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

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

Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

But increasing scale required us to evolve our approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluating AI for Microsoft

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

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

Ria Khetan, senior program manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

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

Building transformation on core pillars

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

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

Don Campbell, principal group technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

The operating model is intentionally simple.

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

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

Our CoE uses these four pillars to guide our work:

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

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

Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture

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

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

Qingsu Wu, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roadmap

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

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

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

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

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

A key part of this approach is disciplined experimentation.

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

Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responsible AI is embedded throughout that work.

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

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

Fostering agent innovation

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

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

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

Garima Tiwari, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

Architecture quickly followed.

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

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

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

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

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

That architectural clarity changed how decisions were made.

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

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

The roadmap lens then brought structure to execution.

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

Don Campbell, principal group technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

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

Culture and enablement ran alongside that work.

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

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

The outcome wasn’t a single standardized solution.

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

Try it out

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

He didn’t plan it.

Yet somehow, he became a Viva Engage superstar.

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

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

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

It was about being real and accessible.

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

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

That’s the “why” in this story.  

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

Connecting with your employees

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

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

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

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president of Viva Engage

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

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

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

Leadership with Viva Engage

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

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

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

From broadcast to conversation

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

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

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

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

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

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

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

Jason Mayans, vice president of product management, Viva Engage

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

Meeting employees where they work

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

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

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

Over time, that rhythm of consistent communication shapes culture.

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

Steve Nguyen, principal program manager, Viva Engage Customer Experience

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

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

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

Putting leadership principles into practice

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

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

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

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

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications

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

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

It relies on trust.

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

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

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

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

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

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

Try it out

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting employee engagement

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

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

Evolving our culture

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

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

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

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enriching our employee experience

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

Viva Engage

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

Viva Engage home feed

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

Viva Amplify

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

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

Viva Amplify overview

Viva Insights

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

Viva Insights dashboard

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

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

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

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

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

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

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

Surveying our employees

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

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

Viva Learning

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

Viva Learning modules

At Microsoft, we use Viva Learning to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

Try it out

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications

Building trust to change our culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reaching employees in the flow of work

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

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

Evolving communication with Viva Engage

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

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

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

Engaging employees through major campaigns

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

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

The results spoke for themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing dialogue with respect and accountability

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

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

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

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

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

Ife Kolawole, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

Communicating for meaningful change

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

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

Try it out

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soumik Maji, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

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

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

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

Read our Viva Engage guide

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

The leader’s perspective

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

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

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president, Viva Engage

Staying connected required scrolling through feeds and piecing together context.

That’s changing.

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

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

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

Powering Corporate Communications with Viva Engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying connected to what matters most

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eva Etchells, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

IT Communications and community content

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lundy, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

“It’s a huge time-saver,” Lundy says.

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

Try it out

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

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

Microsoft Digital readiness guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways

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

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

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

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

Try it out

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

Related links

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

We’d like to hear from you!

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

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

Microsoft Digital stories

The 2020s have been a tumultuous decade for employees globally. Starting with the COVID-19 pandemic that upended workplace norms and expectations in 2020, then quickly followed by the generative AI revolution in 2022, we’re living through a time of unprecedented workplace change. From flexible work to the advent of generative AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, forward-looking companies are seizing the moment to accelerate digital transformation like never before, with engaged employees using AI-powered tools to create a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Employee engagement is a global challenge

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the experts at Gallup saw that employee engagement—defined as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace—was extremely low. In fact, in 2009 only 12% of employees globally indicated that they were engaged at work. While that number steadily improved over the next 15 years, by 2024 only 21% of employees globally indicated they were engaged in their workplace. (Gallup, 2025)

Interestingly, the numbers are not uniform globally. At one end of the spectrum, in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, 31% of employees indicate they are engaged in work. At the other end of the spectrum, only 13% of European workers indicate they are engaged. (Gallup, 2025)

No matter where a region falls on this spectrum, it’s not very promising for companies who want to attract, retain, and develop the best employees. Data indicates that engaged employees are one of the best predictors of economic success:

In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across all of Microsoft, our goal is to ensure our employees feel engaged at work by providing the digital tools, access to information, and personal connections that enable them to live our culture no matter where they are in the world. 

{Read Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report.}

AI is fundamentally changing the world of work

While flexible work created new challenges for employee engagement, generative AI tools have created unprecedented opportunities to increase employee productivity and positively impact engagement in the workplace.

Each year, the team at Microsoft WorkLab generates a report called the “Work Trends Index.” This annual survey of over 20,000 knowledge workers globally illuminates challenges and opportunities as companies pursue strategies to harness the power of AI in the enterprise.

A few data points from past surveys that are particularly resonant:

Aligned to these insights, digital leaders need to consider three things:

Enterprise AI solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot are optimized to help employees discover enterprise knowledge that was previously hidden in various SharePoint libraries, Teams Channels, and OneDrive for business repositories. Copilot can reason across your entire Microsoft 365 estate instantly to help employees find the information, answers, and connections needed to quickly address business opportunities and challenges.

While employees are starting to actively use generative AI at work, if they don’t have access to a solution that’s grounded and secured in your enterprise data, your confidential or proprietary data could be at risk. This is especially true when you consider that most employees are new to this and may not have the training or knowledge necessary to navigate the risks of AI in the enterprise.

Burned out employees are not engaged employees. AI-powered solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot make it easy for employees to reason across their Outlook inbox, Teams Channels and Groups, Viva Engage posts and more, to quickly identify the information that’s important to them. While the volume of activity in the enterprise will likely only increase, the ability to manage information more effectively is now in the hands of employees – especially those who are trained to effectively harness AI.

How has Microsoft adapted?

Times of change demand strong vision and action, and Microsoft emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever. Reflecting on that success, Microsoft Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Coleman enumerated several reasons. Among them:

• A strong corporate culture that helped to counteract chaos.
• A focus on management excellence.
• An inclusive work environment that enables all employees to thrive.
• And critically—a recognition that the digital employee experience is as important as the in-person experience.

Prior to the pandemic, the digital employee experience wouldn’t have been high on the list of key enablers for many executives. After witnessing the power and flexibility of our digital tools during the pandemic to keep our employees connected, productive, and thriving, it became clear to us that a modernized digital employee experience had to become a key tenet of our workplace strategy.

Formula for success

Right as we found our footing post-pandemic, the next big disruptor landed: generative AI and our industry leading productivity tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. The digital employee experience, enhanced by the power of AI, is now more important than ever. As we in the company’s IT organization look to the next decade of employee productivity and enterprise growth, our formula for success is simple:

1. Create a physical and digital environment where our employees are engaged, energized, empowered, and invested in their work.
2. Continue to give our employees the very best productivity tools in the world, powered by Microsoft 365 and made exponentially more powerful by AI-powered tools like Copilot.
3. Combining these forces leads to facilitate a high-performance work culture, enabling us to achieve sustainable business outcomes while generating a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Your company can use the same formula to achieve the same competitive advantage. At Microsoft, we make that vision real by focusing on the three critical dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces and facilities, and culture.

Focusing on our employee experience

Digital capabilities

We keep employees productive and out environment safe and secure, no matter where employees are or how they connect. AI is defragmenting the employee experience.

Physical spaces

We partner with Global Workplace Services to imagine & deploy capabilities that support an inclusive approach to productivity.

Culture

A strong partnership with HR ensures our digital employee experience enables our aspirational culture, regardless of an employee’s physical location.

Digital capabilities

In Microsoft Digital, our mission is to power, protect and transform the digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. Simplifying the employee experience has long been a goal of our team. We want Microsoft employees to be the most engaged, efficient, and productive in the industry.

Our vision is to revolutionize the employee experience at Microsoft, using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to “defragment” the many tools, websites, and applications Microsoft employees need to interact with to complete their jobs. By using Copilot as our “UI for AI”, Microsoft Digital is using Copilot to:

• Providing contextual support in the flow of work.
• Reducing the number of sites and apps an employee must remember.
• Enabling seamless collaboration globally.

In addition to AI, our team here in Microsoft Digital continues to accelerate collaboration through enhancements to Microsoft Teams and Teams Rooms, enables employee innovation with the Power Platform, and delivers a world-class employee experience powered by Microsoft Viva. Read on to learn how.

