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

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

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

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

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting needs and answering important questions

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

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

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

What employees want from AI

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

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

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

What leaders want from AI

Transforming Microsoft with the AI Center of Excellence

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

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

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

Our CoE uses these pillars to guide their work:

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

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

Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Capturing strategy with an idea pipeline

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

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

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

Activating AI here at Microsoft

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

Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roadmap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence team

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

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

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

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

Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Customer Zero at Microsoft

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

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

But how do you do that?

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

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

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

Customer Zero at Microsoft

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

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

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

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

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

Envision

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

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

Build, Evaluate and Drive Adoption

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

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

Deploy, Govern, Operate, and Support

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

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

Evangelize

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

A mindset, not a marketing slogan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enabling useful results

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

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

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

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

Curating enterprise content for Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

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

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

Liu and his team are prioritizing this culture transformation.

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

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

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

Next generation content management with SharePoint Premium

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

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

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

Automating metadata extraction with document processing

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

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

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

Standardizing content creation with content assembly

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

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

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

Taxonomy tagging

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

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

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

Using generative AI to help generative AI with autofill columns

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

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

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

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

Continuing to grow with SharePoint Premium

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

Protecting content with Microsoft Purview Information Protection

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward

Our enterprise content management transformation is ongoing.

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

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

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

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

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

Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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

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

The post Boosting Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot with smart enterprise content management appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Since we launched the tool internally here at Microsoft, we’ve learned a few best practices for deploying it easily and making full use of its features. This post shares some of our learnings so you can take advantage of our experience when you activate Copilot for Sales at your organization.

[See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.]

Taking the tedium out of sales tasks

Copilot for Sales maximizes productivity with an AI assistant specifically designed for sellers. Like our other AI-powered tools, it increases productivity and efficiency by providing intelligent digital assistance within Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

The added value of Copilot for Sales is working with Dynamics 365 or Salesforce to access, use, and input customer relationship management (CRM) data. As a result, it eliminates distracting tasks that eat away at their time and get in the way of what they do best—building relationships and solving problems.

“Everything we’ve done in terms of our Dynamics 365 sales platform aims to give time back to sellers so they can invest it into customers,” says Alexandra Jones, senior business program and change manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With AI and copilots, our technology is doing even more to help us reach that goal.”

The sweet spot exists at the intersection of AI-enabled intelligence and CRM integration into the spaces where salespeople operate every day. Within Microsoft Teams, Copilot for Sales delivers real-time call insights, AI-generated meeting summaries, post-call analyses and action items, and more. In Microsoft Outlook, its abilities include crafting contextual email responses, summarizing lengthy threads, and creating Teams Collaboration Spaces associated with accounts and opportunities.

Across both workspaces, Copilot for Sales makes it easier to create, update, or view CRM contacts, opportunities, and other data associated with sales accounts. That mitigates the need for sellers to migrate to a different tool as they conduct the essential business of using or updating their CRM.

“For sellers trying to do their jobs, it’s all about that flow of information within the flow of action,” says Kerry Barrass, director of business programs within Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions. “While the conversation is fresh, the tool distills information down into consumable chunks and actionable items.”

Those features come in handy because sales are complex and require strong coordination across large teams. One of our typical sales accounts involves anywhere from 20 to 50 individual employees, each with a vital role to play. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to get everyone on a call or piece together the narrative underlying email threads.

“When I get copied into an email thread, I used to need a knowledge transfer meeting to get up to speed,” says Emilio Reyes Le Blanc, a technology specialist in Microsoft Sales. “This technology means I can just open an email thread, have Copilot generate a summary, and contextualize my existing relationships from the integrated pane within Outlook.”

Taken together, these features deliver greater contextual understanding, more efficient workflows, and higher data fidelity within our CRM systems.

Our top seven tips for adopting and using Copilot for Sales

Our deployment experience and  of Copilot for Sales have provided some helpful insights. These seven tips should help with your adoption and everyday work with this AI-powered tool.

Seven tips for deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

01

Ride the wave of excitement

02

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

03

Leverage leadership at every level

04

Ensure our underlying data policies are secure

05

Start simple and work up from there

06

Prioritize CRM data resilience

07

Practice effective prompting

Deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally at Microsoft has taught us important lessons that we hope will help you deploy it at your company.

Ride the wave of excitement

Sellers have an eye for value, and when they saw what Copilot for Sales could do, it generated a lot of excitement. The tool’s intuitive features mean that, from a user perspective, it isn’t a complicated solution. As a result, we’ve experienced a substantial organic boost to adoption.

“One day, a magic button popped up in my Outlook and I got a prompt to try Sales Copilot, so I taught myself to use it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “One of the beautiful things about this tool is that its time to value is extraordinary.”

When you’re deploying Copilot for Sales to your own sellers, focus on visibility first. When the excitement takes hold, it will boost adoption among your self-motivated salespeople. Encourage that uptake to score some early champions.

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

Not everyone is a self-driven early adopter—and that’s perfectly alright! Effective change management starts with understanding your audience and the complexities of your sales environment.

We recommend building hero scenarios for each user persona by taking a granular look at their challenges, sales processes, and day-to-day work. Dig into their role descriptions and documentation and ask what they’re trying to accomplish. From there, you can piece together your enablement materials based on what provides value.

Using video For video enablement content, we’ve discovered that the ideal length is 30 seconds to one minute.

Consider different learning formats and modalities as well.

“You want to make readiness consumable and provide options,” Jones says. “Some people want to show up to a demo session, and some people want to watch a video on their own time, so it’s important to offer a variety of pathways to adoption.”

Multimodality that includes courses, demos, written documentation, and more will help your readiness efforts reach the most people with the most impact.

Engage leadership at every level

It’s always important to engage your leaders. That includes both organizational leadership and product champions.

“Advocates and champions are always important, not just for leading from the front,” Barrass says. “You also get more candid feedback by empowering these people to be part of pilot groups.”

Naturally, enthusiastic executive sponsorship is essential, especially with new technology. Not only do leaders provide direction and encouragement for their organizations, but they can also choose to give people space to allocate time and prioritize learning. Cultivate those sponsorships early and actively.

The same goes for employee champions. By running internal pilots targeting key user scenarios, you’ll ensure you receive early feedback to guide product development and a core of users who can help lead adoption across your organization.

Ensure your underlying data policies are secure

Your organization might be cautious about how AI tools interact with their data repositories, so deploying Copilot for Sales is a good opportunity to review your data-loss prevention setup. By ensuring your policies are up to date, you can prevent accidental data loss or exposure.

“Copilot for Sales sits on top of our existing data repositories, so it engages with that data in the same way as any other connected tool,” Jones says. “It’s less about the solution and more about having a robust infrastructure of administrative policies and technologies safeguarding your organization.”

It will be essential to initiate reviews within several key disciplines. Those include HR, legal, security, and the IT team responsible for maintaining and protecting your data estate. Within your sales teams themselves, administrators may have concerns about access. If that’s the case, encourage them to conduct a thorough security and role review.

Guide those conversations using Copilot for Sales’ extensive product documentation.

Start simple and work up from there

For sellers themselves, building trust in a new technology takes time. People might need to work up the confidence to try more intensive or involved features, especially if they’re reticent about AI technology.

“Just start with two or three features that are really going to appeal to people,” Jones says. “Encourage sellers to ask what works best for their role.”

We suggest salespeople start small with meeting and email summarization capabilities. They might not be ready to trust email drafting tools just yet, but when they see how the intelligence works through summarization, they’ll understand how Copilot for Sales engages with information.

After sellers have built up their understanding and confidence around how this tool engages with data, they can experiment with different features that apply to their work.

Prioritize CRM data resilience

Anyone in sales operations will tell you that high data fidelity in your CRM is crucial. Leadership needs to know their institutional data is resilient. Accuracy and completeness ensure up-to-date contact data along with a comprehensive view of relationships across internal and external teams.

All this information helps sales managers make effective decisions, generate accurate forecasts, and properly understand attrition. In other words, the business value of CRM data management is enormous. It’s also prone to disarray because it formerly required salespeople to switch over to the CRM and input information. Copilot for Sales changes all that.

“Historically, the way for this to work is you would write the email, then go to a different window, find the account record, go to the contacts list, create a new one, put in all of the contact’s information, and save it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “But here, I can do all that in one fell swoop.”

