated plan for listening and gathering product telemetry was implemented, so that all feedback could be captured and routed back to the product team.

This process was particularly important for building stakeholder trust in the tool. For example, our HR professionals worked closely with the product group to make sure the answers produced by the Employee Self-Service Agent met their high bar for accuracy and reliability.

“Engaging our stakeholders early was key,” Ajmera says. “We iterated with them as they went through the various prompts and responses manually and rated them for accuracy. We learned a lot. It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve gotten to the point where the agent is able to automatically generate responses that meet stakeholder expectations.”

“This product is very significant for us, both from the user perspective and the cost-savings angle. We can get the right answers to and solve issues for our employees faster, which increases their satisfaction and helps them be more effective.”

Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences

This “virtuous flywheel” development process played a role in making the Employee Self-Service Agent better and preparing it for general release, as a feature available to all Microsoft 365 enterprise customers with a Copilot license. That release is expected soon.

Because the agent is built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, it gives us flexibility to adapt and grow as needed. We plan to eventually expand the Employee Self-Service Agent to other key areas across the company, like finance, legal, and more—to become a true single-pane-of-glass portal for all our employees’ needs.

In the end, the agent offers the potential to deliver the kind of impact that only truly breakthrough business software can: delighted users and major ROI.

“This product is very significant for us, both from the user perspective and the cost-savings angle,” Gregersen says. “We can get the right answers to and solve issues for our employees faster, which increases their satisfaction and helps them be more effective. And the solution scales up to real cost savings for the organization.”

Key takeaways

Here are some things to consider when tackling employee assistance at your organization:

• Approach it from the user perspective. Offering a “single pane of glass” portal from which an employee can access help on a wide variety of topics may present some technical challenges, but it meets users where they are and resolves their pain points.
• Start with high-demand categories. We launched our Employee Self-Service Agent journey with two core verticals that offer potential for ROI: HR and IT support. We then added facilities and real estate, in part because the high usage rates (such as for dining and transportation) would drive greater employee awareness and boost user-session numbers.
• Think about task completion. Employees need to not only access authoritative information, they also want the ability to accomplish their goal right from the agent interface. If their issue can’t be handled by the agent, it should be able to make a smooth handoff to the tool that can.
• Spend time up front on data governance. An employee-assistance agent must supply clear, current, and accurate information that is highly relevant to that user. Vague, inaccurate, or irrelevant answers can damage product credibility with your employees.
• Customizable rather than a turnkey solution. It’s important to note that the Employee Self-Service Agent is a flexible template built on top of Copilot Studio; it requires customization by your organization in terms of implementation, categorization, data selection, third-party integration, privacy, legal considerations, and other factors.
• Make sure to collect feedback and iterate. Generative AI tools are still new, and your help solutions can be improved by listening to your employees and acting on what they tell you about their experience.

Try it out

Learn more about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Learn more about our strategic approach to agentic AI internally at Microsoft.
• Find out how we’re transforming the way our employees get help on campus with the Employee Self-Service Agent.
• Read how the Employee Self-Service Agent is helping Puget Sound-based Microsoft employees with their transportation needs.
• Explore how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Copilot to empower our employees.
• Learn how we’re enabling modern support at Microsoft with AI.
• Discover our five-step guide that helps IT leaders get to enterprise AI maturity.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Accelerating employee services at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In the past, Julie might have interacted with different apps and websites to get help with each of those tasks. Today, thanks to the power of agentic AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio, Julie can turn to a single portal to handle all of it: the Employee Self-Service Agent.

This agentic tool, which will soon be released publicly as a free add-on for the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, has already made a big impact on the lives of our employees, saving them time, effort, and frustration. We call it the “one-stop shop” experience of employee self-service.

“Before we had the Employee Self-Service Agent, the employee-assistance experience was fragmented across mobile, websites, and physical kiosks,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The new agent unifies all of these experiences and puts them in the same place.” Now our employees can ask questions in natural language, and it guides them through whatever campus experience they need to do—invite a guest, find dining options, create a help ticket, etc.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done. And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

Of course, employees like Julie also need assistance with other common job-related tasks, like getting their human resources (HR) questions answered or fixing a technical issue with their device.

Those are also important categories included in the Employee Self-Service Agent, something the flexibility and extensibility of Copilot Studio makes possible.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done,” West says. “And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities, HR, or IT support. We live in an AI-powered world, and this agent meets the moment for our people.”

In this story we share how we’re using the Employee Self-Service Agent in the real estate and facilities space, but it does much more than that. Our employees also use it to get help with IT problems and answers to their HR queries, and we expect to add other key areas soon, such as finance and legal. Available to all Microsoft employees worldwide, the full agent is already delivering a significant boost in productivity, cost savings, and user satisfaction across the company.