Accelerating productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to turn your employees’ words into some of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet—all within the flow of work. It works alongside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to provide real-time intelligent assistance.

At Microsoft, we began deploying Copilot to our own employees back in November of 2023, and by March of 2024 all our employees and vendors globally had access, making Microsoft the first enterprise to deploy Copilot at global enterprise scale.

A key lesson we’ve learned is that enterprise AI is a significant cultural and technological change that shouldn’t be underestimated. Consider that knowledge workers have been trained to interact with systems and data using the graphical user interface for over 40 years. The magic of Copilot is that it upends that human-computer interaction paradigm, bringing the power of natural language interaction to employees to find information or answers, to augment their creativity, or to accelerate workflows.

But those skills are new for nearly every employee on the planet, which is why you need to focus on skilling and reinforcement to help employees to maximize the potential value of generative AI in the enterprise. Help your employees to jumpstart their skilling journey by carefully selecting training paths—both virtual and instructor-led—to accelerate their productivity journey with Copilot. Microsoft offers some great free training programs to help your employees build the skills necessary to maximize the value of Copilot. 

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a six-step process for unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot based on these lessons that you can apply in your own enterprise. Being deliberate as you deploy, understanding employee pain points, measuring the before and after, and focusing on the developing of AI skills, you can accelerate and prove the value of Copilot in your environment, as well as recapture value so you can pursue new business opportunities or challenges.

{Read our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.}

Empowering our employees with agents and Copilot Studio

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

For example, our Employee Self-Service (ESS) agents have already demonstrated the power of agents to simplify and improve the employee experience at Microsoft.

• Using ESS, employees were 36% more likely to solve their own IT support issues.
• Similarly, employees were 42% more likely to answer their own HR questions.
• Employees were 18% more satisfied using ESS to address their issues than traditional support methods.

As we continue our journey with AI-powered agents, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Phases of maturity

Each step on our agentic journey marks a significant leap forward in capability, with both opportunities and risks for our leaders.

Employee learning and skilling are key to unlocking the value in each phase of agentic maturity.  

• Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-ready AI-powered like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. Becoming accustomed to AI in the enterprise and learning how to prompt AI for effective results is the key to unlocking value in later phases.
• Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
• Knowledge and actions. Powered by built-in connectors in Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience.
• Workflow reinvention. Human-led, agent operated teams perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end workflows, enabling employees to focus on the highest value work while agents take care of repetitive tasks.

Emerging industry standards and open protocols including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, and NLWeb are enabling an agentic powered future where human-led, agent operated teams will take employee productivity to new heights.

We’re making progress on each type of agent here at Microsoft:

• Microsoft was the first company in the world to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale. Every employee at Microsoft now has an AI-powered assistant to enhance their productivity.
• Every employee at Microsoft also has the tools and support to build simple Retrieval agents that are trained using knowledge stored in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive for Business.
• Our engineering teams are using Copilot Studio to create Agents that can retrieve information then act on it, using built-in connectors in Copilot Studio to enable actions.
• And with the advent of new industry protocols, we’re just beginning to enable fully autonomous end-to-end workflows powered by Agents.

{Learn how we’re governing our use of agents at Microsoft.}

AI-powered meetings with Microsoft Teams

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. 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.

{Check out our Microsoft Teams Rooms meeting guide.}

Empowering our citizen developers

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have many more employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to business 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 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 infographic—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 accelerate digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

Microsoft Power BI

A collection of software services, apps and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Microsoft Power Apps

A suite of apps, services, and connectors that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

With Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365. or SQL Server)

Microsoft Power Automate

Enables you to automate business processes quickly and easily, with support for over 500 data sources or using any publicly available API.

Microsoft Virtual Agents

Lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

{Learn how we’re empowering our employees with the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft.}

Physical spaces and facilities

Having the best digital experiences means very little if you don’t have the right physical space or hardware to maximize potential for your employees to collaborate when they’re in the office.

For us, Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) and our Microsoft Digital team represent the company’s “front door.” 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.

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. A few examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences include:

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility. 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, find a parking spot, or book a conference room or workspace.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft.

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 our employee experience. By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation for innovation that will help our employees thrive.

{Learn how we’re accelerating our global real estate transformation.}

Culture

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he made lasting and powerful changes to our company culture. Our early culture was extremely competitive, and people often succeeded by showcasing their own individual work and achievements. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has undergone significant change, starting at the top. He instilled in us that, to stay relevant, we needed to find the courage to change our culture and embrace a growth mindset.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture and it all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Attributes of our aspirational culture include:

• Embracing learning and curiosity. Instead of being “know-it-alls” we need to be “learn-it-alls.”
• Trying new things and not being afraid to fail.
• Obsessing over what matters to our customers.
• Being diverse and inclusive in everything we do.
• Operating as “One Microsoft”.
• Making a difference in the lives of each other, our customers, and the world around us.

Satya made it clear that our aspire-to culture was key to our future business success, and the ensuing decade was one of the most successful in the history of Microsoft.

But how do you bring culture to life digitally, especially in a global company that has embraced flexible work? The answer was to build an employee experience platform that allowed our employees to live our culture, no matter where they were in the world.

Supercharging our culture with Microsoft Viva

The Microsoft Viva Suite delivers an integrated employee experience platform that empowers people and teams to thrive by bringing together communications, knowledge, learning, goals, and insights directly into the flow of work. Built on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Viva helps organizations foster a culture of engagement and performance by providing personalized, data-driven experiences that support employee well-being, growth, and productivity. Viva enables leaders to align business outcomes with employee success, making it a strategic investment in both people and performance.

The various modules and capabilities in the Viva Suite enable Microsoft employees to experience and participate in our culture digitally. Each module supports different dimensions of Microsoft’s “aspire-to” culture, with the Viva Suite collectively serving as the underpinning of our shift to growth mindset.

The Viva Suite is comprised of numerous modules, including:

Viva Connections

Delivers a secure, customizable gateway to internal communications and resources, seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Teams to enhance employee engagement without adding new infrastructure.

Viva Insights

Provides privacy-protected, data-driven insights that help improve productivity and well-being while ensuring compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

Viva Learning

Centralizes learning content from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and third-party providers into Teams, simplifying deployment and governance of upskilling initiatives.

Viva Amplify

Empowers corporate communicators to manage multi-channel campaigns with analytics and targeting, all within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.

Viva Engage

Fosters community and connection through social experiences in Teams, with enterprise-grade compliance and identity management built in.

Viva Pulse

Enables managers to gather real-time team feedback securely, with built-in templates and analytics that respect data privacy and organizational policies.

Each of these tools helps to bring our culture to life while simultaneously providing our employees with best-in-class, AI-enhanced tools that foster and enhance collaboration in the enterprise.

{Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.}

Adopting new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change managementto ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve learned that even the most useful, intuitive technologies will not see widespread adoption and usage without a deliberate and sustained change management effort.

Our Microsoft Digital organization 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 learned that effective change management requires careful planning, and localized change efforts are crucial to maximizing the impact of our digital investments. Our change management efforts take inspiration from the Microsoft 365 Adoption Framework as well as Prosci’s ADKAR model, which progresses through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

As you’re considering your approach to change in this era of AI and flexible work, we suggest reviewing our Copilot deployment and adoption guide, which details our learnings in four chapters with useful checklists and best practices you can apply in your own enterprise. Microsoft also publishes 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 AI—or any other digital investment.

{Learn how we’re driving the future of work: How we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.}

Thriving in an AI-powered world

The world of work has changed dramatically with the advent of flexible work and generative AI.

Flexible 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 oceans apart.

Copilot and agentic AI have the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness like never before. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition. Focus on skilling and learning to ensure your employees are getting value from AI-powered tools.

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 in Microsoft Digital as we continue to define the future of work, powered by AI.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming your employee experience:

• Focusing on the three critical elements of your employee experience—digital capabilities, facilities, and organizational culture—will enable your enterprise to thrive.
• Empowering “citizen developers” with the Microsoft Power Platform can supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Ensuring effective change management will accelerate value from your investments in AI-powered digital transformation.
• Automating tasks with agents will unlock employee productivity, allowing you to expand operations and take on new challenges.