If you’re a seller, get used to creating and updating CRM contacts from within Microsoft Teams and Outlook using Copilot for Sales. This feature eliminates the need to re-enter information directly into the CRM and builds healthy habits around data fidelity.

That flow of information works the other way as well. Be sure to use the contact card feature to view summaries of customer information from within Microsoft Outlook and Teams. That ensures you’re working with the most up-to-date data directly from your CRM.

Practice effective prompting

Prompt creation will become increasingly important as AI tools mature, so it’s worth honing those skills using Copilot for Sales’ email drafting feature. A simple rule to remember is that the more you put in, the more you get out.

“If you have specifics off the bat, like you know you want to schedule a meeting or there are a few key points to express, include those in your prompt,” Jones says. “Be succinct and save your own time, because that’s what the technology is for.”

Prompting is just like any other practice. The more you work at it, the easier it becomes.

The expanding possibilities of AI assistance

Microsoft salespeople have already seen amazing success, and we’re just getting started. Within our sales organization, 12.5K out of 35K sales roles are Copilot for Sales monthly active users—more than a third of the workforce. For a technology in its first year, that’s remarkable progress.

Reyes Le Blanc estimates that he’s saving two hours each month creating contacts in Dynamics 365 and five hours a month reviewing emails. With over 6 million seller emails sent in our first quarter of this fiscal year, the potential for email time savings alone is enormous.

He also finds his meeting notes much more accurate now that Copilot for Sales has his back, especially when it comes to long lists of technologies or technical requirements. It’s the ideal tool for gathering details via the meeting review feature and performing keyword or conversational analyses.

“This is a way to do more with less,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “As a seller, I can’t imagine working without artificial intelligence.”

Considering our average salesperson participates in 17 meetings per week, those efficiencies really add up. As new features and integrations come into play, Copilot for Sales’ horizons will only widen.

Start using AI to streamline your selling experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

• See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover how we’re using Microsoft 365 to bolster our teamwork.
• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales on Microsoft Learn.

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

The post Seven things we learned deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

To tackle this challenge head-on, Microsoft engineers in Puget Sound developed the Global Commute Service. The software comes in the form of a web and mobile app and has ever-improving features that streamline the commuting experience for employees.

One of these features is an upgraded user interface (UI) that is visually consistent with other Microsoft workplace applications. The familiar design and layout make the software more readily understandable and usable for employees. Riders are also empowered by the modern mobility platform with a trip-planning function, push notifications, real-time ETAs, and live vehicle map tracking for shuttle and Connector bus services.

Trip planner allows employees to plan for their multimodal trips and take the hassle of planning away. This allows employees to plan their end-to-end trips using Connector or shuttle, or on foot up to two weeks in advance.

At the same time as the UI upgrade, the entire backend of the experience was also updated. The updates gave Microsoft a scalable and extensible system that powers real-time updates and can be deployed globally. These improvements benefit the drivers and operators who manage these transportation services, giving them visibility into route usage, rider traffic, and automated vehicle dispatch.

[Find out what Microsoft is doing to create a digital workplace. Discover how Microsoft is reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world.]

Switching up routes to deliver a new experience

For a long time, the booking platform known to the Puget Sound campus as MERGE (Manage Explore Reserve Go Anywhere) served as the main method for riders to get a seat on one of Microsoft’s buses or shuttles. It was the go-to for reserving a ride on a Connector shuttle, the fixed route shuttles that run on a loop around campus, and the on-demand shuttles that move people between offices.

The legacy booking platform served Puget Sound well but had a different interface than other services available to Microsoft employees, making for an inconsistent user experience. To further complicate matters, MERGE was closely tied to the local transportation services found exclusively in Puget Sound, meaning the app could not be easily replicated to other Microsoft campuses. It was also difficult to extract important and accurate data from the transportation system for operational insights.

The first thing we think about is the rider experience. We start with the physical world, the environment that we live and work in, then we think about the digital world. We want to deliver an experience that is centered around ease, flexibility, and choice.

—Esther Christoffersen, senior services manager, Real Estate and Facilities

All of this added up to one key takeaway—it was time to transform Merge into Global Commute Service, a new mobility experience that offers a consistent interface, modern features, scalability, and visibility.

Two teams worked in tandem to help upgrade transportation systems: Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company, and Microsoft’s real estate team who are responsible for managing and operating the company’s global facilities and services.

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

The team knew that building a strong bridge between the physical and digital would empower riders with an improved transportation experience.

“We had to think about what really matters,” says Garima Gaurav, a senior product manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “That meant building something modern, real-time, and fast for riders. But we also wanted operational agility for the Real Estate and Facilities team.”

Improving mobility at Microsoft

The two organizations started brainstorming new rider experiences in 2019, but a few months into the project, the Puget Sound campus shifted to primarily remote with only essential employees working onsite.

“This was an opportunity to pause and really dive into the feedback to see what we could do better,” Christoffersen says.

We built a service that is robust, reliable, and scalable.

—Ram Kuppaswamy, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

With campus services pausing, Microsoft could disassemble the front-end (the web and app interface riders engage with) and the back-end (the operational workhorses that manage transportation services) without creating disruption.

Work started by decoupling Global Commute Service from the Puget Sound’s established back end. This allowed Microsoft’s new service to integrate with any transportation system. If, for example, a campus uses a new transportation system, Global Commute Service will connect seamlessly, offering riders a consistent experience no matter which Microsoft campus they were on.

“We built a service that is robust, reliable, and scalable,” says Ram Kuppaswamy, a principal software engineering manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “Now we can launch similar experiences for the rest of Microsoft’s campuses globally.”

Vehicles used to be dispatched manually. By selecting this partner, technology is driving everything from booking, managing dispatch, and assigning vehicles. It has also empowered us to provide features like real-time updates and communications with drivers. We can do it now.

— Garima Gaurav, a senior product manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Having separated the booking interface, Microsoft could transform the back-end management of its transportation system. This would give much needed visibility and ownership of operating data, the kind that enables real-time status updates and introduce new efficiencies, like automated vehicle dispatch and data-driven service scaling.

To get there, Microsoft engaged with a new partner to help introduce these new data-driven optimizations across Puget Sound. Having onboarded the partner into Microsoft Azure, Microsoft now had access to transportation data that was once lacking.

“Vehicles used to be dispatched manually,” Gaurav says. “By selecting this partner, technology is driving everything from booking, managing dispatch, and assigning vehicles. It has also empowered us to provide features like real-time updates and communications with drivers.
We can do it now.”

This data introduced other benefits as well.

“In the past, we didn’t have a common dashboard for operations and engineering,” Kuppaswamy says. “There was no easy way to understand why an error in the system was occurring. We can have consistent understanding now.”

Access to this technology is also giving Microsoft’s transportation service more operational agility. Data can be augmented, and machine learning can be applied for better operational insights.

“We can share this data with our partners to adjust routes, increase or decrease the number of buses we have, and prioritize service and operational adjustments,” Christoffersen says.

Microsoft’s enterprise shuttle simulator

Microsoft was able to get a lot done with the majority of employees working remotely during the height of the pandemic. Unfortunately, it also meant there were few employees on campus to test the new service.

“That was an unexpected part of the lifecycle,” says Jessie Go, an application manager with Real Estate and Facilities. “With the pause in services, we had to do a lot of testing virtually. No one was traveling.”

How a rider books, how long it takes a driver to get to a stop, and how a rider is verified by a driver all needed to be tested for bugs. To ensure it worked in a real usage scenario, the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience’s engineering team worked onsite at the Puget Sound campus to run everything through the steps.

“We followed all the COVID safety protocols,” Kuppaswamy says. “One or two engineers would book a trip with a shuttle. We tested all the major use cases. It’s a new experience for the drivers as well. They got trained for the new technology.”

One trip at a time, Microsoft was able to validate the upgraded transportation experience. When employees came back, they loved the new experience. It was consistent and intuitive.

Booking a seat to a new future

Microsoft has launched a seamless transportation experience for riders.

Whether they want to use the web or a mobile app, riders have a consistent interface akin to other workplace services. Global Commute Service was deployed across Puget Sound’s new kiosks, giving users more options for how they want to schedule transportation.

“We want to provide Microsoft employees the best commute option for reaching any destination between home, office, or any building on campus,” Kuppaswamy says. “The first step was to make the experience consistent.”

We can make almost real-time updates in terms of routes and how often we hit them in our schedules. We weren’t able to do that before. The work we’ve done so far is impactful for scalability and insight.