Everyday use cases for agentic assistance

Julie might not need IT support or help with an HR issue every day. But she’s always on the hunt for her favorite foods for lunch.

In our existing dining app, employees could look up that day’s menu for a specific building cafeteria, but they couldn’t just ask, “Hey, where can I get some good teriyaki on campus today?”

With the Employee Self-Service Agent, now they can.

“Searching on type of cuisine or dish is one of the top requests we were getting,” says Balaji Radhakrishnan, principal software engineering manager for the dining team. “It was an important feature missing from our existing apps, and we solved that with the employee-assistance agent.”

Employee Self-Service Agent screenshot

Not only can the agent help Julie locate the perfect lunch, it also connects her to the tool where she can order and pay for it. This streamlines the process for her—she doesn’t have to remember which website or app to call up to procure her teriyaki treat. (In the future, we plan to extend the functionality so the agent remembers your previous food choices, and you can order right from the agent.)

Dining is just one of the facilities-related experiences we targeted when developing the Employee Self-Service Agent. Other tasks include:  

• Lobby and visitor services – registering a campus guest
• Parking – registering a car to park on campus
• Maps – navigating around a building or a campus
• Facilities tickets – getting help with office furniture, lighting, HVAC, or other building issue
• Transportation – calling a shuttle for a ride between buildings or finding commuting help
• Finding a space – locating a place to relax, work, or connect with colleagues

“We started out by looking at the services we already offered,” West says. “We thought about what tasks would be in highest demand, where that information or transaction lived now, and how best to surface it. The more we explored the power of the agent, the wider the variety of experiences we were able to incorporate.”

Saving time and reducing frustration

Resolving employee pain points and saving time are two of the key advantages inherent to this area of agentic employee assistance. Consider the common employee task of registering a business-related campus guest (such as an interview candidate or a prospective customer).

“If we can handle 50%—600,000—of these business-related visitor registrations through the Employee Self-Service Agent, that adds up to 50,000 hours of employee time each year.”

Bhavani Paruchuri, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

According to Bhavani Paruchuri, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, in 2024 Microsoft saw more than 2 million registered visitors at our buildings worldwide. Roughly 1.2 million of these were business-related guests.

Previously, employees had to email or talk to lobby hosts (front-desk staff) when they wanted to register a guest; the host would then enter visitor details into the Guest Management System. Now, the Employee Self-Service Agent provides a simple form within the chat, asking for details like guest name, email, purpose, building number, and date. Once the form is submitted, the system confirms it and sends a QR code directly to the guest via email.

“We calculated that this new process could save at least five minutes for each guest registration,” Bhavani says. “If we can handle 50%—600,000—of these business-related visitor registrations through the Employee Self-Service Agent, that adds up to 50,000 hours of employee time each year. So, just in this one area alone, the agent can have a big impact on overall productivity.”

Those savings add up, and quickly.

“Once you start using the agent for dining, you use it daily. As we added in cuisine and price filtering and other functionality that wasn’t available before, you could see it was a big differentiator from what the previous tools could do.”

Erik Downing, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

One of the reasons we decided to include facilities-related help early on in the development of the Employee Self-Service Agent is that these common tasks would help increase usage of the new portal—building a habit with our workers that would have long-term benefits.

We have already seen employees used to finding a meal with the agent also using it to solve other challenges, including in the HR and Support spaces.

“Once you start using the agent for dining, you use it daily,” says Erik Downing, a principal product manager with Microsoft Digital. “As we added in cuisine and price filtering and other functionality that wasn’t available before, you could see it was a big differentiator from what the previous tools could do.”

West explains how this can have an outsized effect on promoting product adoption.

“If people get in the daily habit of using the agent for these routine tasks, they’ll be more comfortable going to it for other things,” West says. “Then you can really start to scale the agent up and see the larger impact across more areas.”

Filing a service request with the help of AI

Julie gets to work one morning and is dismayed to discover that her adjustable desk will no longer rise to a standing position. She needs to open a facilities ticket for help.

“The AI automatically picks out the problem class and the problem type; presents a form with the details; asks for confirmation; then kicks off the ticket right from there. It’s all in one place, AI-driven, and truly agentic in terms of task completion—and it will only get better.”

Sonaly Choudary, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

In the past, this would have required Julie to send Facilities an email with a description of the problem, or she would have had to track down the right app or web form for the same purpose.

Now, she can simply snap a photo of the broken desk and upload it to the Employee Self-Service Agent.

The agent will open a form and use information from the photo to create the help ticket right there. This image-based technology, like natural-language chat, is something that our previous apps couldn’t do, which reflects the power of AI. 