Try it out

• Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot and to create your own agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how we’re digitally transforming Microsoft.
• Check out five key things we learned serving as the company’s IT organization for 50 years.
• Find out more about our Zero Trust security model.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post The future of work is here: Transforming our employee experience with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In a global organization, it’s easy for crucial communications to miss the mark as they disperse across international teams.

Communications from core corporate teams like Security, HR, or Employee Listening might suffer from fragmentation and poor localization. Employees might tune out centralized messaging due to the volume of campaigns. And local communicators might feel overburdened by the sheer volume of information and resources they need to disseminate.

Within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, our Western European team has developed a process for closing these communication gaps.

Microsoft Viva Amplify is the tool that enables their work.

Global communications, local challenges

Global enterprises aren’t monoliths. Microsoft encompasses several major regions around the world, and many of those regions are home to diverse cultures and languages, each with specific needs.

Western Europe is a perfect example. It comprises over 15,000 Microsoft employees spanning 11 different countries. As a result of this wide and varied workforce, our Microsoft Digital team in the region was facing several communications challenges:

• Individual countries and regions had different communications structures based on local policies. For example, the team could communicate directly with Microsoft employees in one country but had to route messaging through the PR lead in another.
• With different corporate teams communicating at scale, there was too much noise in the ecosystem, and that clashed with a cultural preference for local communications from sources close to the recipients.
• Because of the specific workplace culture in certain EU locations, centralized communicators couldn’t even access local channels.

“Our task was to find the right medium to access our audience while avoiding the need to write everything from scratch,” says Allan Hvass, director of Employee Experience for Microsoft Digital in Western Europe. “The right carrier for your message is someone who can relate to the audience they’re trying to reach.”

After investigating different approaches to solving these challenges, the team landed on a process for receiving and distributing centralized communications and deploying them through more local channels. Thanks to its simplicity and multi-channel flexibility, they chose Microsoft Viva Amplify as the engine behind their efforts.

“In a word, Viva Amplify is easy,” says Nicola Pettinato, senior IT manager with Microsoft Digital. “It helps you create communications in the right format for the platform you want, in the context that works for your users.”

Robust processes supported by the right tools

The team developed a process that would channel centralized communications from global Microsoft Digital functions to the Western European team and from there to employees. That process encompasses three distinct elements:

• An editorial structure managed in Microsoft Loop
• A publishing process handled by Microsoft Viva Amplify
• Communication channels employees use in their day-to-day work, primarily Microsoft Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Outlook

Loop is the foundation of the process. That’s where the Western Europe team houses their editorial calendar. It takes the form of a table with an entry for each post, including fields for attributes like the topic and intended platform, the date of the communication, its owner, and its progress through the publishing process.

The Loop page also includes a detailed brief with instructions that walk centralized communications teams through the steps for sharing their content.

“Within Microsoft Digital, we have a dedicated communications team that creates all kinds of content in a promotional calendar, which we distribute to different channels around the world,” says Sandra Hausfelder, Adoption and Insights lead for Microsoft Digital. “Western Europe is just one consumer for this content, and we collaborate closely to make sure we’re aligning our formatting with the needs of their editorial calendar.”

Delivering that content involves a templatized Microsoft PowerPoint deck featuring all the relevant information, including text, branding, intended channel, and directions for publishing. From there, the Western Europe team inputs that content into their calendar at the regular cadence they’ve established.

Once the content is in place, the team initiates a workflow that pulls in key roles for testing, approving, and publishing posts. That’s where Viva Amplify comes into play.

The team ports the content over to Viva Amplify as part of a persistent evergreen campaign they call Digital Insider. It publishes between one and three Viva Engage posts a week, each on a single topic.

The campaign also flights more high-impact announcements once a month across both Viva Engage and Outlook. Announcements function as newsletters that contain content from other posts throughout the month and any other high-value messaging.

To facilitate communications on Viva Engage, the team has created a Digital Insider channel that includes everyone in the Western European subsidiaries of Microsoft. That makes it easy for more local IT managers and business program managers in individual countries to tailor and share the most relevant content with their colleagues—further emphasizing local connections.

They also publish the content to an internal Microsoft Teams channel to facilitate granular sharing by local leaders.

“The process we’ve created balances between centralized efforts and a local-only approach,” Hvass says. “It encapsulates the global communications that need to go out to all employees and gives people the opportunity to push locally as well.”

The flexibility and efficiency of Viva Amplify make it an ideal tool for this kind of work. It automatically formats content for different communications platforms like Viva Engage, Teams, and Outlook, making multi-channel messaging very efficient. Metrics are also highly accessible, so the team can easily understand how effectively their campaigns are landing.

A regional conduit for global communications

Digital Insider messages cover all different aspects of central Microsoft Digital communications. They include Copilot tips to help drive AI adoption, IT info hours that serve as guidance sessions for employees, and content that encapsulates security, adoption, technology updates, and more.

“Our remit is to represent Microsoft Digital, which is a worldwide organization,” Hvass says. “We’re here to make global, centralized IT content new and relevant for our audience.”

The benefits work both ways. They allow IT leaders in Western Europe to control communications in their region and support the employees they serve while making sure centralized messaging gets the maximum possible visibility.

Hvass and Pettinato’s work supports communications initiatives from several different teams.

Microsoft Digital communications teams and initiatives

Here are a few communicators from our Microsoft Digital organization who are using Viva Amplify to get localized messaging to our employees in Western Europe. 

Microsoft Places

Jason McWreath is the director and global adoption lead for Microsoft Places, an AI-powered solution that helps teams optimize their workspaces. His work centers on empowering the hybrid workplace by helping our employees find places where they can collaborate effectively in a mixed digital environment through conference spaces, reserving hotdesks, and more. Because much of their work involves local amenities, the experience will vary region by region. That demands highly tailored communication in every region where these solutions come online.

McWreath’s adoption work for this solution has focused on local pilot projects and tapping into the internal Microsoft Elite program to engage our most industrious employees for testing, feedback, and grassroots peer-to-peer enablement. Other apps are the typical entry-point for Microsoft Places, so the team has largely based its communications on the capabilities of the tool and how they can improve employees’ experience in the workplace.

Because of the sensitivity around “return-to-office” mandates versus enabling hybrid work, the Microsoft Places team worked closely with Microsoft Digital in Western Europe to ensure they got the messaging right. Folding local leaders and stakeholders into the process through Hvass and Pettinato’s process also helped accommodate employees’ preference for messaging from local sources.

As a result of these careful and concerted efforts, Microsoft Places usage skyrocketed in the team’s target regions, including Western Europe.

“If we cast too broad of a net, it’s going to encourage people to find gaps and question the motives for change. Amplify has helped us be specific, target communications more narrowly, and help folks find value within a fairly complicated broader context.”

-Jason McWreath, director and area capability lead, Emerging Markets, Microsoft Digital

Adoption and Insights

Sandra Hausfelder, global Adoption and Insights lead for Microsoft Digital, is responsible for supporting several regions without conducting in-person engagements. That leads to a number of challenges, including the difficulty of reaching people who don’t have specific ties to her team, excessive noise from overflowing Outlook inboxes or too many Teams notifications, and competing priorities. Finally, the more diverse a region is, the more specific communications should be.

Currently, the team is promoting Copilot Expo, a three-week, 75-session learning summit for Microsoft employees. The goal of their communications is to encourage sign-ups, and that requires publication across different channels like Outlook, SharePoint, and especially Viva Engage, thanks to its community benefits and potential for virality. Multi-channel posting is an easy task for Viva Amplify.

Beyond the normal process for engaging Microsoft Digital in Western Europe, Hausfelder’s team has a Power App they call Activity Tracker, which adds a layer to Viva Amplify’s out-of-the-box analytics to help them track performance across channels and deliver better insights into the efficacy of their communications.

“Viva Amplify is an enabler for using other channels effectively. It provides a well of content that more local communicators can use to push to their communities.”