—Jessie Go, application manager, Real Estate and Facilities

Riders will have access to real-time status updates on their transportation plans. When you’re moving Microsoft’s Puget Sound employee population around, that’s a big deal.

“We have around 55,000 employees or more in Puget Sound. We run a small city,” Christoffersen says. “Everything is organized; nothing is ambiguous. I can now see a shuttle on a map that’s moving in my direction. That creates a sense of confidence that reduces the stress of getting from point A to point B.”

Data visibility gives Microsoft the operational agility that was once lacking, allowing Real Estate and Facilities to give riders an even better transportation experience.

“We can make almost real-time updates in terms of routes and how often we hit them in our schedules,” Go says. “We weren’t able to do that before. The work we’ve done so far is impactful for scalability and insight.”

Now that modern transportation experiences exist for Microsoft’s campuses, the teams are thinking about how to further empower riders.

“The next big step is to combine every type of commute option, to provide a more holistic trip plan—be it the Microsoft offered transport options, driving, walking, or public transport” Gaurav says. “There are so many ways to move around campus. How can we support that? What’s the total length of time for walking, biking, or even using public transportation? Let’s give employees options so that they can decide the best way to get around.”

• Meet riders where they are: mobile, desktop, or kiosk. The new transportation experience can be accessed in a variety of ways.
• Testing at various stages of development is critical though difficult due to the offices being closed down.
• Employees expect modern transportation experiences to be like what they see when booking a cab or some other mode of travel.
• Digitally transforming a real-world service starts with the physical experience. Finding that intersection between physical and digital creates outcomes for users.
• Ease, flexibility, and choice—those are three priorities for creating a better employee experience.

• Find out what Microsoft is doing to create a digital workplace.
• Discover how Microsoft is reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world.

The post Microsoft’s upgraded transportation experience arrives in Puget Sound appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT journey at Microsoft

The rapid advance of AI is enabling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience, to the network, infrastructure and devices that power our employee productivity, everything is evolving quickly.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.”

In this article, we describe some of the ways we’re already using AI, as well as new investments we’re making to accelerate our own AI-powered transformation—and to inspire yours.

{Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.Discover how we’re improving our Employee Experience as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.}

Resilient and secure infrastructure powered by AI

Reliable and secure access to corporate resources is paramount—especially at a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on a foundation of network connectivity to seamlessly access the tools and services they rely on every day. Harnessing the power of AI to ensure our employees stay productive and our network remains resilient and secure is one of our top investment areas in Microsoft Digital.

“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”

One way we’ll do that is by infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, comply with standards and security policy, reduce operator effort and errors, and efficiently respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Investments in software defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are already improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance. We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to drive continuous operational improvements. We’ve used data from past incidents to train an AI model that will help our network engineers to reduce the time needed to mitigate infrastructure incidents with the goal of reducing or eliminating network outages and increasing employee productivity.

Securing the Microsoft network and other endpoints is critical to AI and Machine Learning (ML) are among our best tools to enhance the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network and hosting environments.

While Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we’ll use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the burden on IT admins to classify and assign networks manually. We’ve implemented consistent access controls for wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. We’re also building AI and ML capabilities to automate our security workflows, including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and remediation.

A vast network of interconnected devices running many different operating systems relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources. To better manage them, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities spanning the entire device lifecycle.

AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a key investment area. We’ll use AI and ML to schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, prolong device lifespans, and ensure employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors. We’ll also use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems. We aim to help IT administrators be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.

{Learn how we’re moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Discover How AI will impact the future of security.}

Employee experiences enhanced with AI

AI enables possibilities to simplify the employee experience in unprecedented ways. Our vision in Microsoft Digital is to use AI to simplify the employee experience by providing a single endpoint for most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI seamlessly integrates into our employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems they must learn and navigate. We’re working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where our employees can access critical data, tools, and insights, all from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower our employees to work smarter, faster and happier.”

With Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric, to meet people in the flow of their work.

Navigating with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Business Chat will support a range of different employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role. We’ll connect different Copilot features and our internal data to Business Chat and reduce the time to get answers or insights by more than half. Our employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Business Chat will become a primary entry point for many workflows.

Generative AI will also change how our employees experience support services. We aim to increase employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.

{Learn more about how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft Digital is reinventing employee productivity in the hybrid workplace.}

AI-powered transformation powered by good governance

We’re working to strike the right balance with AI—we want to use it to transform the way we work and to empower our employees while also protecting the company. To get this right, we’re laser focused on adopting the right governance measures.

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

Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can be a challenge. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups increase the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment. AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us to detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.

High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is another key to our AI-led transformation. We’re establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, with assigned data owners to supervise them. We’re using tools to measure data quality and produce a quality score, enhancing confidence and trust among users so they can be confident using the data in AI scenarios.

However, high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance.We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants, and we’ve experienced the complexities of governance at global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, are our priority, so that we as a company can keep innovating without risking security or reputational damage. Using tools like Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, sensitivity, and lifecycle of data for AI, focusing on discovery, classification, and protection. Our goal is to safely handle sensitive data, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.

{Discover how Microsoft Digital is governing its key productivity tenants to support AI. Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.}

Transforming our approach to IT

In Microsoft Digital, we’re committed to innovating with AI to revolutionize our employee experience and to rethink IT management, work that we’ll power through consistent governance practices and high-quality enterprise data.

“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.

As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we’ll push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation for our employees and for our customers. Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI. We’re excited to continue sharing our insights from our journey of AI-powered transformation with our customers and partners.

Here are some learnings that we hope will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience. Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot can increase employee productivity by making information easier to find and by reducing or eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks, which will enable your employees to focus on higher value work.
• Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so you can use your data to support AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services. Microsoft Purview offers a great solution to protect your sensitive enterprise data.
• We’ll be using the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will improve the experience for our customers as well.

Get started with Azure AI.

• What is Azure OpenAI Service?
• Learn about Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our employee experience as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.

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

The post Powering a generational shift in IT at Microsoft with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Why change?

We realized that to help our customers transform through technology, we needed to transform the experience for our own employees. The investments we made in a reimagined employee experience enabled Microsoft employees to innovate, create, and collaborate seamlessly.

Our shift to the Microsoft Azure cloud made us more agile. But even with a forward-looking vision and people-centric investments, nothing could have prepared us for March of 2020, when Microsoft employees globally were sent home to protect their health and safety. The era of hybrid work had begun.

In this article, we share how we’re making hybrid work, work at Microsoft. Our goal is to help fellow digital transformation leaders learn from our experience keeping over 300,000 people productive, connected, and empowered around the world. It describes our journey from Microsoft IT to Microsoft Digital; how we’re helping Microsoft and our customers thrive in the hybrid workplace across digital experiences, physical spaces, and cultural norms; our investments in AI to revolutionize our IT infrastructure, employee experiences, and corporate functions portfolio; and building and driving adoption of transformative new technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Becoming Microsoft Digital

For years, Microsoft IT operated like a traditional IT organization—highly reactive to circumstances and more focused on the technology than the experience. Of course, we cared about the experience of our users, but it was mostly outside of our direct control, as we primarily deployed and sustained solutions built by other teams or other companies. In 2017, we adopted a new name—End User Services Engineering—which reflected our transition to a modern engineering organization. Our team was now “vision-led,” focused on building and deploying the right solutions to meet the needs of people, not just deploying the latest technology. We became proactive visionaries rather than reactive practitioners.

That transformation culminated with our transition to becoming Microsoft Digital. At the core of that transformation is an obsession with the needs of our employees that transcends tools and infrastructure and extends to the entirety of their daily experience, from the day they’re hired to their eventual retirement. We steward their digital experience through every dimension of their employment, ensuring they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure needed to be productive on the job no matter where they are or what they do.

While our journey to deliver a world-class digital experience for Microsoft employees began years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly enabled us to accelerate the evolution of our employee experience. Grappling with the pandemic gave us time and insights necessary to ensure that everyone at Microsoft has a great digital experience, whether they’re in the office or working remotely.

Subsequent sections of this article demonstrate how we’re bringing that vision to life for Microsoft’s global employees so they can thrive in a hybrid world.

Thriving in a hybrid world

Like most large companies, our shift to remote work happened almost overnight, with impacts to company culture, infrastructure, and processes that have lasted well beyond the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The implications of hybrid work continue to resonate—from this moment forward, every investment needs to be considered through multiple dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces, and culture.