“Whether you upload a photo or just describe your issue using natural language, we’ve really pushed this tool to be as agentic as possible,” says Sonaly Choudary, a senior product manager who works on facilities technology products for Microsoft Digital. “The AI automatically picks out the problem class and the problem type; presents a form with the details; asks for confirmation; then kicks off the ticket right from there. And then you can query the agent to get status updates on it. It’s all in one place, AI-driven, and truly agentic in terms of task completion—and it will only get better.”

How Customer Zero makes our products better

Because Microsoft employees are the first ones to use our newest products and features, we have the opportunity to roll them out gradually and test them under actual enterprise-work conditions, which enables us to gather valuable feedback and telemetry. This data is then fed back into the product development process to make key improvements. We call this our Customer Zero philosophy.

“We were pioneers as Customer Zero in showing the need for these services in an employee-assistance portal, and the product group saw that need.”

Michelle Schaefer, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital

In the case of the Employee Self-Service Agent, we began product development by tackling HR and IT support, which were key areas to capture cost savings.

But how could we get even wider usage of the product? We turned to our real estate and facilities functions.

“The facilities and real estate aspect of Microsoft Digital is unique, in that it focuses on the employee experience at the company, literally in the buildings,” says Michelle Schaefer, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “All those tasks—getting lunch, parking, filing a facilities ticket, moving around the campus, inviting a guest—are universal for all our employees. We were pioneers as Customer Zero in showing the need for these services in an employee-assistance portal, and the product group saw that need. And we’re constantly gathering telemetry to learn how our workers can more easily discover the agent and have a better experience with it each time.”

Adding the facilities and real estate category to the Employee Self-Service Agent also helped our engineers learn more about building an agent that presents a “single pane of glass” to the user on the front end but incorporates so many different functions on the back end.

“Our strategy with this new natural-language agent is to augment our existing tools, which brings AI to the experience and gets the user to the right place.”

Thomas Po, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Each team has its own tools that compete for our employees’ attention.

“The challenge was to turn all those into a common experience for the user,” says Erik Orum Hansen, a principal engineering manager for Microsoft Digital. “That’s been a learning journey for us, as the organization pivoted to developing a single agent incorporating all these different functions.”

This single-portal approach makes it so much easier for users to explore their options and figure out the best way to accomplish the task, even as the underlying tools are still available.

We still have as many as 15 different tools that employees use today for campus related tasks, but we’re managing them more effectively—now our employees only need to use them when their use case is more challenging or detailed in nature.

“Our strategy with this new natural-language agent is to augment our existing tools, which brings AI to the experience and gets the user to the right place,” says Thomas Po, a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital. “The user may not have the specific facilities app they need on their phone, but everyone has Copilot, right? It’s about giving our employees access to information in more places and connecting them to the right tool or function.”

Employee Self-Service Agent screenshot

The Employee Self-Service Agent can also see when an employee took prior action, recognize that they might want to take the same action again, and suggest that action—for example, suggesting that they may want to reserve a shuttle ride to the same location they’ve visited previously.

“This allows users to have a more contextual, conversational experience,” says Ram Kuppaswamy, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For example, for transportation needs they can just type, ‘Help me book a campus shuttle,’ and the agent can suggest options based on their previous ride history. Then it can call up a form to help complete the booking. Users really love it.”

Built on the power of Copilot Studio

We built the Employee Self-Service Agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a powerful platform that allows you to create and extend AI agents. The agent is designed so that our customers can customize it to fit their own business needs and integrate it with their existing technologies.

“We didn’t want a custom connector; we wanted to go with an out-of-the-box connector that worked with Dynamics,” he says. “There were some product iterations to deal with while we made sure it met Microsoft’s data-compliance standards, but ultimately it made it easier to show customers how simple it is to implement the agent—it’s a very low-code/no-code solution.”

Erik Orum Hansen, principal engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

When we built the part of the Employee Self-Service Agent that handled HR and IT Support needs, we were able to create connectors for major third-party service providers in those areas, such as Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow. (These connectors are now “out-of-the-box capabilities” that are included in the product.)

In the facilities and real estate space, we have numerous vendors that we work with to provide various campus services. Since we already used various existing internal applications to connect employee requests with these vendors, we were able to create connectors for the agent easily using Copilot Studio. More importantly, we were also able to use the out-of-the-box Dataverse connector that worked with our Dynamics 365 data, which cut down on development time.

“The agent functions as a single entry point, which then connects with the Microsoft Dynamics data,” Schaefer says. “We have numerous different facilities vendors in different parts of the world, but we didn’t have to build multiple connectors to those vendors because of the common Dynamics back end.”

Orum Hansen says this caused a small delay in the internal deployment of the product, but that it was worth it in the end.