-Sandra Hausfelder, Global Adoption and Insights lead, Microsoft Digital

Change Management and Readiness

Lisa Fryc, director of Employee Change Management and Readiness for Microsoft Digital, covers the security portfolio for changes to how employees interact with their business environment. That could mean devices, authentication, policy changes, access to enterprise resources, or any number of other areas.

Fryc’s team runs a monthly employee news flash that focuses on what’s happening in the Microsoft security landscape. It usually features four or five topics per month that include blurbs, branding, and quick links, all designed for deployment to tools employees use in their day-to-day work: Outlook, Viva Engage, and SharePoint. By aligning these communications with the format the Western Europe team requires, they give the local team the power to adapt and deploy central communications in the way that makes the most sense to their audience.

Currently, the team is running an awareness and adoption campaign for phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (PRMFA) on over 1.5 million devices. The team published centralized adoption communications designed to increase adoption and enablement paired with a more localized push in Western Europe to maximize impact. The campaign contributed to keeping employee satisfaction steady while avoiding an influx of helpdesk tickets over the issue.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all comms strategy. You have to look at the culture in the regions you’re trying to reach. The Western Europe team does a fantastic job of taking global messaging and making it relevant to their audience.”

-Lisa Fryc, director of Employee Change Management and Readiness, Microsoft Digital

Lessons learned from using Viva Amplify

As the Western Europe team’s editorial practices and usage of Microsoft Viva Amplify have matured, we’ve learned some important lessons. The first is that these tools aren’t just for communications professionals.

“No one in our group was an expert in Viva Amplify, but we learned on our own,” Pettinato says. “Now I can do something in 30 minutes that used to take me two or three hours, and I have far better ways to measure success.”

It isn’t just about ease of use for IT communicators. It’s also about more successful communications.

For announcements across Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Viva Engage, the team’s benchmark for success was a 50% open rate. Now, they typically see 60% within two days.

For posts that only push to Viva Engage, a typical view rate falls around 1%. For Western Europe’s Digital Insider community, the view rate has increased to an average of 2–3%, even reaching 8–10% for key posts. Escalating performance may be the result of easier republishing or redirection by downstream receivers who reinforce communications for their local audiences.

The Western Europe team attains this success in part through core best practices they’ve built over time:

• As part of the editorial process, the team established a test campaign on Viva Amplify in addition to the main Digital Insider campaign they use to push communications to employees. That provides a venue for pre-approval and reviews of published posts just to make sure everything appears the way it should.
• A well-established scheduling cadence makes populating the editorial calendar much easier. The team can select different types of content for different schedule slots on a recurring basis while maintaining enough flexibility to swap out posts when needed.
• The team is very intentional about pinning posts on Viva Engage, which boosts the performance of key posts and solidifies their messaging. Typically, the team will swap pinned posts at least once a week to keep things fresh.
• Using these channels doesn’t just drive awareness. It also unlocks discoverability for people to find and consume content on important topics. Viva Engage is especially useful for building a community-driven knowledge base, a key feature during adoption efforts that can last for years.

The lessons we’ve learned from pioneering this approach in Western Europe provide a helpful example for communicators. The strategy demonstrates how effective regional channels managed through Viva Amplify can be for distributing global communications.

“With communications, there’s more than top-down and bottom-up,” Hvass says. “We’ve found the middle way where we can fulfill our remit to represent the worldwide Microsoft Digital organization while serving the people in our communities who need our support and guidance.”

These key takeaways can help you start using Viva Amplify for communications at your organization:

• Attention spans are measured in seconds. Keep your messages concise and to the point. Otherwise, people get lost.
• Consider the culture. Pay attention to how you communicate and keep the language as simple and free of culture-bound expressions as possible.
• Trust the people on the ground. It’s important for central communications teams to construct their content packages in a format that provides the essential information local teams need and rely on them to convey that information to their region in a way that works for them.
• Find the influencers. If you’re a member of a regional team, cultivate local champions who promote and share content among their peers. Don’t be afraid to feed them content intentionally.
• Embrace diversity. Understand each of the local groups you’re targeting and what they need. That includes a clear understanding of the information you’re presenting and the value it provides for your audience.

Want to see how Microsoft Viva Amplify can boost communications in your organization? Try it free today.

• Explore the ways we’re getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify.
• See how Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft.
• Learn from our experience of deploying Microsoft Viva Engage.  

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

The post Connecting with regional employees more effectively at Microsoft with Viva Amplify appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

As the company’s IT organization, we at Microsoft Digital realized that advanced AI was going to create opportunities for our employees to increase their reach and impact. We knew we needed to move quickly to help them get ready for the moment.

Our response?

We assembled an ambitious data and AI curriculum through Microsoft Viva Learning that draws from Microsoft Learn and other content sources. This curriculum is now empowering our employees with the skills they need to harness these tools.

It’s all part of our approach to infusing AI into everything we do to support the company. The more successful we are in Microsoft Digital, the better our team can deploy our new AI technologies to the rest of our colleagues across the organization.

“We take a holistic approach. It’s not just about winning with technology—it’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.”

Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management, Microsoft Digital

Infusing AI into Microsoft through a learn-it-all culture

Fully unleashing AI across Microsoft is a bold aspiration that will require plenty of guidance and support from our Microsoft Digital team. It’s both a technology and a people challenge that requires us to have more than IT knowledge to deliver.

“We take a holistic approach,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of product management in Microsoft Digital. “It’s not just about winning with technology—it’s about supporting the community and doing things the right way.”

With our learn-it-all culture and Microsoft Viva Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other content sources at our disposal, a progressive curriculum was the natural choice for upskilling our technical professionals. Microsoft Viva Learning connects content from our organization’s internal learning libraries and third-party learning management systems.

As a result, it makes it easy for our team to develop learning paths with content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and external providers like Pearson.

“As a tech company, we’re always encountering new concepts and new technologies,” says Miguel Uribe, principal product manager lead for Employee Experience Insights in Microsoft Digital. “It’s part of our culture to absorb technology and consume concepts very quickly, and AI is just the latest example.”

Building meaningful AI certifications for Microsoft employees

Our AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE)—the Microsoft Digital team tasked with designing and championing how our organization uses AI—is at the forefront of these efforts. They’re working to standardize how we leverage AI internally.

[Read our story on our CoE here: The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital is responding with an AI Center of Excellence.]

The AI CoE operates according to the principles of AI 4 ALL: Accelerate, learn, and land.

Strategy

Work with product and feature teams to determine what we want to achieve with AI, define business goals, and prioritize the most important implementations and investments.

Architecture

Enable infrastructure, data, services, security, privacy, scalability, accessibility, and interoperability for all AI use cases.

Roadmap

Build and manage implementation plans for AI projects, including tools, technologies, responsibilities, targets, and performance measurement.

Culture

Foster collaboration, innovation, education, and responsible AI among stakeholders.

Responsible AI

Responsible AI serves as the foundation for all our AI-powered solutions and products. The AI CoE prioritizes the company’s responsible AI principles for our AI projects: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusion, transparency, and accountability.

“Our first priority is creating a common understanding and language around these fairly new topics,” says Humberto Arias, senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The technology changes constantly, so you need to learn continually to keep up.”

Fortunately, enterprising employees within Microsoft have been laying the groundwork for this moment for years. Our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) community had been working on their own time to deepen their knowledge through research and independent certifications.

When generative AI took off at the start of 2023, that community began partnering with the AI CoE and got serious about empowerment. They brought their knowledge. The AI CoE brought their organizational leadership.

“No other organization within Microsoft can provide such a clear picture of what you need for upskilling,” says Urvi Sengar, an AI/ML senior software engineer in Microsoft Digital. “Only our IT organization is functionally diverse enough.”

Their work is a testament to the power of trusting your technology champions to lead change.

“So much is changing that we don’t want to stop at just one static certification. We want to keep the learning going, along with everything new and relevant, so we can take this community forward.”

Urvi Sengar, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital

In previous years, Sengar and her AI/ML community colleagues had already built a learning path focused on Azure AI Fundamentals. They relaunched the course in 2023 to represent the core of our AI certifications.

From there, a diverse group of technical and employee experience professionals collaborated to assemble, create, and structure a series of learning paths to launch our Microsoft Digital employees into the next level of AI expertise. That’s where Microsoft Viva Learning really shines. The platform makes it easy to curate our AI content actively as the technology landscape evolves.