The sections that follow reflect on our journey at Microsoft across these three dimensions of the employee experience.

Digital capabilities

The pandemic and subsequent shift to hybrid work served as an accelerant to our efforts to revolutionize the employee experience for our employees and customers, with Microsoft Viva the centerpiece of that effort. In 2023, breakthroughs in generative AI enabled entirely new ways to support employee productivity, enabling Microsoft Digital to rethink “core” IT and to reimagine employee productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Additionally, other transformative investments in Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Power Platform, and many other technologies are helping us accelerate the transformation of our employee experience, while a Zero Trust security posture keeps our enterprise safe and secure and our employees productive. More on each of these investments follows.

Microsoft Viva

When millions of people globally left the office to work from home in 2020, it marked a tectonic shift in how employees experienced the workplace and how companies supported their own employees to keep them safe and productive during a pandemic. Among the millions were thousands of Microsoft employees, and our challenges are like yours—how do we stay connected, informed, and motivated as we transition to the new world of hybrid work?

Despite positive feedback from many employees about the new availability of flexible work options, our CEO Satya Nadella describes a hybrid paradox wherein employees want both more flexible work options as well as additional opportunities to connect and collaborate with colleagues in person. And there is also compelling evidence that as employees have fewer opportunities to expand their networks and make new connections, innovation suffers. This is where Microsoft Viva initially came to market as a single, coherent platform built around the employee. Ultimately, the initial goals were centered around employee connection, wellbeing, and productivity. Now, since Viva’s 2021 launch, that experience has since shifted, rapidly evolving to a present-day focus on business impact and performance, driven by global macroeconomic concerns.

Microsoft Viva has also introduced several new Viva apps since initial launch, and the Microsoft Viva deployment at Customer Zero now includes extra capabilities in support of the new focus:

At Customer Zero, we are looking forward to new incoming AI-enabled features across the Viva Suite and seeing how these capabilities improve the employee experience. In the interim, we are still capturing employee feedback and sentiment to continue to improve the capabilities across Viva for our employees and customers, and we’re excited for what the future holds for the platform.

• Employee Experience and Engagement | Microsoft Viva
• The Case for EXP

Transforming with AI

Employee productivity reached a new level in 2023 with the widespread use of AI. Microsoft 365’s generative AI has unlocked amazing new features that assist employees with essential tasks like composing emails, making presentations, summarizing meetings, searching for information, and more. The AI era has arrived!

AI offers new possibilities to improve employee experiences like never before, enabling seamless collaboration, personalized workflows, and simplified engagement across the organization. AI will simplify the many systems our employees must use and access, reducing daily work challenges, providing flexibility to perform tasks at any time and place, and enabling smooth cooperation in a hybrid work environment.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless. We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers,” says Nathalie D’Hers, CVP, Microsoft Digital.

In addition to those typical employee productivity situations, we see that AI can transform other IT services and spark a wave of innovation that can enhance outcomes, reduce costs, and boost productivity for employees everywhere. We are taking advantage of this moment to use the power of AI to simplify operations and enhance services across our vast portfolio. Our goal is to use our extensive expertise of enterprise IT to speed up Microsoft’s own AI transformation while helping our customers to leverage this generational opportunity to speed up their own digital transformation.

One technology that will be central to our transformation is Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot helps you create and edit documents, presentations, emails, and more with the power of AI. It can suggest content, formatting, design, and data based on your context and preferences. It can also help you collaborate with your team and access relevant information from various sources. Research shared by Microsoft’s WorkLab team showed that early adopters of Copilot have seen remarkable benefits to their productivity:

• 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive.
• 68% said it improved the quality of their work.
• Users were 29% faster in a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing).
• 77% of users said once they had Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up.

Another key technology that will transform the employee experience at Microsoft is Microsoft 365 Chat. Microsoft 365 Chat will act as a core engagement hub for our employees, enabling Microsoft Digital to redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric. Microsoft 365 Chat will enable employees to access essential information in a summary fashion rather than as a multitude of search results, delivered through highly context aware and natural language Q&A while also performing tasks seamlessly.

We’re in the early days of designing these AI-powered employee experiences and will share more as our vision matures.

• Microsoft 365 Chat
• What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work?
• Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption

Hybrid meetings with Microsoft Teams

Our deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe is a significant challenge. Because employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As we prepare for a return to the workplace, we’re preparing our physical and virtual capabilities for an improved hybrid meeting experience.

An unexpected result of remote work has been an increase in meeting experience satisfaction by 31 points. The primary reason for that increase in satisfaction is simple—universal remote meeting participation helps create an even playing field, with a more inclusive atmosphere for all. Remote participants are no longer at a disadvantage to their peers attending in person, and as a result feel more included in discussion and meeting outcomes. A key priority as we prepare for the hybrid work environment will be to retain that inclusive environment and employee satisfaction through a combination of changes to physical spaces, improvements in our digital capabilities, and establishment of cultural norms that codify beneficial behaviors that began during the pandemic.

One way we’re extending that momentum is by taking full advantage of the new features in Microsoft Teams as well as new hardware in meeting rooms, like intelligent AI-powered cameras that help everyone participate equally in meetings. We will continue to take advantage of Microsoft Teams features that drive interaction and participation like meeting chat, the “raise hand” feature, as well as reactions, emojis, and integrated GIF support ensure a productive and interactive meeting experience for all.

Microsoft Teams benefits from Copilot integration as well, enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.

We’re continuing to retrofit conference rooms to utilize the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities, and we’ll keep partnering with the Microsoft Teams product group to push the envelope with innovative new capabilities that take advantage of investments in hardware, software, and physical space to create immersive and inclusive environments. We’ll achieve that while being sensitive to cost, prioritizing employee value. Like our customers, we face budget constraints, but we invest when we’re convinced that we’re delivering sufficient value to our employees to justify the expense. Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms at a global scale while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.

• Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at the Hive
• Get started with Copilot in Microsoft Teams meetings
• Advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting guide

Microsoft Power Platform

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have thousands of employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to our success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Citizen developers use no-code/low-code solutions to accelerate digital transformation of their workstreams. At Microsoft, the technologies that comprise the Microsoft Power Platform empower literally anyone in the company to transform our employee experience. After all, who’s the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s not normally someone in a central IT team—it’s the employee who is closest to the problem or opportunity.

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion graphic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before.

Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to enable digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

• Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform
• Powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI
• Rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Automate

Securing employee experiences across devices, apps, and infrastructure

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy in 2020, Microsoft was more prepared than most organizations, not because we had anticipated the pandemic, but because we had already done the work to shift nearly every critical workload to the cloud, implementing a Zero Trust security model. A cloud-first strategy is critical in a hybrid world.

Zero Trust security ensures a healthy and protected environment by using the internet as the default network with strong identity, device health enforcement, and least privilege access. It reduces risk by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access (just-in-time, just-enough-access) to only explicitly authorized resources.

Zero Trust requires that every transaction between systems is validated and proven trustworthy before the transaction can occur. Ideally, the behaviors shown in this companion graphic are required.

The security threat landscape continues to change, with attacks on corporate networks increasing in frequency and complexity, partially as a byproduct of hybrid work. Through our Zero Trust security posture, Microsoft Digital plays a significant role in protecting our corporate assets and securing the enterprise while ensuring our employees have the best possible day-to-day experience. By implementing Zero Trust within your organization, you too can mitigate threats to your critical enterprise infrastructure.

• Implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft
• Transitioning to modern access architecture with Zero Trust
• Zero Trust Model – Modern Security Architecture | Microsoft Security

Physical spaces and facilities

One of the three critical questions that all digital transformation leaders need to ask as they consider a return to the workplace is “What are the changes needed in the physical environment to support an inclusive and equitable approach to hybrid productivity?” After all, the best digital experiences mean very little if you don’t have the right physical spaces or hardware to maximize their potential for collaboration. And even more important than productivity is “How can I keep my employees safe and healthy?”

Between our Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) team and Microsoft Digital, we represent the “front door of Microsoft”— the technology and the facilities. The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing. As Microsoft Digital’s Becky West put it in her recent article:

Typically, technology is added to a building many years or even decades after building construction. For example, software for booking a conference room or reserving a campus shuttle is developed independently from an office building being built, bought, or leased. This model works OK. However, to truly transform, technology needs to be integrated into the building, which requires a tight real estate and IT partnership.

While Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leaders and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses, when both functions are aligned on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible. The following are some examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences:

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility, and in a hybrid work environment it’s even more important to streamline and automate that experience. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
• Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, or book a conference room or workspace. Soon our employees will have the ability to find available parking near their assigned workspace or meeting facility.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft. By integrating inputs from previously siloed data sources (like motion and occupancy sensors), we’re evolving the way Microsoft employees interact with their spaces, with a focus on efficiency and productivity.
• With Microsoft Dynamics 365 running on Microsoft Azure, we’re working together to consolidate all facility management processes and provide them to our vendors.
• Working together, we built a simple-to-use health attestation app using the Microsoft Power Platform to ensure that our employees acknowledge their health and vaccination status before entering a Microsoft facility. Microsoft even released a version that’s free for eligible customers.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of the employee experience. We’ve learned that working together on a shared vision informed by employee and industry data, carefully researched by user experience designers, and using our full portfolio of digital experiences leads to transformative outcomes.

By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help our employees thrive in the hybrid workplace.

• Creating the digital workplace at Microsoft
• Accelerating Microsoft’s global real estate transformation with Microsoft Digital
• Using Azure Digital Twins and IoT to modernize Microsoft buildings
• Transforming how Microsoft manages its corporate real estate data

Cultural norms

While investments in hardware and physical spaces are important, the greatest technology in the world won’t help unless people embrace best practices and apply consistent norms to ensure that all meetings are inclusive and that remote participants continue to have a great experience. While norms might vary based on your location, culture, and technical capabilities, digital transformation leaders should consider simple steps like those shown in this graphic.

These are just a few of the behaviors and standards to consider codifying as norms in your organization to support productive and effective hybrid meetings. For additional tips, please review this Tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world article. The following resources offer additional guidance, insights, and ideas for maximizing the productivity and effectiveness of hybrid meetings.

• How Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world
• Driving Inclusive and Effective Meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams
• Designing the New Hybrid Meeting Experience—for Everyone
• WorkLab Live: Andrew Wilson and Nathalie D’Hers on the future of hybrid work
• To Thrive in Hybrid Work, Build a Culture of Trust and Flexibility

Driving adoption of new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change management services to ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In fact, the importance of change management is so great, it’s reflected in our organizational vision.

Microsoft Digital is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve also benefited from the Microsoft 365 standardized approach to change management. This simple three-stage model can help teams of all shapes and sizes unlock the value of their investments in digital transformation.

In addition to practical guidance, case studies, and templates, Microsoft also makes available free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of digital transformation in the hybrid workplace.

• Microsoft 365 Adoption – Get Started
• How Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform
• Driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience with investment prioritization

Conclusion

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last few years. The first big shock was hybrid work, and the next is generative AI. We’ve captured some of our key learnings from that journey in this article and hope they will inspire you as you consider your own pathway to the future of work.

Hybrid work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re miles away. And they’ll be far less likely to leave for a competitor who has a more sophisticated and flexible model than you do.

Generative AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, has the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness in your workforce. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings.

• Rethink your employee experience across your digital capabilities and physical spaces to meet your business needs in a hybrid world.
• Focusing on the three critical elements of the employee experience—digital capabilities, physical space and facilities, and organization culture—will help your organization to thrive in the hybrid workplace of the future.
• Microsoft Viva can help your employees find balance in the hybrid work environment, enabling you to retain talent in a competitive labor market.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot can unlock creativity and productivity in your workplace, while giving your organization an edge as AI becomes a key tool for organizational effectiveness.
• Use the Microsoft Power Platform to unlock innovation from your front lines by enabling your citizen developers to visualize and analyze data, build apps that address common business scenarios, and automate business processes.
• Adopting a Zero Trust security posture will keep your network secure and your employees safe.
• Build a strong partnership between your IT and real estate teams.
• Ensuring you have effective change management policies in place will help you extract value from your investments in digital transformation.

• Learn about Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out these hybrid work solutions for your hybrid workplace.
• Read this WorkLab story on vital facts about the future of work.
• Find out if we’re ready for the disruption that hybrid work is creating for us.

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

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience for a hybrid world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That’s exactly what we designed Microsoft Viva Engage to do.

To capture those benefits, we rolled out Microsoft Viva Engage’s newest features to our hundreds of thousands of employees here at Microsoft. Making this happen required a cross-disciplinary team of product specialists, change management practitioners, communicators, and executive sponsors.

We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient. If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.

—Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager, Human Resources

[Learn about all the ways Microsoft Viva is making work life better at Microsoft. See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday. Find out about Microsoft’s employee-centric experience.]

Keeping connected in the modern work world

Microsoft Viva Engage is the next evolution of our enterprise social platform Yammer, giving our employees a place to connect, express themselves, and find belonging that builds meaningful relationships at work. We’re using it to transform the way we do corporate communications. And while Viva Engage helps all employees connect, its latest features unlock especially powerful ways for our senior leaders to connect with people across their organizations and people with each other across organizations and networks.

We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people. So we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.

—Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead, Microsoft Digital

“We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient,” says Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager with Microsoft Human Resources. “If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.”

We started using Microsoft Viva in helpful new ways starting in in Fall 2022:

• Leadership Corner is a dedicated space for communications and connecting with leaders.
• AMA (Ask Me Anything) events give leaders and employees the chance to make direct connections through Q&As with their colleagues.
• Employee Resource Group brings together employees who can support each other, share ideas, and build community.
• Storyline announcements deliver messaging directly to a leader’s most appropriate audience.
• Social campaigns rally people around shared initiatives through common social media behaviors.
• Analytics demonstrate value and guide behaviors through testing and learning.
• Answers, the latest feature, provides a crowdsourcing forum where employees can get their questions answered.

These features perfectly position Microsoft Viva Engage for a leadership-driven approach to adoption.

Building a strategy for success

The adoption team’s first challenge was finding a way to earn buy-in from our senior leaders. Microsoft Viva Engage is an enterprise social app, and executives are our biggest influencers.

“We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people,” says Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead in our Microsoft Digital (MSD) organization. “So, we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.”

Cafiero’s team partnered with a wide range of collaborators across HR, change management, and product to build a strategy for reaching the executive community.

“We started digging into the size of this audience and the breadth of communication roles at Microsoft,” Cafiero says.

One group stood out: Global Employee and Executive Communications, a team known as GEEC. These professionals work with executives to craft internal communications, so they’re perfectly positioned to influence the influencers.

The adoption team started recruiting GEEC members into a new Early Adopter Program (EAP) for Microsoft Viva Engage. The program had three requirements:

• Become a superuser – Members were encouraged to set aside 30 minutes per week to learn about Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Collect insightful feedback – We asked them to share their insights with the adoption team to help us shape the features and direction of Viva Engage.
• Generate best-use scenarios – We encouraged them to actively use Viva Engage to find ways to promote adoption.

They also had the opportunity to join regular workshops, pop-up focus groups, a bespoke Microsoft Viva community within the app, and 1:1 follow-ups. As a result of this high-touch engagement, they had the comfort and confidence to use the tool in their everyday work and explain its value to executives.

“We started to see what they needed as corporate communicators to best leverage Viva Engage,” Owen says. “An important learning was that we shouldn’t be feature-focused but problem-focused. We asked what challenges these communicators face and began to co-create solutions for how they can best use this app to solve them.”

Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable, someone who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.

—Paula Bohn, senior business program manager, change and adoption, MSD

Thanks to the adoption team’s work, we had buy-in from key members within the corporate communications discipline. They grew into an engaged group of superusers who were excited to apply Microsoft Viva Engage to their work with executives.

Building groundswell for Microsoft Viva Engage

With the release of leadership-focused features, we were in an excellent position to capture executive buy-in for the rollout.

“We talked to leaders about how employees often see executives as these unreachable entities,” says Paula Bohn, senior business program manager for change and adoption with MSD. “Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.”

Supported by the communications professionals in the EAP program, our leaders came to the table with a full understanding of Microsoft Viva Engage’s value and how it works. As a result, we had strong buy-in from our internal influencers.

One of the most successful activations came at the end of 2022, when we launched a Microsoft Viva Engage social campaign asking employees to look back over the last year: #2022Reflections. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella contributed his own reflection, it received over 200,000 impressions. That gave the adoption a massive boost.

