In light of this priority, we have established a Microsoft Digital Data Council to help accelerate our companywide AI-powered transformation.

Our data council is a cross-functional team with representation from multiple domains within Microsoft, including Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization; Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA); and Finance.

“By championing robust data governance, literacy, and responsible data practices, our data council is a crucial part of our AI-powered transformation. It turns enterprise data into a strategic capability that fuels predictive insights and intelligent outcomes across the organization.”

Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

Our data council’s mission is to drive transformative business impact by establishing a cohesive data strategy across Microsoft Digital, empowering interconnected analytics and AI at scale. Our vision is to guide our organization toward Frontier Firm maturity through a clear blueprint for high-quality, reliable, AI-ready data delivered on trusted, scalable platforms.

“By championing robust data governance, literacy, and responsible data practices, our data council is a crucial part of our AI-powered transformation,” says Naval Tripathi, principal engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “It turns enterprise data into a strategic capability that fuels predictive insights and intelligent outcomes across the organization.”

Our evolving data strategy

Over the past two decades, we at Microsoft—along with other large enterprises—have continuously evolved our data strategies in search of the right balance between control and agility. Early approaches were highly decentralized, with different teams owning and managing their own data assets. While this enabled local optimization, it also resulted in inconsistent quality and limited enterprise-wide insight.

Our subsequent shift toward centralized data platforms brought much-needed standardization, security, and scalability. However, as data platforms grew more sophisticated, ownership often drifted away from the business domains closest to the data, slowing responsiveness and diluting accountability.

Today, we and other leading companies are embracing a more balanced, federated approach, often described as a data mesh. Rather than forcing all our data into a single centralized system or allowing unchecked decentralization, the data mesh formalizes domain ownership while embedding governance, quality, and interoperability directly into shared platforms.

With this approach, our domain teams publish data as well-defined, discoverable products, while common standards for security, metadata, and compliance are enforced through automation rather than manual processes. This model preserves enterprise trust and consistency without sacrificing speed or autonomy.

By adopting a data mesh mindset, we can scale analytics and AI more effectively across the organization while still keeping ownership closely connected to the business focus. The result is a system that supports innovation at the edges, strong governance at the core, and seamless collaboration across domains, enabling the transformation of data from a technical asset to a strategic, enterprise-wide capability.

Quality, accessibility, and governance

To scale enterprise data and AI, organizations must first ensure their data is trusted, discoverable, and responsibly governed. At Microsoft Digital, our data strategy is designed to create data foundations that power intelligent applications and effective decision making across the company.

“High-quality, well-governed data is essential to accelerate implementation and adoption of AI tools. Data quality, accessibility, and governance are imperatives for AI systems to function effectively, and recognizing that is propelling our data strategy.”

Miguel Uribe, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

By implementing a data mesh strategy at scale, we aim to unlock valuable data insights and analytics, enabling advanced AI scenarios. Our data council focuses on three core dimensions that make AI-ready data possible:

• Quality: Making sure enterprise data is reliable and complete
• Accessibility: Enabling secure and discoverable access to data
• Governance: Protecting and managing our data responsibly

Together, these dimensions form the foundation for scalable innovation and AI-powered data use. They connect data silos and ensure consistent, high‑quality access across the enterprise—enabling both humans and AI systems to work from the same trusted data foundation. As AI use cases mature, this foundation allows AI agents to retrieve and reason over data through enterprise endpoints, while supporting advanced analytics, data science, and broader technology.

“High-quality, well-governed data is essential to accelerate implementation and adoption of AI tools,” says Miguel Uribe, a principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital. “Data quality, accessibility, and governance are imperatives for AI systems to function effectively, and recognizing that is propelling our data strategy.”

Quality

AI-ready data is available, complete, accurate, and high-quality. By adopting this standard, our data scientists, engineers, and even our AI agents are better able to locate, process, and govern the information needed to drive our organization and maximize AI efficiencies.

By utilizing Microsoft Purview, our data council can oversee the monitoring of data attributes to ensure fidelity. It also monitors parameters to enforce standards for accuracy and completeness.

Accessibility

Ensuring that our employees get access to the information they need while prioritizing security is a foundational element of our enterprise data strategy. Microsoft Fabric allows us to unify our organization’s siloed data in a single “mesh” that enables advanced analytics, data science, data visualization and other connected scenarios.