“So much is changing that we don’t want to stop at just one static certification,” Sengar says. “We want to keep the learning going, along with everything new and relevant, so we can take this community forward.”

The result is a granular, multidisciplinary curriculum that gets Microsoft Digital employees leveled up not just to AI literacy, but to AI proficiency.

Innovative AI certifications designed for employee success

Our AI and Data Learning curriculum divides into three distinct learning paths: basic, intermediate, and advanced.

• AI Learning Basic gives beginners a ground-level, conceptual understanding of the technology. It builds familiarity with generative AI and no-code AI tools, as well as more theoretical frameworks and topics like the responsible AI principles, AI ethics, and how to align AI projects with our values.
• AI Learning Intermediate is where things get more functional. Here, employees learn about natural language processing and prompt engineering, as well as several specific AI tools, including ChatGPT, AI Builder in Power Automate, Semantic Kernel (for building AI-based apps), Azure OpenAI generative models, and more.
• AI Learning Advanced goes from function to innovation. This is where employees can dive deeper into working with large language models (LLMs), training neural networks, self-supervised machine learning, and other skills that will help them develop more advanced solutions and automations. Examples include units on Advanced Natural Language Processing with Python and UX for AI.

When employees complete each learning path, they receive a sharable badge. We used Credly, a digital credentialing solution created by Pearson, to design and manage those badges. We can then distribute them to our employees through Credly’s integration with Microsoft Viva Learning.

Microsoft Digital AI certification levels

Curating the curriculum is only one part of the AI CoE’s job. It’s also crucial to promote and socialize these learning opportunities internally. The wider Microsoft Viva employee experience suite takes care of that.

We actively socialize the AI certifications through Microsoft Viva Engage, our employee communication platform, but top-down promotion is only one component of their success. Microsoft Digital employees often share their certifications via LinkedIn or through Viva Engage. As a result, there’s an element of virality that leads even more of our employees to take these courses—even outside Microsoft Digital.

“People are observing the work we do and looking for ways to bring it into their organizations. Even external customers are asking how they can set up their own centers of excellence and what to prioritize.”

Nitul Pancholi, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our teams are clearly excited about their success. The share rate for AI Learning badges is 67 percent, well above Credly’s average of 47 percent.

Beyond Microsoft Digital, lines of business across Microsoft are adapting these certifications for their own needs.

“People are observing the work we do and looking for ways to bring it into their organizations,” says Nitul Pancholi, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, who leads the AI CoE’s culture pillar. “Even external customers are asking how they can set up their own centers of excellence and what to prioritize.”

Freshly empowered AI practitioners, ready for the future

We’re still at the beginning of our internal AI adoption journey. But by raising the baseline of AI knowledge, these certifications ensure our technical professionals are ready to lead the rest of our organization.

“That’s one of the super cool things about Microsoft,” MacDonald says. “We have the playground at our fingertips, and we have the autonomy and opportunity to dream up whatever we want.”

The advent of advanced AI supported by thoughtful empowerment initiatives will only amplify our employees’ ability to experiment with emerging technologies. We’re confident that developing our own AI curriculum will help us work our way into a virtuous cycle of more learning, more creativity, and more business innovation.

Customers with access to Microsoft Viva Learning can start assembling their own AI curriculum, drawing from Microsoft Learn content, their own educational materials, and external providers and learning management systems. By unlocking AI for employees through education, organizations will be better positioned to ride the wave of the next digital revolution.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to consider as you think about launching an AI curriculum at your company:

• Leverage your integrations with tools like Microsoft Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning.
• Actively curate your courses to keep your curriculum up to date.
• Busy schedules get in the way: Build time for learning into your employees’ days, then support them with curriculum.
• Leverage executive sponsorship, employee champions, and the social aspects of learning.
• Incentivize and recognize progress through gamification, friendly competition, badges, and testimonials.
• Build a diverse enablement team from across different disciplines, seniorities, and technical backgrounds.
• Think about how to segment learners by level of expertise and learning style, then tailor the learning to those segments.

Try it out

Start building your own AI curriculum with Microsoft Viva Learning.

Related links

• Learn how we’re managing our response to the AI revolution internally at Microsoft with an AI Center of Excellence.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover how Microsoft cultivates a culture of learning with Viva Learning.
• Explore creating learn-it-alls at Microsoft with Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning Hub.
• Get more details about our AI Center of Excellence.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Embracing emerging technology at Microsoft with new AI certifications appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

• Microsoft Viva Engage: A powerful business transformation tool
• Chapter 1: Administration, access, and governance
• Chapter 2: Community management and content moderation
• Chapter 3: Learning from Microsoft success stories

Microsoft Viva Engage: A powerful business transformation tool

Leading change through community engagement

Microsoft Viva Engage connects employees with their leaders and each other. It gives leaders a powerful way to engage employees in two-way dialog to foster alignment of vision and strong organizational culture. It also helps people create meaningful relationships by building community, sharing their experiences, participating in discussions, and asking questions.

By creating a space where all of your employees can seek help, participate in conversations, and connect with peers and leaders, Viva Engage emulates the ways people connect through social media channels in their personal lives. The app can serve many different functions across an organization, from executive communications to crowd-sourced troubleshooting. And because Viva Engage integrates with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, people can participate no matter their preferences and style for getting work done. Through our widespread implementation of Viva Engage across Microsoft, we’ve discovered that those capabilities are especially useful for business transformation.

Viva Engage makes coordinated communication and engaged adoption possible like never before, and we’re continuing to see results internally across the company.

1. How to Improve Employee Engagement in the Workplace – Gallup
2. How Glint enriches the Microsoft Viva experience | Microsoft Community Hub

A blueprint for using Viva Engage effectively

Meaningful Viva Engage adoption won’t happen by accident. Like any tool, you need strategy and alignment across multiple teams to use it effectively.

Your organization will benefit from adopting the following:

• A goal and common purpose for the platform across your organization  
• A consistent model for your different types of communities
• Unlocking the breadth, transparency, and employee agency the platform empowers
• Getting leaders on board and securing their participation
• Evolving from mono-directional to networked communications
• Measuring your reach and audience participation
• Automating your data and analytics capabilities and the insights they deliver
• Integrating AI to help craft communications based on audience insights

This guide shares how Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, collaborated with a diverse team of stakeholders to put administrative policies and practices in place for Viva Engage while establishing best practices for community management and moderation.

It also shares stories of three of our successful—but very different—communities of practice and how they use the app effectively. Throughout the guide, you can follow our thought processes, benefit from the lessons we’ve learned, and access resources and checklists that will guide your own work.

“We operate within a culture of ‘how,’” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms. “How do we foster the confidence to speak and share with integrity and accountability? How do we build connections while ensuring safety? Viva Engage gives us the power to realize these goals as a community.”

Read on to start your Viva Engage journey and add a powerful community building and business transformation solution to your toolkit.

{Download our Viva Engage at Microsoft readiness guide.}

Chapter 1: Administration, access, and governance

Laying an administrative foundation for success

With the release of Viva Engage in 2022 as a successor to Yammer, we had a powerful opportunity to invigorate employee communities like never before. The massive growth of hybrid work amplified those possibilities. But making it happen effectively demanded real foresight and collaboration with the teams who actively use the tool in their work.

Viva Engage is a deeply human tool. It’s our role in Microsoft Digital to ensure that it serves our employees to its fullest potential.

Setting your organization up for successful engagement: Configuring Viva Engage for effective communities

At Microsoft, implementing Viva Engage involved working closely with our communications and employee experience leaders, in addition to our product team. Much of that effort centered around understanding our internal communities’ needs and primary modes of engagement, allocating responsibility for management, and making decisions around how the app should work. It also required extensive consultation with the community leaders responsible for employee enablement and change management.

Designing our approach to Viva Engage

We took special care to ask questions that would identify how users and communities would benefit most from the app:

• Would they take a more peer-centered or leadership-driven approach?
• Is a community’s engagement more event-based or asynchronous?
• Do campaigns need to reach the entire company, specific organizations, or narrow groups? How should those different communities function?
• Are users most interested in connecting with leaders, finding answers, exploring topics, or sharing expertise?