“My change management team can jump through plenty of hoops to make adoption readiness happen, but a tool doesn’t actually land until employees see their leaders modeling the behavior,” Bohn says.

Microsoft Viva Engage shines through top-down deployment driven by senior leadership. But as it reached a critical mass of usage and engagement, the team took steps to reinforce adoption for all employees.

“Once we began to see leaders posting to their organizations in ways that weren’t possible before, the number of questions and requests for enablement quickly exceeded our capacity for white-glove treatment,” says Frank Delia, senior program manager for Office 365 services management and adoption with MSD. “That’s when we realized we needed to scale this information to meet demand.”

It’s not just about enabling leaders—everyone can take advantage of Microsoft Viva Engage’s capabilities. The best way to fuel Viva Engage usage is to drive interest in solving challenges that teams have and not on trying to get them to deploy a particular feature.

Company-wide adoption efforts included an extensive communication strategy featuring product documentation, in-tool directional supports, internal blogs, and all-employee emails, all while sourcing feedback from GEEC members and employees alike.

Paired with the excitement and engagement of connecting more closely with our top leaders, the groundswell of Microsoft Viva Engage usage continues to surge. As of March 2023, monthly active usage (MAU) for the Viva Engage app in Microsoft Teams stood at 71 percent of Microsoft employees. That’s nearly double its 38 percent MAU before we launched the new features in November, and much higher than our adoption target of 50 percent.

A roadmap for adoption success

At this point, Microsoft Viva Engage usage is high, and the feature sets are fully in place. The next steps are all about scale.

Now that this adoption is firmly established, Microsoft employees’ experience and feedback provide valuable insights for future deployments. Both the approach to communications and the EAP will feature heavily in our next big rollout.

“To me, adoption means users fully understand the product and its value, and they wouldn’t want to do without it.” Bohn says. “That’s the real measure of a successful adoption.”

The specific technology and key players may be different, but the core adoption process will remain our north star. It’s all about communicating value, capturing your key players, and making sure your technology meets your customers’ needs.

• Different approaches are valid for different tools, so select a top-down or bottom-up approach based on your use case.
• Be problem-focused—not feature-focused—to capture value for your key stakeholders.
• Be diligent about building a usage framework and differentiating use cases.
• Identify who your influencers are and who’s influencing them.
• Thoroughly research your target roles and their work.
• Train your early adopters and influencers extensively because other employees will follow their lead.

• Learn about all the ways Viva is making work life better at Microsoft.
• See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday.
• Find out how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience.

The post Transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva

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

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

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

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

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

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva

Viva Connections

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

Viva Amplify

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

Viva Learning

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

Viva Goals

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

Viva Engage

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

Viva Insights

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

Viva Pulse

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

Viva Glint

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

Viva Amplify

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

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

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

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

Viva Learning

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

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

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

Viva Engage

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

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

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

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

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

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

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

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

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

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

Viva Insights

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

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

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

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

Viva Goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing support is just the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

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

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

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

When elements of IT infrastructure are shrouded in mystery, it can lead to security vulnerabilities, non-compliance, and poor budget management. That’s the trouble with shadow IT—a term for any technical infrastructure that conventional IT teams and engineers don’t govern.

At Microsoft, we’re on a journey to increase our shadow IT maturity, resulting in fewer vulnerabilities and increased efficiencies. To get there, we’re leveraging tools and techniques we’ve developed through our core discipline of Microsoft Azure optimization.

[See how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure. Learn how we’re transforming our internal Microsoft Azure spend forecasting.]

The challenges of shadow IT

Shadow IT is the set of applications, services, and infrastructure that teams develop and manage outside of defined company standards.

It typically crops up when engineering teams are unable to support their non-engineering partners. That situation may arise from a lack of available engineering capacity or the need for specialized domain solutions. On top of those circumstances, modern tools enable citizen developers to stand up low-code/no-code solutions that enable businesses to reduce their dependency on traditional engineering organizations.

Six corporate function teams have been involved in creating shadow IT environments: business development, legal, finance, human resources, and our consumer and commercial marketing and sales organizations.

Many of the solutions they’ve developed make strong business sense—as long as they’re secure and efficient. That’s where our Microsoft Digital (MSD) team comes in.

Three years ago, our biggest driver was getting visibility into the shadow IT estate and finding ways to secure it. Now we’re at a point where we’re looking for cost savings—that’s a natural progression.

—Myron Wan, principal product manager, Infrastructure and Engineering Services team

Over the last few years, our IT experts have been working with the shadow IT divisions to increase the maturity of the solutions they’ve developed, taking them from unsanctioned toolsets lurking in the shadows to well-governed, compliant, and secure assets they can safely use to advance our business goals.

Now that these shadow IT solutions are more secure and compliant, we’ve turned our attention to efficiency and optimization to ensure we’re able to do as much as possible with the least necessary budget expenditure.

“Three years ago, our biggest driver was getting visibility into the shadow IT estate and finding ways to secure it,” says Myron Wan, principal product manager within the Infrastructure and Engineering Services (IES) team. “Now we’re at a point where we’re looking for cost savings—that’s a natural progression.”

Because many of our shadow IT solutions leverage Microsoft Azure subscriptions, that was a natural place to start the optimization work.

Azure best practices, shadow IT efficiency

Fortunately, we have robust discipline around optimizing Microsoft Azure spend in conventional IT and engineering settings. Microsoft Azure Advisor, available through the Microsoft Azure Portal, has been providing optimization recommendations and identifying overspend for subscribers both within Microsoft and in our customers’ organizations for years.

The plan was to take applicable recommendations that we use in our core engineering organizations and distribute them to the shadow IT divisions.

—Trey Morgan, principal product manager, MSD FinOps

Internally, we’ve added layers that help streamline the optimization process. One, called CloudFit, draws from a library of optimization recommendations, which are tailored to the specific needs of the teams we support. Then we use Service 360, our internal notification center that flags actions in need of addressing for our engineering teams, to route those recommendations to subscription owners within MSD, product groups, and business groups.

Optimization tickets then enter their queue and progress through open, active, and resolved statuses. It’s a standard method for creating and prioritizing engineering tasks, and Microsoft customers could accomplish a similar result by building a bridge between Microsoft Azure Advisor and their own ticketing tool, whether that’s Jira, ServiceNow, or others.

“We have an existing set of cost optimization recommendations that we use for a variety of different technologies like Azure Cosmos DB and SQL,” says Trey Morgan, principal product manager for MSD FinOps. “The plan was to take applicable recommendations that we use in our core engineering organizations and distribute them to the shadow IT divisions.”

Getting there was a matter of establishing visibility and building culture.

Shining a light on shadow IT spend

Many of the optimization issues within shadow IT divisions came about because of non-engineers’ and non-developers’ unfamiliarity or lack of training with subscription-based software. They might not have the background or expertise to set them up or even ensure that their subscriptions would terminate after they had served their purpose.

In some cases, vendors or contractors may have set up processes and then moved on once their engagement was complete. Each of these scenarios had the potential for suboptimal Azure spend.

Providing visibility into these issues was relatively simple. Because all Microsoft Azure subscriptions across our organization are searchable through our company-wide inventory management system and sortable by department, engineers were able to locate all the subscriptions belonging to shadow IT divisions. From there, they simply had to apply CloudFit recommendations to those subscriptions and loop them through Service 360.

Our people now have the information they need to act—our organizational leaders can visit their Service 360 dashboard or can review their action summary report to see what they can do to cut their costs. That’s where culture and education came into the equation.

“Culture is always the number-one challenge when items aren’t actually owned by a core engineering team,” Wan says. “When you have teams that are more about generating revenue or managing corporate processes, a lot of what we have to deal with is education.”

It wasn’t just educating teams about Microsoft Azure optimization techniques. CloudFit and Service 360 provided a lot of the guidance those teams would need to get the job done. To a great degree, non-engineering employees needed to build the discipline of receiving and resolving tickets like a developer or engineer would.

But through direct communications from FinOps tools and support from Wan’s colleagues in engineering, we’ve been meeting our goal of optimizing Azure spend in shadow IT divisions. In the first six months of this solution’s availability, we’ve saved $1 million thanks to various optimizations.

Microsoft Azure savings and organizational discipline

Shadow IT will always exist in some form or another, so this journey isn’t just about remedying past inefficiencies. It’s also about building a culture of optimization and best practices across shadow IT divisions as they use their Microsoft Azure subscriptions moving forward.