Microsoft Purview then gives us the ability to democratize that data responsibly. By implementing a data mesh architecture, our employees can work confidently, unencumbered by siloed or inaccessible data, and with the assurance that the data they’re working with is secure.

The data mesh connects and distributes data products across domains, enabling shared data access and compute while scaling beyond centralized architectures.

Platform services are standardized blueprints that embed security, interoperability, policies, standards, and core capabilities—providing guardrails that enable speed without fragmentation.

Data management zones provide centralized governance capabilities for policy enforcement, lineage, observability, compliance, and enterprise-wide trust.  

Governance

As organizations scale AI capabilities, strong governance becomes essential to ensure security, compliance, and ethical data use. Data governance—which includes establishing data policies, ensuring data privacy and security, and promoting ethical AI usage—is critical, as is compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA) regulations, among others.

However, governance is not only a technical capability; it’s also a cultural commitment.

Responsible data use must be embedded into the way teams manage data and build AI solutions. Through Microsoft Purview, we implemented an end-to-end governance framework that automates the discovery, classification, and protection of sensitive data across the enterprise data landscape.

This unified approach allows teams to innovate confidently, knowing that the data powering their insights and AI systems is trusted and protected, as well as responsibly managed.

“AI systems are only as reliable as the data that powers them,” Uribe says. “By investing in trusted and well-managed data, we accelerate not only the adoption of AI tools but our ability to generate meaningful insights and intelligent outcomes.”

The data catalog as the discovery layer

By serving as a common discovery layer for humans and AI, the data catalog ensures that governance translates directly into speed, accuracy, and trust at scale.

A unified data strategy only succeeds if both people and AI systems can consistently find the right data. At Microsoft, this is enabled by our enterprise data catalog, which operationalizes the standards set by our data council. 

For business users, the catalog provides intuitive search, ownership transparency, and trust signals—enabling confident self‑service analytics. For AI agents, the same catalog exposes machine‑readable metadata, allowing agents to programmatically discover canonical datasets, validate schema and freshness, and respect governance constraints.

Our role as Customer Zero

In Microsoft Digital, we operate as Customer Zero for the company’s enterprise solutions, so that our customers don’t have to.

That means we do more than adopt new products early. We deploy them at enterprise-scale, operate them under real‑world constraints, and hold them to the same standards our customers expect. The result is more resilient, ready‑to‑use solutions and a higher quality bar for every enterprise customer we serve.

“When we engage product teams with real telemetry from how data is created, governed, and consumed at scale, we move the conversation from theory to execution. That’s how enterprise readiness becomes real.”

Diego Baccino, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

Our data council embodies this Customer Zero mindset through its Enterprise Readiness initiative. By engaging product engineering as a unified enterprise voice, the council drives strategic conversations that surface operational blockers, influence roadmap prioritization, and ensure new and existing data solutions are truly ready for enterprise use.

These learnings are then shared broadly across Microsoft Digital to accelerate adoption, reduce duplication, and scale proven patterns across teams.

“When we engage product teams with real telemetry from how data is created, governed, and consumed at scale, we move the conversation from theory to execution,” says Diego Baccino, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital and a member of the council. “That’s how enterprise readiness becomes real.”

This work is deeply integrated with our AI Center of Excellence (CoE), where Customer Zero principles are applied to accelerate AI outcomes responsibly. Together, the AI CoE and the data council focus on improving data documentation and quality—foundational capabilities that are required to make AI feasible, trustworthy, and scalable across the enterprise.

By grounding AI innovation in measurable data quality and governance standards, Microsoft Digital ensures that experimentation can safely mature into production‑ready solutions. The partnership between our data council, our AI CoE, and our Responsible AI (RAI) Council is essential to our broader data and AI strategy.

“AI readiness isn’t aspirational—it’s operational,” Baccino says. “By measuring the health of our data, setting clear quality baselines, and using those signals to guide product and platform decisions, we turn data into a strategic asset and AI into a repeatable capability.”

Together, these teams exemplify what it means to be Customer Zero: Transforming enterprise experience into action, governance into acceleration, and data into durable competitive advantage.