Thinking through each of these questions informs the tone, participation goals, and management and moderation requirements for a community.

Community leaders have a substantial toolkit of capabilities, including storyline posts, campaigns, ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions, live and broadcast events, and more at their disposal. Each has an important role, but laying the groundwork for effective usage requires giving informed leaders and administrators the power to manage the features that support their work.

In addition to these capabilities, several features enable administrators to make foundational decisions about the environments where communities can thrive:

• Managing community membership
• Implementing and managing campaigns
• Creating specialized accounts for leadership and communicators
• Allowing organizationally led vs employee-led communities

Decisions around communities will naturally evolve over time. What’s important at the outset is identifying who’s the best fit for making these kinds of decisions for different communities.

Internally, we share responsibility for these capabilities between Microsoft Digital and our internal business leaders and communicators. Identifying who would lead a community and what level of control they should have was an integral part of establishing our administrative structure for Viva Engage.

The ability of designated Viva Engage leaders to target their specific audiences with storyline announcements enables them to share perspectives and anecdotes in a way that encourages dialog and reveals more about their personality and values. And because storylines are visible to people across the company, leaders model transparency and foster connection across divisions.

Your organizational needs will differ from ours. But what’s most important is that you reflect on how you want to use Viva Engage, then consider how to structure those objectives into your administrative choices.

Pairing administrative features with organizational needs

Working out these relationships and spheres of responsibility is one task. Implementing them is another. Fortunately, features and administrative roles are highly configurable in Viva Engage.

As you implement the tool throughout your organization, these six steps will help you configure Viva Engage to meet your organizational needs and distribute ownership over communities securely and effectively.

The user’s perspective: Global Employee and Executive Communications

Jon Bates is the employee and executive communications lead for Microsoft in Western Europe. He’s part of a team driving executive and organizational communications for 3,000 sales and marketing employees across ten countries, each with its own subsidiary.

Bates is part of a network of communicators that form the Global Employee and Executive Communications (GEEC) team, responsible for reinforcing our company culture and keeping our workforce up to speed. Their Viva Engage community helps them stay connected and tapped into crucial company information. For Bates, it’s a place to consume official content curated by our centralized communications team. It’s also a forum for crowdsourcing information, answers, and best practices while providing insights based on his expertise.

“This community helps turn the cascade of information into conversation,” Bates says. “It helps me explore the stories that matter.”

In information-rich, high-communication roles like Bates’, Viva Engage provides an invaluable direct line to both organizational leaders and his colleagues around the world.

Flexibility is key

As you collaborate with different Viva Engage community leaders, you might find that you need to provide extra guidance about capabilities that promote awareness and participation for members. Different communities will gravitate toward different modes of interaction, so it’s worth providing training material about their options. During this process, your more centralized administrators, employee experience professionals, and communications experts have an important role as guides and consultants to help line of business community managers understand the implications of Viva Engage features.

Onboarding your users

After you’ve established the guidance and structure that make sense for your teams, it’s time to get your communicators, leaders, and users onboard. With appropriate configurations and active, communicative partners to lead your communities, you’ll set your people up for rewarding engagement that supports your organizational goals.

How we did it at Microsoft

Use these assets to guide you our own journey—they represent how we did things here in Microsoft Digital.

• Discover best practices and tips from Microsoft’s own internal adoption of Microsoft Viva. This resource shares tips and tricks we developed while rolling Viva Engage out at Microsoft.
• Read the story of how we drove adoption of Microsoft Viva internally. This blog post shares some of the lessons we learned during our own implementation.

More guidance for you

Here are more assets that we found useful.

• Understand the fundamentals of setting up Viva Engage to build a foundation for appropriate and effective communities.
• Learn how to configure your Viva Engage tenant to ensure your setup meets your employees’ needs.
• Find out how to manage licenses to ensure appropriate access for all relevant employees.
•  Learn how to determine administrative roles to ensure proper control over your Viva Engage communities.

Chapter 2: Community management and content moderation

Creating and leading secure, supportive, effective communities

With the right administrative parameters in place, our communications leaders, community managers, and content moderators have the control that they need to build and maintain engaged, helpful, and secure communities. Grounding our practices in Microsoft’s organizational culture helped us structure those efforts.

To do this work, we relied on our experts in the employee experience and policy space: executive communications and HR professionals.

Matching community to culture: Building Viva Engage communities founded in your culture and vision

Viva Engage is all about fostering community—between peers, between teams and leaders, and across our organization as a whole. When our communications professionals started strategizing for Viva Engage, they formulated three goals.

Communications goals for employee and executive communications

Accomplishing our goals relies on a delicate balance between driving value through connection and protecting our employees from harm. In any space where people communicate, there’s a small risk of disruption, agitation, and lapses in integrity—often occurring accidentally. To avoid those pitfalls, we grounded our Viva Engage strategy in Microsoft’s culture of respect, integrity, and accountability while ensuring that we didn’t stifle communication or engagement.

Community management in an expanding Viva Engage environment

Building a foundation for effective community management relies on understanding what different Viva Engage communities do and how they work. At Microsoft, our executive communications team developed a framework for structuring communities to guide our thinking about who owns the responsibility for posting, management, and moderation.

Community management in Viva Engage

As you think through structuring any Viva Engage community, there are a few key questions to ask yourself:

• What are your goals for this community and how can Viva Engage help you achieve them?
• Who will you include in its membership?
• Who will be responsible for managing this community?
• Who can post and engage?

Owners for every effort, initiative, or community will need to ask themselves these questions to guide their decision-making. Being thoughtful about these issues will ensure the communities they oversee serve both the broader organization’s objectives and more specific line-of-business goals.

Employees will use Viva Engage in the way that seems most organic to them, but these features have been particularly useful for supporting communications and engagement at Microsoft. They’ll be powerful assets as you build out your own Viva Engage strategy.

In more employee-led communities, this can be a largely hands-off process, with peers asking questions, solving problems, and carrying on conversations on their own initiative.

Protecting communities through moderation

Viva Engage offers plenty of creative ways to reach your community. But keeping conversations respectful and appropriate is an important part of making people feel safe enough to share their ideas and opinions.

Our moderation process relies on input from several different organizations within Microsoft, including IT professionals with Microsoft Digital and Viva product engineers, executive and crisis communications specialists, HR, and our legal team. In consultation with these stakeholders, we established policies and practices for effective moderation.

Each of these practices has a role to play in keeping our professional communities safe and respectful.

The user’s perspective: Copilot Champs

Samuel Boulanger is a cross-solution AI lead, but he wears another hat as well. He’s one of our Copilot Champs, a group of early and enthusiastic AI adopters the company has embraced as peer leaders throughout our Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption. They help spread enthusiasm and model creativity for their peers.

There’s no single employee profile, so the champs are a diverse group of professionals working across all disciplines. Viva Engage provides an ideal peer-driven space for sharing inspiration, hosting discussions, and asking questions. The social aspects of the tool are some of the most powerful for Boulanger, especially the ability to tag people into conversations, follow relevant subjects, and conduct live events like the Copilot Champs’ community-wide monthly meetings, where he’s been a featured speaker on more than one occasion.

Boulanger also maintains a YouTube channel dedicated to mastering productivity with AI, and media integration features in Viva Engage make it a perfect place to share his work his peers can easily discover his tips and tricks.

“In an age of fast-paced tech evolution, being able to take advantage of others’ knowledge is crucial for keeping up,” Boulanger says. “Viva Engage is the place I go to connect with subject matter experts.”

If questionable posts do appear, Viva Engage enables several possible actions, all depending on the severity and context of the issue we’re trying to resolve. Community managers and moderators can take several actions:

While Viva Engage is a powerful tool for building community, any forum carries the potential for sowing division, much like social media in the public sphere. In addition to the moderation practices detailed in this guide, it’s important to proactively communicate appropriate usage policies to your employees, always staying sensitive to your company culture, location, and industry. While employees may feel that their right to expression is being impinged, it’s important for them to understand that employers have a prerogative to manage the appropriate use of their corporate resources, and their speech rights as employees may differ from their rights as individuals outside of work. Depending on your company culture, you may want to put policies in place that discourage or even prohibit political discourse or other controversial topics on Viva Engage.