“We didn’t want a custom connector; we wanted to go with an out-of-the-box connector that worked with Dynamics,” he says. “There were some product iterations to deal with while we made sure it met Microsoft’s data-compliance standards, but ultimately it made it easier to show customers how simple it is to implement the agent—it’s a very low-code/no-code solution.”

“We’re also previewing more multi-agent capabilities that are coming from Copilot Studio, which our customers will be able to incorporate into their own solutions. The product is just going to get richer and richer over time, as it extends into other lines of business.”

Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences

The future of workplace AI

In many ways, we’re still in the early stages of the revolution that AI agents are going to bring to the workplace.

But the Employee Self-Service Agent is a significant early marker on that path.

“The first step is to develop this agent that’s optimized for the HR, IT, and facilities verticals,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences. “We’re also previewing more multi-agent capabilities that are coming from Copilot Studio, which our customers will be able to incorporate into their own solutions. The product is just going to get richer and richer over time as it extends into other lines of business.”

As employees like Julie are already finding out, this new era of agentic AI is going to be a major improvement over what came before.

“Most companies already have some kind of employee-assistance portal solution,” Orum Hansen says. “With this new agent, there’s an opportunity to really reimagine the entire experience—to shed some of the old baggage and figure out how to do things differently. It’s going to lead to a more efficient workplace, along with more satisfied employees.”

Key takeaways

Here are a few factors to remember when implementing an AI-powered employee-assistance solution at your company:

• Pick high-value targets. Consider employee needs and the most commonly used assistance functions (using data where available), then develop a solution that addresses those areas. This will drive adoption and daily use of the agent.
• Customize the solution. Take advantage of the extensibility of Copilot Studio to develop an agent that fits your organization’s specific needs.
• Augment existing tools. Your employee-assistance agent can be the front door through which users find the tool they need. Over time, you can retire legacy tools and portals as the agent is able to complete the same functions on its own.
• Go beyond information retrieval. Employees want to be able to carry out tasks right from the agent, so incorporate forms and other technologies that allow them to accomplish their goal as quickly and easily as possible.
• Think outside the box. The image-driven feature we developed for filing a facilities ticket is a great example of applying the revolutionary abilities of AI to solve problems in new and innovative ways.    

Try it out

Learn more about the Employee Self-Service Agent.

Related links

• Read about the full scope of the impact the Employee Self-Service Agent is having on our organization.
• Learn about our strategic approach to agentic AI internally at Microsoft. 
• Explore how the Employee Self-Service Agent is helping Puget Sound-based Microsoft employees with their transportation needs.
• Explore how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Copilot to empower our employees.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Reimagining campus support at Microsoft with the Employee Self-Service Agent appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Five years ago, as a global pandemic shut down offices and commuting ground to a halt, Microsoft took the opportunity to overhaul the technology underpinning its transportation services. The result was a more modernized and integrated system that employees enjoyed as they resumed work at our Puget Sound-based global headquarters.

“Figuring out their commute should not be a pain point for employees. We’re harnessing our advanced technology and the power of AI to do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to struggle to figure out how they’ll get to work.”

Garima Gaurav, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Today, with flexible work schedules the norm, the investment in these technologies—including improved UIs for employee-facing tools, better data handling and collection on the backend, and a more seamless experience—has paid dividends in terms of flexibility and efficiency.

As rates of in-office attendance creep up, our Commute Services group can quickly adjust and stay on top of demand, leaving us better positioned to meet our company’s ambitious sustainability goals.

And now, we’re embracing the Microsoft vision of an AI-powered future by adding agentic, predictive capabilities to our commuting tools, which makes booking a shuttle, Connector bus, or other transportation option fast and easy for our workers.

“Figuring out their commute should not be a pain point for employees,” says Garima Gaurav, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re harnessing our advanced technology and the power of AI to do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to struggle to figure out how they’ll get to work or to a meeting in a different building.”

Upgrading the transportation experience

We’ve always had clear goals for the type of transportation program we wanted to bring to our employees.

“The first thing we think about is the rider experience,” says Esther Christoffersen, a senior manager with Puget Sound Commute Operations. “We want to deliver an experience that is centered around ease, flexibility, and choice. We start with the physical world, the environment that we live and work in, and then we think about the digital world that employees interface with.”

But our technology systems didn’t always make it easy to accomplish those goals. So we undertook the overhaul of our commute tools, implementing a modern UI that was more consistent with other Microsoft workplace applications. At the same time, this work allowed our engineers to transform the back-end management of our transportation system, using Microsoft Azure to give them better visibility and clearer ownership of operating data.

Better data and tools meant empowering riders with mobility features like a trip-planning function, push notifications, real-time ETAs, and live vehicle map tracking for our shuttle and Connector bus services.