With these solutions and practices in place, we’ve moved on from a “get clean” and “stay clean” culture to one where we “start clean.”

—Qingsu Wu, principal program manager, IES

“As we get more mature and divisions build up their muscles, we’re actually getting to an ongoing state of optimization,” says Feng Liu, principal product manager with IES. “As we build up that culture and that practice, folks are becoming more aware and taking more ownership and accountability.”

Some shadow IT divisions are even going beyond FinOps recommendations. For example, our commercial sales and marketing organization uses shadow IT solutions so extensively and is so keen to optimize their budget that they’ve automated the implementation of recommendations and created their own internal FinOps team.

“The whole vision of our shadow IT program is helping business teams to be self-accountable and sustainable,” says Qingsu Wu, principal program manager for the Infrastructure and Engineering Services (IES) team. “With these solutions and practices in place, we’ve moved on from a ‘get clean’ and ‘stay clean’ culture to one where we ‘start clean.’”

It’s all part of building a more effective culture and practice to do more with less.

• Understand your inventory. Spend time linking your organizational hierarchy to your Azure resources.
• Get to a confident view of your estate and your data. It’s crucial.
• Don’t be overly prescriptive. Be open to how you’re going to approach the situation.
• Build sustainability into your efforts by getting non-engineering teams more comfortable with regular engineering practices and learning from each other.
• Don’t overlook small wins. When they scale out across an entire organization, they can produce substantial savings.

• See how we’re doing more with less internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure.
• Learn how we’re transforming our internal Microsoft Azure spend forecasting.
• See how we’re enabling launch optimization at Microsoft.
• Find out how SAP and Azure combine to forge a trusted path to innovation in the cloud.
• Discover how we’re optimizing network performance for Microsoft Office 365.

The post Doing more with less: Optimizing shadow IT through Microsoft Azure best practices appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

But one of the areas where Microsoft Teams has not received enough credit is the way in which it has helped ease several gaps created by the physical distance and missing connection brought on by remote-only or hybrid work environments.

As an employee who started at Microsoft during the pandemic and works 100 percent remotely, Microsoft Teams is the sole product that has afforded me the ability to cultivate strong relationships with colleagues that I have never physically met. The same types of “hour-long lunch date, over share about your personal life, and solve all the problems of the company” conversations that I had with teammates at former jobs pre-pandemic have still been possible thanks to the authentic connections that I have established via Microsoft Teams.

Now I understand that not all employers see these types of conversations as fruitful or productive, but I do know that all employers value the importance of a strong company culture and connection between colleagues. So how does one go about making these types of authentic relationships when they are brand new to a company and separated physically from the rest of their team?

Seeing a real need to help new hires successfully onboard during the pandemic, several organizations within Microsoft were looking for an innovative way to drive connection while removing the awkwardness of being the new employee and the pressures that come with having to be the first person to proactively reach out. So, some great minds within Microsoft Teams Customer and Partner Ecosystem, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, and its India Development Center (IDC) got together to figure out a way to solve this.

“Working together with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, we looked for a new way to enable and spark human connection within Microsoft Teams to help solve for some experiences that employees were missing due to the pandemic,” says Eu Nice Loh, a customer and partner ecosystem senior product manager on the Microsoft Teams product group.

Deploying the Icebreaker app

Icebreaker is based on a template created by the Microsoft Teams product group. This app is hosted in Microsoft Azure and backed by the Microsoft Azure Bot Framework that can be deployed to any company’s Microsoft Teams apps store. It aims to do the work of sparking connections by randomly pairing team members to help them build trust and encourage valuable, meaningful, long-term, and personal connections.

Microsoft’s Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) organization was one of the first to adopt the out-of-the-box Icebreaker as part of their onboarding experience. When the pandemic first hit, they realized they would need to completely rethink the way they did their onboarding and sales training. Previously, the program had been a two-week immersion at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington where new hires were flown in for onboarding, training, networking, and to build their social capital within the company.

Paola Medina, a business program manager with the MCAPS onboarding team, quickly got to work on finding new ways to foster connection within MCAPS new hire communities.

Even with hybrid work and people returning to the office, Icebreaker continues to be ranked high for MCAPS new hires as their favorite tool for connection, and we have found it to be more cost effective than some of our previous alternatives. In strained financial times, where many companies’ budgets for networking, morale-related events and internal company travel might be limited, the Icebreaker app is a great tool to help initiate connections that were once mainly nurtured by in-person activities.

—Paola Medina, business program manager, MCAPS onboarding team

“I started exploring for ways to help build engagement within MCAPS onboarding during this unique time and stumbled upon the app template for Icebreaker,” Medina says. “After some trial and error, I was able to figure out how to deploy the app, and we started using it with new hires worldwide as a way for them to connect and foster belonging. It has been such a powerful tool for bringing people together.”

Thousands of MCAPS new hires have accessed Icebreaker over the past few years, and they continue to use the app as a critical tool of engagement. Originally as a solution for remote work and office shutdowns brought on by the pandemic, it has continued to prove its usefulness, especially now during challenging economic times.

“Even with hybrid work and people returning to the office, Icebreaker continues to be ranked high for MCAPS new hires as their favorite tool for connection, and we have found it to be more cost effective than some of our previous alternatives,” Medina says. “In strained financial times, where many companies’ budgets for networking, morale-related events and internal company travel might be limited, the Icebreaker app is a great tool to help initiate connections that were once mainly nurtured by in-person activities.”

Not only did we have great team engagement, but it ended up fostering different types of conversations. You had people having casual discussions, in some instances with managers a few levels above them, that may never have happened without Icebreaker. It also led to becoming a great mentoring app for many.

—Timi Bolaji, software engineer, Xbox

xCloud, Microsoft’s Xbox cloud gaming team, has also utilized the Icebreaker app with much success. In fact, in a recent survey taken by xCloud employees, 97 percent of the participants said that the Icebreaker app gave them the ability to make new relationships across the organization.

Timi Bolaji, a software engineer with Xbox and a member of their Culture team, was the one to first introduce Icebreaker to his organization. He felt like the initial Icebreaker app was very approachable, and the documentation was particularly good, but for it to be successful for the xCloud team, he would need to make some technical changes that would better suit his teams’ needs and ensure usage.

“Not only did we have great team engagement, but it ended up fostering different types of conversations,” Bolaji says. “You had people having casual discussions, in some instances with managers a few levels above them, that may never have happened without Icebreaker. It also led to becoming a great mentoring app for many.”

This company-wide need to continue to foster personal connections in a hybrid environment brought together a team with the best suited skill sets to enhance the Icebreaker app. The Microsoft Teams product group set out to design a new experience that would feel fully native to Teams. Also, they provided insights into potential improvements through usage of the latest Teams software development kit (SDK) and Adaptive Cards features.

IDC, one of Microsoft’s premier centers for engineering and innovation, and others on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team united modern designs, enterprise-scale performance requirements, new technology capabilities, and Microsoft’s internal app compliance standards to create an improved version of Icebreaker.

Before we could deploy it, we needed to ensure that it could be used by multiple Teams simultaneously using a single set of Azure resources, and the backend service could handle the complex logic of pairing-up employees from different teams based on individual user preferences and Team settings. The scalability requirement drove the re-architecture of the application and broke it down into multiple micro-services, so now the app can be installed by any team in the company.

“In addition to making these changes, we had the opportunity to validate our approach with internal users who had already used Icebreaker and iterate on that feedback,” says Balasubramanyam Janakiraman, a principal software engineering manager leading IDC’s engineering team and overseeing the technical implementation of Icebreaker. “After four months of running the app in pilot, hundreds of teams at Microsoft are now using the new and improved version.”

What we learned as Customer Zero

From all the internal employee usage of the Icebreaker app has come great insight and response. For instance, Medina was instrumental in helping the Icebreaker product team improve the app based on the collective feedback she received from the MCAPS organization.

Some of the top recommendations for improvements included:

• Pulling profile data to present on the app card when matching occurs
• Feature to adjust scheduling, frequency, and matching for Team Owners and Team Members
• Improved messaging, language, and user experience within the App
• Incorporating conversation starters to the app when matched to ease connections
• Ability to modify time options for the “pause matching” feature

“It’s been a real collaborative effort between us, IDC, the Microsoft Teams product group, and our internal customers to get the Icebreaker app where it is today,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, a Teams productivity senior program manager with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “Through the feedback we have received from our employees, we’re able to improve the app and make it even more useful for cultivating strong connections and helping solve the gap created over the past few years.”