As you’re setting out your own policies for Viva Engage moderation, it will be helpful to align behavioral guidelines with your organization’s values. From there, you can agree on what actions are appropriate in various circumstances and decide who will carry out the actions.

There will always be room for subjectivity and discretion on the part of your community managers and moderators—after all, community engagement is a deeply human practice.

Community management and moderation lessons

How we did it at Microsoft

Use these assets to guide you our own journey—they represent how we did things here in Microsoft Digital.

• See how we’re transforming internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage. This blog post shares the story of how our communications leaders coordinate their efforts across Viva apps.
• Understand the evolution of employee engagement at Microsoft with Viva Engage. This story outlines how Viva Engage is revolutionizing community and connection between employees.

More guidance for you

Here are more assets that we found useful.

• Learn how to manage a community in Viva Engage to ensure a safe and smooth process for employees.
• Create a dynamic group in Viva Engage to automate and simplify community creation.
• Learn from Microsoft insiders about digital safety and moderation in Viva Engage to see how our internal experts keep our employees safe.
• Explore best practices for engaging employees with AMAs and live events to diversify engagement and employee connections.

Chapter 3: Learning from Microsoft success stories

Guiding communities through successful creation and engagement

One of the superpowers of Viva Engage is its ability to connect leaders with employees and peers with peers. At Microsoft, we surveyed our own employees and learned that people appreciate timely communication from leaders on topics that matter to them. Since we transitioned our broad-reaching company communications primarily to Viva Engage, we’ve been hearing that employees prefer the kind of connection they experience with community and storyline conversations.

At Microsoft, there are many kinds of communities that serve diverse purposes and operate in unique ways. Whatever you want your Viva Engage communities to accomplish, you can draw lessons from our experiences with these three teams.

Global employee and executive communications: A new connection for high-impact communicators

The Global Employee and Executive Communications community—affectionately known at Microsoft as GEEC—includes comms leads across the company who are responsible for disseminating information and supporting messaging from senior leadership. This community has existed since 2018, primarily using traditional employee engagement channels like email, intranet sites, and all-hands meetings. The rise of hybrid work coincided with a desire for leaders to find ways to connect more personally at scale with employees. Viva Engage provided an opportunity to connect this cross-company community even more closely, further empower their work, and accelerate leader adoption of the platform.

As highly skilled communications professionals, the GEEC community were in an ideal position to test the new tool internally, build out best practices, and help each other drive company-wide impact. As a result, they’ve left their stamp on much of our overall Viva Engage policy and practice.

When GEEC leadership started exploring Viva Engage, they needed to think through several aspects of the tool:

• The learning and adoption curve
• Incorporating Viva Engage into the larger communication channel portfolio
• Membership management for people entering and exiting roles
• Resource storage and access for teams with different purviews

None of these considerations were difficult to overcome, but they did require thought and planning, especially for the IT professionals responsible for managing access and identity. At the same time, we knew we needed to equip these high-visibility communicators with the skills to use Viva Engage effectively. We accomplished that through a combination of in-depth support from community owners and ample opportunities to consume learning content.

Clear leadership was also essential. For an impactful group like GEEC, it’s not enough to have a purely peer-led effort. Senior comms leaders took special care to align the community’s Viva Engage habits with its goals.

Internal communications on Viva Engage

As you consider using Viva Engage within your own organization, corporate and executive communicators can be one of the most effective groups to lead your adoption. Their communications expertise paired with a knack for effectively reaching audiences make them excellent pioneers in the space.

Our Copilot Champs Community: Supporting adoption by empowering peer leaders

When we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot company-wide in the winter of 2024, we knew this tool represented a generational shift in workplace technology. We also had the benefit of eager early adopters who were quickly building their expertise with AI tools. Copilot adoption leaders saw an opportunity to empower them as peer leaders and created the Copilot Champs Community.

A team like this has several benefits.

Why should I build a Champs Community?

Unlike the GEEC community, which consists entirely of communicators, the Copilot Champs Community represents a broad cross-section of Microsoft employees working across different roles, lines of business, and job disciplines. The common ground is enthusiasm for sharing Copilot innovation. As a result, recruitment and enablement for new members were crucial aspects of launching this community.

To meet this need, the Copilot Champs Community lead developed a process that onboards, educates, and empowers new members while encouraging input.

Getting your new Copilot Champs started

An active onboarding process decreases the risk of a community growing stale while increasing buy-in and community culture. With 5,000 members and counting, the Copilot Champs Community clearly has a winning strategy.

Maintaining a purpose-driven community like this requires active leadership. If you’re intending to foster a team of peer leaders like we’ve done for Copilot, you will need to commit resources to staffing, either through fractional ownership or a full-time community leader. These leaders can help direct people to answers, highlight exciting conversations, tag people in where necessary, and coordinate live events.

We’ve made it easy for network admins and corporate communicators to enable a Viva Engage community specifically built to support adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Find step-by-step guidance for creating a Copilot adoption community in Viva Engage here.

The Microsoft Sales Experience Community: Enabling communities of practice and deep product expertise

Some communities are based around mutual support with a highly specific toolset, skill set, or discipline. Microsoft Sales Experience (MSX) within Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an excellent example.

Microsoft’s sales team is an enormous, highly matrixed organization with many routes of accountability associated with different aspects of MSX. It’s important that our sellers stay up to date with the latest product features and capabilities while having a discipline-specific peer-to-peer support network.

A solution-based community might be the most straightforward to set up in Viva Engage from a membership perspective. For our MSX community, we accomplish that through auto-provisioning. In the simplest terms, everyone on our sales team provisions for MSX gets automatically added to new community that you create.

The user’s perspective: MSX for Microsoft Dynamics 365

Nick Fratello is a Power Platform director at Microsoft, operating as a BizApps specialist for our sales team. As a result, he needs to engage with MSX daily.

His specific purview deals with Power Platform, which releases around 400 enhancements every six months. That’s far too much to keep track of through conventional documentation or communications. The MSX Viva Engage community is a way to lean on fellow employees for technical answers, sales collateral, and support for customer questions.

“As field-based employees, we’re often floating on our independent rafts,” Fratello says. “Viva Engage helps us connect to our tribe and make progress so we can keep Microsoft’s sales engine moving.”

For Fratello, sharing his work within the community is a way to create a digital trail that helps people retrace their steps on problems or processes they’ve solved. Conversations and questions become established knowledge, and that helps the whole community.

Using the MSX Viva Engage community

Community managers augment peer-led engagement to provide even more value. For example, community managers can codify peer support questions and the resulting conversations through Answers in Viva or direct members to relevant support material based on their conversations.

When members share their wins and insights, community managers can highlight and amplify these conversations to give them a wider reach. In turn, a community of practice like this informs organizational leaders about their team’s needs and contributes to better workflows and proficiency.

Learning from our established Viva Engage communities

How we did it at Microsoft

Use these assets to guide you our own journey—they represent how we did things here in Microsoft Digital.

• Unpacking the ways Microsoft employees collaborate on Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage. This blog post showcases the power of community for boosting employee collaboration.
• Driving our Microsoft Viva Goals usage with Microsoft Viva Engage.

More guidance for you

Here are more assets that we found useful.

• Explore the step-by-step process of creating and managing Viva Engage communities to ensure effective setups and avoid rework.
• Understand Viva Engage campaigns and discover ways to boost communications.
• Find out how we’re transforming communications and employee engagement at Microsoft to start enacting these principles at your organization.
• Learn how to collaborate with Copilot in Viva Engage on posts and articles to add AI automation into your community engagement efforts.

Applying Microsoft’s lessons to your own organization

You’ve learned from our Viva Engage initiatives. It’s time to get started on yours.

The impact of engaged and connected employees is hard to overstate. Viva Engage is a powerful vehicle for fulfilling that need by fostering vibrant communities that offer support, provide information, and build organizational culture. By applying the lessons and best practices we’ve acquired while implementing and using Viva Engage at Microsoft, you can accelerate time to value for your business and your employees.