“We had to think about what really matters,” Gaurav says. “That meant building something modern, real-time, and fast for riders. But we also wanted operational agility for the Commute Services team.”

Getting there with the help of an AI agent

With the right technology in place, these tools are ready for agentic AI—and it’s here. While they can still use our internal desktop or mobile platforms to book a ride to work or a different campus location, employees can now also opt for the Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent we’ve developed.

Jessie Go, a technical program manager in the Real Estate and Facilities group, emphasizes the fluid, end-to-end experience that this AI agent can provide to commuters.

“If I’m a new employee, I want to know my commute options,” Go says. “I go into ESS and ask, ‘What are my options to get to campus?’ The agent gives me a list of commuter choices, and one is the Connector bus. I then ask it to help me book a Connector; the agent pulls up a booking tool and I schedule my Connector ride. It’s so much simpler.”

“The ESS tool is kind of a one-stop-shop Copilot agent, aimed at helping our people with all of their work tasks.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

ESS not only offers a user-friendly Copilot Chat interface, but also the potential to understand the rider’s transportation history and preferences.

“It allows users to have a more contextual, conversational experience,” says Ram Kuppaswamy, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “They can just say, ‘Book me a connector,’ and the agent can suggest options based on their previous ride history. It also offers one-click booking, which is used in 40% of all bookings today. It saves users a ton of time, and they really love it.”

It’s all part of making routine tasks frictionless and more efficient for Microsoft employees.

“We’re bringing the experience right to where the employees live, in the AI chat interface,” Gaurav says. “This way they can get all the information they need in one place, rather than 10 different places.”

Of course, ESS can do more than just help with transportation needs—it’s been rolled out company-wide, with the ability to answer employee questions and solve problems relating to anything from their benefits to IT issues to dining options.

“The ESS tool is kind of a one-stop-shop Copilot agent, aimed at helping our people with all of their work tasks,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “In the Real Estate space, that might be help with booking a shuttle or seeing what’s for lunch in the cafeteria. In other areas, it might be getting assistance with questions about vacation policy, or what’s wrong with their computer.”

Keeping sustainable transportation top-of-mind

At Microsoft, we take sustainability seriously. Our transportation program is a key component of that effort.

“We offer shared transportation to employees to reduce single-occupancy vehicles on the road, and we’re transitioning our fleet to electric vehicles,” Christoffersen says. “It’s part of our corporate commitment to be carbon negative by 2030.”

“Our global headquarters in Redmond is the size of a small city, with transportation services that help employees get to, from, and around our campus. We continuously look at the data so that we balance the rider experience with running an efficient operation.”

Esther Christoffersen, senior manager, Puget Sound Commute Operations

Microsoft provides electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at many Puget Sound campus locations for employee use. We also offer transit passes, guaranteed rides home, and other rideshare options, giving commuters maximum flexibility.

The easier it is to access these services, the more single-occupancy vehicles we can remove from the region’s roads, which means less air pollution and traffic congestion for everyone.

Because Microsoft is one of the largest employers in the state of Washington, these efforts can make a real difference.

“Our global headquarters in Redmond is the size of a small city, with transportation services that help employees get to, from, and around our campus,” Christoffersen says. “We continuously look at the data so that we balance the rider experience with running an efficient operation.”

Looking toward the future

As AI-powered tools like the Employee Self-Service agent get even better and more broadly used across the company, our transportation services will continue to improve. We hope these services will eventually be available in other regions as well.

“The overall goal is to expand the discoverability of commute information to our workers around the globe,” Gaurav says. “So, whether an employee is in Silicon Valley, India, or somewhere else, they will be able to ask the AI tool for transportation options where they are located and get assistance. It’s a work in progress for us.”

Key takeaways

If you are looking to improve the transportation experience for employees at your organization, here are some important things to remember:

• Keep your overarching goals front and center. Ease, flexibility, and choice are the three main principles we focus on when aiming to give our employees a first-class transportation experience, and those principles apply to any employee experience we build in Microsoft Digital.
• Think both physically and digitally. Digitally transforming a real-world service starts with the physical experience; finding the intersection between the physical and the digital creates better outcomes for users.
• Meet riders where they are. At Microsoft, this includes offering mobile, desktop, and agentic interfaces, letting our employees choose what works best for them.
• The better the data, the better your service. Gathering relevant data about demand, usage, and satisfaction allows you to produce insights that lead to improved services.
• Use AI to increase personalization. We’re developing an AI agent that knows more about our employees, which allows for easy customization and seamless, pain-free experiences with commute services.

Try it out

• Learn more about the Employee Self-Service agent.
• Explore Microsoft Azure and sign up for a free account.