Learn more

Read about our AI Center of Excellence.

Advancing our data culture

Our data council plays a pivotal role in advancing the organization transition from data literacy to enterprise data and AI capability. In conjunction with our AI CoE, it creates curricula and sponsors learning pathways, operational practices, and community programs to equip our employees with the skills and mindset required to thrive in a data- and AI-centric world.

While early efforts focused on improving data literacy, our data council ’s mission has evolved to enable data and AI capability at scale together with our AI CoE—where employees not only understand data but can effectively apply it to build, operate, and govern intelligent solutions.

“Our focus is not just teaching our teams about data. It is enabling employees to apply data to create AI-driven outcomes. When teams understand how data powers AI systems, they can make better decisions, design better products, and build more responsible AI experiences.”

Miguel Uribe, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our curriculum includes high-level courses on data concepts, applications, and extensibility of AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as data products like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.

By facilitating AI and data training, offering internally focused data and AI certifications, and internal community engagement, our council ensures that employees develop the capabilities required to responsibly build and operate AI-powered solutions. Achieving data and AI certifications not only promotes career development through improved data literacy, it also enhances the broader data-driven culture within our organization.

“We recognize that AI capability is built when data skills are applied directly to real AI scenarios and business outcomes—not when learning exists in isolation,” Uribe says. “Our focus is not just teaching our teams about data; it is enabling employees to apply data to create AI‑driven outcomes. When teams understand how data powers AI systems, they can make better decisions, design better products, and build more responsible AI experiences.”

Find out more

Learn how a Copilot Expo helped us build interest in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Lessons learned

Our data council was created to develop and execute a cohesive data strategy across Microsoft Digital and to foster a strong data culture within our organization. Over time, several critical lessons have emerged.

Executive sponsorship enables transformation

Executive sponsorship is a key element to ensure implementation and adoption of a data strategy. Our leaders are committed to delivering and sustaining a robust data strategy and culture and have been effective champions of the council’s work.

“Leadership provides support and reinforcement of the council’s mission, as well as guidance and clarity related to diverse organizational priorities,” Baccino says.

Cross-functional collaboration accelerates impact

Our council’s work has also benefited from the diverse representation offered by different disciplines across our organization. Embracing diverse perspectives and understanding various organizational priorities is critical to implementing a successful data strategy and culture in a large and complex organization like Microsoft Digital.

Modern platforms allow for scalable AI productivity

Technology and architecture also play a critical role in enabling enterprise data and AI capability. Platforms like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric provide the governance, discovery, and analytics infrastructure required to create trusted, AI-ready data ecosystems.

Combined with strong leadership support and community engagement, these platforms allow our organization to move beyond isolated data projects toward connected, enterprise-wide intelligence.

As our organization continues to evolve, our data council’s strategic work and valuable insights will be crucial in shaping the future of data-driven decision making and AI transformation at Microsoft.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you contemplate forming a data council to help you manage and scale AI impacts responsibly at your own organization:

• A data mesh strikes the balance enterprises have been chasing. By formalizing domain ownership while enforcing standards through shared platforms, you avoid both chaotic decentralization and slow, over-centralized control.
• Governance is an accelerator when it’s automated and embedded. Using platforms like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric, governance shifts from a manual gatekeeping function to a built‑in capability that enables faster, trusted analytics and AI.
• AI systems are only as strong as their discovery layer. A unified enterprise data catalog allows both people and AI agents to find, trust, and use data consistently—turning standards into operational speed.
• Customer Zero turns theory into enterprise‑ready execution. By operating its own data and AI platforms at scale, Microsoft Digital provides real telemetry and practical feedback that directly shapes product readiness.
• Building AI capability is a cultural effort, not just a technical one. Our data council’s focus on applied learning, certification, and real-world AI scenarios ensures data skills translate into durable business outcomes.
• AI scale exposes the cost of fragmented data ownership. A data council cuts through silos by aligning priorities, resolving tradeoffs, and concentrating investment on the data assets that matter most for AI impact.
• Shared metrics create shared ownership. Publishing data quality and AI‑readiness scores at the leadership level reinforces accountability and positions data as a core enterprise asset.

Try it out

New to Microsoft 365 Copilot? Check it out!