“Viva Engage takes all the energy and innovation at work in our employees and provides a space where their ideas can enrich our wider organization,” says Rajesh Jha, executive vice president of Experiences and Devices at Microsoft. “By thoughtfully and intentionally harnessing people’s passion through community, we make our work environment more vibrant, more engaged, and ultimately more impactful.”

However you choose to move forward, our customer success team is always here to provide support, knowledge, and technical expertise.

If you’re looking for further inspiration for using Viva Engage or other apps in the Viva suite, read stories about how this modern employee engagement platform is making waves at Microsoft.

• Here’s where to go to get started with Viva Engage.
• If you’re an admin, here’s where to go get guidance for managing your Viva Engage instance.

• Click here to download an eBook version of this Viva Engage at Microsoft readiness guide.
• Learn how we’re transforming our employees engagement at work with Viva Engage.
• Find out how we’re driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with our Copilot Champs Community.
• Discover how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.

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

The post Community with purpose: Deploying Viva Engage at Microsoft in three chapters appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When our internal communicators need to get the word out about new Microsoft 365 Copilot features, they turn to Microsoft Viva Amplify, which allows them to do so quickly, across many internal channels at once.

Viva Amplify, with its “write once, publish everywhere” approach, allows our internal communicators to reach employees easily in Microsoft Viva Engage and other distribution channels. It also gives them the ability to monitor the effectiveness of their outreach, so they know how well they’re reaching people in each channel they use.

“People are excited about the ability to create a publication in one place and send it to many channels at once with very limited rework needed,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s internal IT organization. “That they also get rich, consolidated analytics across all of those channels; it really is a powerful one-two punch.”

When the Viva Amplify product team added Viva Engage as a distribution channel internally at Microsoft, it gave communicators from across the company an important tool they were waiting for.

“Many were like, ‘This is cool, but I really want Viva Engage,’” says Sarah Lundy, a senior content program manager on the IT communications team in Microsoft Digital. “I think some were waiting for that key channel because Viva Engage is so key to our communication efforts at Microsoft.”

Communicating with Viva Amplify to Viva Engage

Victoria Martinez and Melissa Cafiero, both senior content program managers in Microsoft Digital, use Viva Engage and Viva Amplify to communicate about our new Microsoft 365 Copilot features they want to share with our employees.

We use Viva Engage from within Viva Amplify all the time for posting Copilot promotional materials, sending helpful tips and links to live trainings,” Martinez says.

This feature, which is also available to external customers, has been well received by communicators across the company.

“Viva Engage users were happy to add Amplify to their toolbox,” Crewdson says. “It’s been very successful.”

Communicating about Copilot with Viva Amplify

If you want to harness the power of Viva Amplify to communicate internally about Copilot, you can take advantage of Martinez and Cafiero’s hard work. They created a pre-built campaign that’s available in Viva Amplify, called the Copilot Deployment Kit. To access it, select the banner in Viva Amplify labeled “Get started quickly with even more pre-built campaigns.”

“Viva Amplify is a key tool for companies looking to land Copilot and get value for the licenses they’ve bought for their employees,” Lundy says. “You can run social campaigns, send launch communications, publish SharePoint training materials—all through Viva Amplify.”

Besides Viva Engage, Viva Amplify has many powerful features that enable communicators to reach more users effectively. With Viva Amplify, communicators can build a single communication to start with, then send it to multiple channels: email, SharePoint, blog posts, Teams, and, of course, Engage.

“We can do it all in Amplify, which makes it really easy and seamless,” Cafiero says. “Also, it promotes consistency and cohesiveness in communications.”

You can customize your communications for each channel by adjusting voice and tone.

“Each channel’s a little different,” Cafiero says. “A blog might be more formal. You can be shorter and snappier on Engage because it’s a social channel.”

Another powerful feature of Viva Amplify is centralized data.

“If a communicator wanted to measure success before Viva Amplify, they would have to go to many different places, including third-party tools,” Crewdson says. “Now you can get consolidated analytics across all those endpoints in a single place, represented in a consistent way.”

The time-saving benefits of Viva Amplify in both creating and tracking communications are significant. Martinez and Cafiero estimate they’ve experienced a savings of 25% in drafting communications, and 50–75% in tracking metrics.

Viva Amplify also enables sharing responsibilities. Multiple people can contribute to a communication and review it, and the people who author the communication don’t have to be the ones to publish it. This feature was helpful to Lundy when a long-scheduled trip conflicted with a release date.

“I was able to leave my coworker with everything ready to go,” Lundy says. “I could prep it all for her and she could publish when she got the word that it was time.”

The future of communicating with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage

Lundy sees Viva Engage as the future of how people will consume information at work. It’s a more social way of communicating, with two-way dialog and opportunities to engage informally and directly with leadership. 

There’s already been an increase in adoption of Viva Amplify since adding Viva Engage, including more people who aren’t professional communicators by job title. For example, program managers are also using it.

“We’re starting to see a hockey-stick shaped uptick in adoption and there’s lots of good stuff to come,” Crewdson says. “The next six to twelve months are going to be really exciting. We’re going to bring the power of Copilot to Viva Amplify. It will help you create concise, effective content. But more, this fall we’re going to release AI capabilities around design ideas. So not only will it help you write great copy, but it’s going to look great too.”

Viva Amplify will also provide even more help with analysis.

“In the future, there’s so much opportunity to provide deeper insights,” Lundy says. “It can tell us, ‘When you send a shorter communication at 7:00 AM, it performs better than longer emails.’”

The value of these tactical improvements is that Viva Amplify will be able to support communicators in their expanded roles.

“We’re not just sending an email about the latest re-org,” Lundy says. “There are elements of change management, leadership messaging, and crisis management. Viva Amplify is beginning to support communicators by allowing them to focus on the big-picture strategy: how their leader is positioned, how employees adopt the right changes at the company. It has the power to free up communicators for the strategic role they often play.”

Here are some suggestions for getting started with Viva Amplify at your company:

• Try out the Viva Engage distribution channel in Viva Amplify.
• Try out Viva Amplify templates. Author a publication and then save it as a template for consistent branding, look, and feel across your publications.
• Try the new pre-built campaigns in Viva Amplify. The Microsoft Digital team has released one for Microsoft 365 Copilot and one for general AI adoption.

Get started with Viva Amplify.

• Read about how we’re improving our internal IT communications with Viva Amplify.
• Explore our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out our Copilot Deployment Kit.
• Learn more about Microsoft Viva Engage.

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

The post Transforming internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Amplify and Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

Applying HR expertise to Microsoft 365 Copilot

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

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

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

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

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

Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption 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 Engage

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

Viva Insights

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

Viva Pulse

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

Viva Glint

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

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

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

HR and people science: A powerful pairing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As this work continues, the HR adoption team is learning from their initial experiments with Viva Amplify. The goal is to collaborate with sponsors and champions to disseminate customized campaigns that provide precise analytics, contributing to continuous improvement. “Everyone can be an effective communicator with Viva Amplify,” says Laura Luethe, a director of communications on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “It combines the capabilities of corporate communicators with the ability to tailor messaging to uniquely relevant audiences.”

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

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

“People are hungry for skilling opportunities for their specific disciplines,” says Amia Randazzo, a learning and development partner in Microsoft HR. “Viva Learning supports that desire by providing one central location for all their learning needs.”

The HR team assembled a set of discipline-specific learning materials to create the AI for HR Academy. It contains the mainstay AI for HR learning path, as well as other modules that include discipline-specific content, material on systems thinking, and more. For people who learn best alongside their peers, there are also opportunities for collaborative skilling activities like group trainings, community teams, or forums. With this academy, HR change leaders have a shareable core of learning material they can deploy alongside enablement communications, community blasts, or other activations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The team has also worked to correlate results from questions about AI usage with metrics regarding “employee thriving,” the main statistic we use at Microsoft to understand the employee experience. To “thrive” is to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work. Based on recent survey results, the HR team is beginning to understand trends and sentiments around Copilot adoption and its impact on employee experiences.

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

That insight accomplishes two things: It validates further investment in Copilot adoption efforts, and it simultaneously demonstrates the value of Copilot to our employees.

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

Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is going strong in HR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post How Microsoft HR is using Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower our employees appeared first on Inside Track Blog.