Related links

• Learn how we’re enhancing flexible work with AI and Microsoft Places.
• Read about our company commitment to sustainability and the role that AI can play in helping meet our goals.
• Discover how Microsoft is transforming the employee experience in the age of AI.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Making transportation seamless and efficient with the power of data and AI at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

This is a time of enormous possibility, but it comes with difficult questions.

How do we put AI into action to solve problems and drive impact? How do we ensure we’re pursuing initiatives that deliver real business value? And finally, how do we equip our teams with the skills they need to realize this potential? Across Microsoft, we’re adopting a methodology to ensure we make the most of this moment: continuous improvement.

“We exist to empower every individual and team at Microsoft to embrace continuous improvement powered by AI in all that we do—simplifying and improving business processes to accelerate growth and boost performance.”

Kirsten Paust, corporate vice president of Continuous Improvement, Microsoft

Our vision for AI and continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is central to our ambition for an AI-powered, human-led future. At its core, it provides a systematic, repeatable framework of methods and behaviors that help teams operate with speed, clarity, and discipline as they progress toward an enterprise enabled by AI.

As a methodology, continuous improvement enables our teams to identify and solve high-impact problems, establish a customer mindset to drive accountability, and codify practices that make progress sustainable and measurable. It’s a fundamentally iterative process based on identifying opportunities, executing initiatives, analyzing results, and making course corrections.

“We exist to empower every individual and team at Microsoft to embrace continuous improvement powered by AI in all that we do—simplifying and improving business processes to accelerate growth and boost performance,” says Kirsten Paust, corporate vice president of Continuous Improvement at Microsoft.

Continuous improvement isn’t new, but generative AI is. That’s why our approach at Microsoft involves redesigning end-to-end workflows with AI at their center, aligning technology, people, and processes to reduce human effort and deliver outcomes more efficiently.

“At Microsoft, we see a lot of benefit to applying continuous improvement and AI together,” says Becky West, leader of the Continuous Improvement Center of Excellence within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The way we do that is, is first initiate our continuous improvement workflows, which makes our processes as efficient as possible, and then we apply AI. Conducting continuous improvement in that order keeps you from automating a broken process and focusing AI’s abilities in the wrong direction.”

Our Continuous Improvement CoE works closely with our overarching, companywide Continuous Improvement team and our Microsoft Digital AI CoE, which is responsible for guiding our internal AI transformation. These organizations partner with each other and teams across Microsoft Digital to build our AI and continuous improvement muscles as an organization.

The result is a process of constant, iterative improvement aligned with our organizational goals, with AI as one of its most powerful drivers.

“Continuous improvement has been around for decades, but AI is providing new opportunities for process improvement because the technology has reached the level of maturity where it can fill gaps and smooth corners,” says Nitul Pancholi, principal and leading member of the AI CoE. “AI is ready for action, and continuous improvement is here to show us how to use it best.”

Continuous improvement in action

Continuous improvement provides us with a structured methodology for establishing rapid learning cycles that deliver tangible improvements across our processes, whether those enhance security, quality, delivery, innovation, or productivity. It helps us apply rigor to solving the right problems to capture the value we want.

“Culturally, continuous improvement helps us emphasize progress over perfection and do a little bit better every day.”

Matt Hansen, director, Continuous Improvement, Microsoft

We define a high-performing continuous improvement system according to four principles:

1. A clear definition of winning based on expectations
   We define success through the lens of what our teams value most and align our priorities accordingly.
2. Disciplined execution
   Teams operate within a simple, repeatable rhythm consisting of four stages: Plan, Do, Check, Adjust.
3. Constrained problem-solving with urgency
   We focus on root causes, not symptoms, and tackle problems head-on.
4. Sustained replication and acceleration
   When we discover improvements, we standardize and embed them into our operations to compound improvements.

“Culturally, continuous improvement helps us emphasize progress over perfection and do a little bit better every day,” says Matt Hansen, a director of Continuous Improvement at Microsoft. “It’s really about understanding your teams, their needs, and the value they can deliver to the business, then focusing their efforts to become as efficient as possible and do it all at scale through replicable techniques.”

The process centers on the disciplined execution of a four-stage cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Adjust.

Our continuous improvement system

Our Continuous Improvement System represents a disciplined approach to process improvement that leads to a virtuous cycle. “Do” is only one phase, which means we don’t take action for action’s sake. Instead, deliberate planning guides our projects, and a highly intentional approach to measurement helps us adjust initiatives as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

To put this system into practice, our continuous improvement methodology includes several processes and tools that underlie a structured approach to identifying opportunities, executing changes, and learning from our experiences to drive greater impact. These processes are informing and guiding several initiatives already in progress within Microsoft Digital.