Related links

• Learn more about the councils that are steering AI projects at Microsoft.
• See how we’re tackling Microsoft 365 Copilot governance internally at Microsoft.
• Explore how we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• See AI-powered agents in action: How we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment 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 Harnessing AI: How a data council is powering our unified data strategy at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In parts of Europe and elsewhere, relationships with our employees are governed by works councils. These councils play a major role in vetting and approving any new technology that might impact our workers and their jobs.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we have gained a ton of insight by working closely with our works councils, especially as we all embrace the rise of generative AI and new tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot.  

“With the speed of AI innovation today, we can’t sit and wait. We need our internal users, including our works council members, to be forward-thinking early adopters and help us drive AI transformation.”

Irina Chemerys, regional experience lead, Microsoft Digital

This experience means we are able to help guide customers who are dealing with their own works councils—many of which also have questions and concerns about the agentic workplace of the future, which is coming fast.

As we continue on our journey to becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm, we are collaborating closely with our works councils to make sure that we address their concerns and follow all applicable regulations. This process also helps us make better products that meet the evolving needs of our customers, wherever they are.

“With the speed of AI innovation today, we can’t sit and wait,” says Chemerys, a regional experience lead who oversees works council engagements within Microsoft Digital. “We need our internal users, including our works council members, to be forward-thinking early adopters and help us drive AI transformation.”

How works councils work

Our works councils serve as the voice of our employees in some geographies (especially in Europe), advocating for their rights and interests within the workplace. Typically, they have purview over topics like workplace health and safety, pay and benefits, hiring, business reorganizations, training, and more.

 As AI technology becomes increasingly commonplace across many industries, our works councils—along with all of our employees—are at the forefront of the complex discussions regarding the implications of AI for the modern workforce.

While our relationship with Microsoft works councils has always been cooperative and collaborative, how we engage with them for product reviews has evolved over time. What used to be somewhat impromptu or inconsistent engagements have changed to become more strategic and programmatic opportunities for feedback, which can end up greatly improving our products.

Chemerys helped lead the Microsoft Digital effort to streamline the approval process for new technology across works council countries. She drove the development of a global solution that uses a single request form and platform for our works councils worldwide, helping them communicate with Microsoft Digital, product groups, legal, HR, and others at the company.

This simplified communication across the board, and facilitated collaboration among all works councils, allowing smaller countries to take advantage of resources from larger ones and creating a more cohesive community. The unified approach significantly improved coordination, collaboration, and, importantly, trust among works councils.

“Trust is more essential than anything else in terms of collaborating with works councils effectively, especially in the context of AI,” Chemerys says. “To build that trust, you need transparency. And the way you build transparency is by having a well-documented and effective request process.”

Approving Copilot: The tolerance phase

Trust and good communication were linchpins of the process we used to gain works council approval for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Considering how new generative AI tools are, and the widely promoted fears surrounding their potential impact on the workforce, there were understandable concerns raised by some of our works councils about Copilot.

Germany was one country where our works councils were particularly wary of AI. They raised questions about the ways that Copilot could be used to evaluate individual employee performance or make impermissible inferences about individual employees without the data to support them. For example, Copilot might be asked to generate a ranking of employee performance during a meeting, something that fell outside the boundaries of our Microsoft responsible AI principles.

“The earliest versions of these generative AI tools lacked guardrails,” says Carsten Schleicher, chairman of the Microsoft works council in Germany. “You could ask them anything and get an answer back—even questions about religion, race, gender, ethnicity, etc. There were also concerns about AI tools generating false information—so-called ‘hallucinations.’”

“AI is in the world; if you deny your employees access to it, you’ll fall behind. It was absolutely necessary to find a constructive way to deal with AI, and to use it in a fair and transparent way in our company.”

Carsten Schleicher, chairman, Microsoft German Works Council

Faced with these concerns, but also wanting to get as much feedback on Copilot from our European employees as possible, we decided to introduce a tolerance phase.

Countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands were included in this approach, which allowed for controlled deployment of the tool while still enabling employees to try it out.

“As a works council, it’s your goal to protect the employees, but you also want the company to be successful,” Schleicher says. “AI is in the world; if you deny your employees access to it, you’ll fall behind. It was absolutely necessary to find a constructive way to deal with AI, and to use it in a fair and transparent way in our company.”