The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team takes our mission to power, protect, and transform Microsoft very seriously. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. As Customer Zero for many products and services, our team obsesses over every aspect of an employee’s experience. Finding ways to better our culture through connectivity and strong relationships is all part of that commitment.

Microsoft Teams will continue to play an integral role in helping our employees and customers connect, collaborate, and explore for many years to come. Innovations like the Icebreaker app are just a small indication of what is still yet to come for Teams as we prepare for many advancements that will continue to enable deep connections within many dimensions.

Are you a customer wanting to learn more about the Icebreaker app in Microsoft Teams or how you and your organization can use Microsoft Teams to foster culture and connectivity? Please go to: https://github.com/OfficeDev/microsoft-teams-apps-icebreaker

Also, if you want to learn more from Paola Medina on her experience as a Microsoft employee and the importance of building community with the Icebreaker app, check out this video.

• Check out these five ways Microsoft Teams has transformed Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Learn how we’re transforming how meetings happen at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Discover Microsoft’s tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world.

The post New Microsoft Teams app helps facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Power Automate, part of the suite of tools offered by Microsoft Power Platform, is a low-code, cloud-based automation service powered by AI. In the company’s own words, Power Automate enables customers to streamline processes across their organization to save time and focus on what’s important.

While that might sound like corporate jargon, I can personally attest to its effectiveness. Power Automate has indeed helped my organization save time and focus on what matters most. By “my organization,” I’m referring to Microsoft itself—specifically, the Microsoft Charlotte Campus and the Blacks at Microsoft (BAM) Employee Resource Group. Power Automate has been essential in planning, organizing, and running our community service events, thereby amplifying their impact and continued viability.

As a senior software engineer at Microsoft, I specialize in data engineering, working on the systems that power Microsoft’s financials through big data analytics, revenue reporting, and product insights. Beyond my technical role, I’m also deeply passionate about giving back to the community through volunteerism. At the Charlotte campus, I’ve channeled this passion into organizing outreach and volunteer events, specifically focusing on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education.

Power Automate has been a game-changer in helping me maintain what I call work-life-volunteering balance. It allows me to stay focused on my primary work duties, keep a healthy personal life, and actively engage in my passion for service. Burnout, especially in tech, is a very real thing. By automating tasks that would have otherwise been overwhelming, Power Automate has helped me avoid burning out, ensuring I can excel at my actual job while still having an impact in my community. I’d like to share how it can help you do the same, but first, story time.

Building community through service

I joined Microsoft in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, but decided to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Microsoft has an office and was looking to expand. (Fun fact: it’s the oldest Microsoft office outside of Redmond, established in 1990!) Relocating during the pandemic presented its own set of challenges. COVID had essentially shut down the city’s social scene and the Charlotte office, making it difficult to meet new people and coworkers. Having spent my first year in Charlotte mostly isolated, I was eager for opportunities to get out and connect with people, both at the office and in the city at large.

Knowing that volunteering is an effective way to build community, I quickly sought out opportunities to get involved, both through local nonprofits and at Microsoft. It didn’t take long to find calls for volunteers throughout the city. My first step was volunteering with a local nonprofit called the Carolina Youth Coalition, which focuses on propelling high-achieving, under-resourced high school students to and through college. As a mentor and writing tutor with the organization, I began looking for ways to connect the students—many of whom were interested in technology—with Microsoft’s presence in Charlotte.

Discover Days: The first big step

I started by investigating the possibility of bringing the students to the Microsoft Charlotte campus for a field trip. My hope was for a fun and informative day complete with a campus tour, networking opportunities, a hearty meal, and some cool swag for them to take home. When I reached out to Chemere Davis—Charlotte Campus Community Lead and BAM North Carolina Chairperson—to see if such a visit would be possible, I was met with an emphatic yes. At the time, it surprised me, still being new to Microsoft, but now, after four years with the company, I see it as a reflection of Microsoft’s genuine commitment to empowering local communities.

That fall, 50 Carolina Youth Coalition students visited Microsoft Charlotte, sparking an annual tradition and an ongoing series of similar events with other local schools, known as Discover Days. Since then, my involvement in STEAM education events in Charlotte through Microsoft and BAM has only grown.

As my volunteer commitments grew, finding a more efficient way to plan, run, and manage events became essential; Power Automate provided the perfect solution. This year, it was crucial in elevating our Discover Days series from isolated single-school visits to something even more impactful.

“When we used Power Automate to ping team members directly in Teams and remind them 1:1 to sign up for our recent Charlotte software engineering Day of Learning event, we saw registrations double overnight—even though we had already sent several emails to the members,” says James Bolling, a principal group engineering manager and Microsoft Charlotte campus director. “It’s clear to me that our team is living and working in Teams Chat and not email these days.”

Every year, the many worldwide chapters of the Blacks at Microsoft Employee Resource Group host an event called BAM Minority Student Day. The event provides a 1-day conference-like experience for underrepresented high school students, engaging them in activities that introduce them to STEAM careers. In 2024, I had the privilege of leading the BAM Charlotte edition of this event, which brought together 400 students and 40 educators from 21 high schools across the region.

While I was excited to take on the challenge of leading the event, I was concerned about how I’d be able to balance my work responsibilities, personal life, and volunteer efforts in a healthy way. Power Automate became key to making it all possible.

Making it happen with Power Automate

Here are some ways that Power Automate enabled us, as the BAM Charlotte chapter, to pull off our incredibly impactful 2024 Minority Student Day.

• Streamlining volunteer coordination: We integrated Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Teams, and Outlook to automate the management of over 100 volunteers, streamlining role assignments, calendar invites, and communications. This ensured that each volunteer was informed of their responsibilities and schedule with minimal manual oversight. By doing so, the administrative burden on leads was greatly reduced, ensuring smooth coordination and a successful event.
• Reporting in real time: We linked Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Planner, and Excel to generate and distribute reports on registration numbers, volunteer assignments, and task completion statuses. This gave our planning team the crucial data needed to make informed decisions as the event date neared, allowing us to adjust plans and resources to stay within capacity and budget constraints.
• Efficient task management: Through integration with Microsoft Planner, we were able to automate task assignments, progress tracking, and reminders. Tasks were assigned to the appropriate team members based on their roles, and automated notifications ensured that deadlines were met. This was crucial in managing the many moving parts of the event.
• Automating document handling: Power Automate worked in tandem with SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Adobe Sign to manage the flow of important documents, such as signed consent forms and event materials. We were able to automatically save documents to the correct folders, update relevant lists, and notify the appropriate team members, significantly reducing the risk of lost or misplaced documents and simplifying the administrative workload.
• Enhanced event promotion and engagement: We used Power Automate alongside Teams and Outlook to boost event promotion. Personalized messages were sent to Microsoft employees via the Teams workflow bot, creating a more engaging and direct line of communication. This approach increased overall engagement compared to previous years.

“I am incredibly impressed with Segun’s meticulous attention to detail and innovative use of Power Automate to streamline the planning and running of our Employee Resource Group programs, and especially our Minority Student Day and our summer mentorship program,” says Chemere Davis, a senior business program manager and chairperson of Blacks at Microsoft North Carolina. “His efforts significantly increased our efficiency, allowing us to focus on enhancing the experience and impact for almost 600 students in the past year.”

Check out the recap of BAM Minority Student Day in Charlotte in this LinkedIn post, and another example of Microsoft’s culture in Charlotte at our Give Fair also posted on LinkedIn

If you’re interested in using Power Automate to help your organization focus on what’s important and automate the rest, here are some resources to get you started.

Check out the Power Automate template gallery for ready-to-use, customizable workflows that offer a wide range of automation possibilities. Here are some templates that were helpful to our community event planning and organization efforts:

• Send an email to a responder after a Microsoft form submission
• Create a daily summary of Planner tasks by bucket
• Create a Planner task when a Microsoft form is submitted
• Microsoft form processing to Outlook and SharePoint
• Create a task in planner from Microsoft forms and a post Teams message
• Create a Planner task when a Teams channel post starts with “To do”
• Notifying a chat when Planner tasks change status
• Generate an Adobe sign agreement and get a signature
• Track Microsoft forms responses in Excel and notify through Teams and Outlook

If you don’t already have a license, go here to sign up for a free trial of Power Automate.

• Check out how we’re rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Power Automate.
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