The Bowler Method

Named for the scorecards used in bowling, Bowlers provide a disciplined method and visual tool for defining, tracking, and driving the outcomes that matter most. They define ownership, use clear KPIs arrayed along a linear progression, and identify urgent actions to close performance gaps. We review our progress on these cards during monthly operating reviews to develop a consistent habit of accountability.

We translate strategy to execution by cascading ownership, accountability, and measurement to the point of impact where the work happens and results are produced. That involves two levels of Bowler scorecards:

• The top-level Bowler defines the enterprise outcomes that matter most, tied to customer value, growth, cost, and risk.
• Cascaded Bowlers translate those outcomes into operational drivers that help deliver the desired results.

A Bowler scorecard

Action plans

Action plans are living tools that drive execution by clearly demonstrating what needs to happen, who owns it, when it needs to be done, and what impact it should have.​ This is where we initiate the Plan, Do, Check, Adjust cycle.

Gemba walks

As part of the planning process, Gemba walks involve observing teams and seeking an understanding of how they do their work. This concept originated from the Japanese phrase “Going to where the work happens.” During these sessions, we walk through a scenario to understand pain points, unpack the employee experience, and observe waste.

Kaizen events

A Kaizen event is a high-intensity, multi-day, in-person, team-based sprint designed to improve processes, solve problems, and close gaps. During the event, we define the opportunity, prepare for action by gathering data, observing work, and mapping processes, run a working session with the relevant parties, and deliver an improvement.

Value stream mapping

As part of a Kaizen event, value stream mapping involves charting the current state of a process to identify waste and pain points, pinpoint and prioritize improvements, design the future state, and create an improvement roadmap.

“Continuous improvement equips us to study our business processes in detail, uncovering how actions connect, where friction slows us down, and where automation can unlock new potential,” says Faisal Nasir, principal architect within Microsoft Digital, member of the AI CoE leadership team. “By combining this discipline with AI, we can turn those insights into transformative outcomes.”

Learning from our approach to continuous improvement

AI-driven continuous improvement initiatives are well underway at Microsoft, and some are producing results already, especially within Microsoft Digital. As the organization responsible for maintaining operational excellence and an exceptional employee experience within Microsoft, we’re applying AI-empowered continuous improvement to several different areas.

Our teams are using this framework to improve everything from third-party software license auditing to network hardware asset management. In one case, a new agent is helping designated responsible individuals (DRIs) on our Digital Workspace team save time resolving network outages, resulting in a 40% boost to a key network performance metric.

“What we’re building is a system of rigor around rapid cycles of accelerated learning to help us determine what works and what doesn’t for delivering the outcomes we want,” says Sammi Clute, a director of Continuous Improvement at Microsoft. “At the most basic level, it requires discipline around metric setting and review, but it also relies on establishing better connections between financial outcomes and executional work.”

As a result of our experience, we’ve established a process for launching continuous improvement initiatives. If you’re considering ways to use continuous improvement in support of your own AI projects, you may want to incorporate elements of our workflow.

First, think about who should be involved. Everyone has a role to play. When done properly, these efforts will have both horizontal and vertical implications, reaching across different teams and functions to foster participation at every level of the organization.

At Microsoft, we identify two major groups of stakeholders:

• The leadership team, responsible for defining business priorities and corresponding key metrics, assigning responsibility, and setting expectations for targets and pace.
• The execution teams build and test bowler cards, create and own execution plans, cascade key metrics if necessary, and conduct the work behind the initiative itself.

From there, consider working through a four-step process similar to Microsoft’s:

1. Understand your business’s priorities
   Clarify what matters most in terms of customer and stakeholder expectations, identify the capabilities your AI initiatives need to deliver, assemble clear and distinct priorities, and stack rank them.
2. Build your top-level bowler
   Once your business priorities are clear, you need to translate them into key metrics and assign ownership. Establish your measurements, set ambitious but realistic targets, and build out your bowler card.
3. Cascade your top-level bowler
   Connect your strategic priorities to the work that drives impact. This is where you clarify accountability, define how you measure progress, and ensure everything aligns with business goals. It’s largely a process of breaking your priorities into components and identifying leading indicators of success.
4. Build action plans for delivery
   With your measurement framework in place, it’s time to translate your key metrics into concrete, time-bound activities with named owners and clear outcomes. Start from your goals, define the components of progress, build actions to push those forward, identify enablers or prerequisites, and quantify the impact you want.

These four steps articulate the process, but AI has the potential to make it transformative. As you’re building out your action plans, put thought into ways that AI can enable continuous improvement by doing what it does best: automating routine tasks, eliminating waste, and augmenting decision-making.

Continuous improvement as a cultural mindset

As we move into the AI-powered future, we’re betting big on continuous improvement as a core methodology to ensure we put it to good use. By modeling this process internally, we’re creating a blueprint that enables our customers to reimagine their own operations.

“As Microsoft’s IT organization, we’re typically the first to scale out new technologies and processes,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Employee Experience. “Now we’re excited to take on a leading role in defining how AI and continuous improvement work together to accelerate transformation, empower employees, and unlock greater value than before.”

All of this has required both cultural and operational development.

“Continuous improvement will serve as an engine for accelerating transformation and impact from AI.”

Carolina Dybeck Happe, executive vice president and chief operations officer, Microsoft

The “learn-it-all” mentality that Satya Nadella instilled in Microsoft when he became CEO in 2014 has been a crucial foundation as we operationalize and reinforce AI-enabled continuous improvement opportunities. In many ways, it’s an extension of the growth mindset that permeates our company’s cultural makeup.

We’ve also had to ensure we have the guidance, sponsorship, and skilling in place to help teams and individual employees feel comfortable taking accountability for continuous improvement initiatives.

It doesn’t happen by accident, but the effort is worth it.

“AI is a catalyst for innovation, growth, and value creation,” says Carolina Dybeck Happe, executive vice president and chief operations officer at Microsoft. “As we build a system of rigor around how we use these next-generation tools, continuous improvement will serve as the foundation for evolving Microsoft into an AI-driven Frontier Firm, transforming work as we know it to achieve more.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for adopting a continuous improvement mindset to transform your company and the way your employees work:

• People and process are equally important: Systems and tools are essential, but you’ll also need to provide support to help change behaviors and embrace this methodology.
• Empower individuals: Impress the importance of accountability on individuals. Ideally, every employee should continually ask, “How is what I’m doing contributing to our goals?”
• Embrace the red: Negative results are part of progress. When you see red on a bowler card as an initiative stalls, use that as an opportunity to learn and adjust.
• Set aside old assumptions: Approaching continuous improvement with humility leads to the best results. It doesn’t matter why a process is broken or inefficient, only that we fix it and make it better using AI.
• Ambiguity is inevitable: Lean into the messiness and uncertainty of discovery. By its very nature, improvement is about progress, not perfection.

Try it out

Learn more about our role as the company’s Customer Zero.

Related links

• Learn more about how we’re using Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents to drive continuous improvement internally at Microsoft Digital.
• Take a look inside the councils steering AI projects at Microsoft.
• Learn about our Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence.
• Explore reasons why responsible AI matters and how we’re infusing it into our internal AI projects.
• Read about ways we’re transforming our employee experience with AI.
• Discover our internal learnings and access a step-by-step guide for unleashing API-powered agents.
• Find out how we’re supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Defining the future: How we’re building an AI-powered continuous improvement culture at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital readiness guide

AI transformation is one of the most profound business changes in decades. Making the most of AI tools will require careful planning, thoughtful communication, comprehensive employee enablement, and diligent tracking.

Fortunately, Microsoft Viva fills all of these roles and more.

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

Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences

Microsoft Viva is a suite of applications designed to help organizations create an engaged and productive workforce. These apps can help you continuously improve employee experiences and business performance with powerful insights, meaningful communications, and genuine connections.

“Viva’s all about helping people thrive amidst transformation,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president of product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot Experiences. “At the intersection of how people communicate with each other, and companies communicate with employees, at the junction of how people feel at work with how they do their work, that’s where Viva makes an impact.”

As you embark on your AI transformation and drive adoption for Microsoft 365 Copilot, we created an eBook to help you plan and implement your change initiatives effectively: Ushering in the era of AI with Microsoft Viva. We based this readiness guide on our internal Copilot deployment and adoption efforts, and it’s based on insights from our teams of change managers, IT professionals, product experts, and business leaders.

Key takeaways

Our readiness guide will walk you through four stages of using Viva to drive your transformation:

1. Get ready: Identify opportunities, secure sponsorship, and apply insights to the planning process.
2. Onboard and engage: Drive awareness, provide opportunities for knowledge and skill building, and scale across communities.
3. Deliver impact: Measure and understand your progress, communicate learnings and success, and address knowledge or skill gaps.
4. Extend and optimize: Deepen the maturity of your transformation and provide opportunities for further success.

In each section, you’ll read examples of how we used apps across the Viva suite, the lessons we learned along the way, and hands-on checklists and resources that will help you propel your adoption efforts to success. When you’re finished reading, you’ll have everything you need to start your journey and use Viva to enter the era of AI securely and effectively.

{Download our “Ushering in the era of AI with Microsoft Viva readiness guide.”}

Try it out

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

Related links

• Learn how we drove Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption internally with an assist from Microsoft Viva.
• Access our readiness guide: Deploying Viva Engage at Microsoft in three chapters.
• Read our guide for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Supercharge your business transformation with Microsoft Viva appeared first on Inside Track Blog.