Some members of our works councils were part of the first Copilot deployment wave, and their feedback was then channeled back to the product engineering team. This early access helped the councils quickly reach an agreement that deployment of Copilot could continue, while also leading to product improvements that benefited all our customers.

The tolerance phased ended in the spring of 2025, and Copilot is now approved for use by Microsoft employees worldwide.

Getting ready for the agentic future

After Copilot was approved, the next challenge for our works councils was the world of AI agents. As a Frontier Firm, Microsoft is gearing up for a workplace where employees are routinely aided in their work by digital agents. Eventually, agents may become our “digital colleagues” or even run entire business processes independently.

“For the Employee Self-Service Agent, it was an easy and straightforward process. We made a presentation to people from Microsoft HR in France, which went well. So, when we went to the works council, there were not a lot of concerns. We got the green light very quickly.”

Isabela Cardoso, regional experience lead for France and Ireland, Microsoft Digital

One example of a digital agent that we’ve launched across the entire company (as well as externally to our customers) is the Employee Self-Service Agent. This AI-driven tool offers a “one-stop shop” that our employees can turn to for help with IT support, HR questions, and facilities requests.

Because the tool can access potentially sensitive personal information about employees, we were careful to make sure that our works councils were consulted during the internal deployment of this agent. Their experience reviewing Copilot—and the simplified process that Chemerys spearheaded—were key to winning rapid approval of the Employee Self-Service Agent.

“For the Employee Self-Service Agent, it was an easy and straightforward process,” says Isabela Cardoso, a regional experience lead for France and Ireland within Microsoft Digital. “We made a presentation to people from Microsoft HR in France, which went well. So, when we went to the works council, there were not a lot of concerns. We got the green light very quickly.”

Edith Dubuisson, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital who manages our relationship with the Microsoft works council in France, agreed.

“AI is a massive change, so getting the councils engaged early helps to deal with the fear and questions. We see the works councils as a true partner in this transformation of the company with AI.”

Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

She stressed how important the concept of partnership is in making sure works council reviews go as smoothly as possible, especially with AI-related technologies.

“We make a point of including the works council in early discussions, telling them that we need them as a partner,” Dubuisson says. “AI is a massive change, so getting the councils engaged early helps to deal with the fear and questions. We see the works councils as a true partner in this transformation of the company with AI.”   

Chemerys notes that as employee-created agents proliferate across the company, the review process will typically take place at the platform level, not the agent level. In this way, agents created with Microsoft 365 Copilot Studio will be treated much like tools created with something like the Microsoft Power Platform are handled.

“When it comes to low-code/no-code agents, you can compare the process to something like Power BI,” she says. “We’ve approved that platform to build reports, and then employees can create reports using it. In some countries, if an employee creates an AI agent using Copilot Studio that could impact the workplace in a sensitive way, then it’s their responsibility to get the proper approvals from our works councils. They can submit it through our standard process, which is why having that is so helpful.”

Embracing the future with our works councils

If there’s one true thing about technology in the age of AI, it’s that things continue to evolve at lightning speed. New tools and features are constantly being created, tested, and launched across Microsoft and many other cutting-edge, innovative companies.

Amidst all this rapid change, we continue to keep our works councils in the loop as these new technologies emerge. It’s a challenge that Microsoft is ready for, Chemerys says.

“There’s an avalanche of new solutions emerging all the time—so many different types of agents and other AI tools,” she says. “And the level is complexity is very high. But we have a great platform for works council reviews, so we can give them an early heads-up, which helps us maintain trust. They hate surprises, so we strive to stay ahead of things and make sure they stay informed.”

In the end, our works councils continue to be a source of invaluable feedback in this new fast-moving AI era. They play a role that transcends mere oversight and embraces proactive engagement, which makes for better products and happier employees—and customers.

Key takeaways

Here are some things to remember as you engage your own works councils with product reviews and discussions in the age of agentic AI:

• Engage your works councils early and often. Bringing them into conversations at the start—well before deployment—reduces uncertainty, surfaces valid concerns, and ensures smoother adoption of new AI tools like Copilot and employee-facing agents.
• Build trust through transparency and structure. A clear, well-documented approval process helps works councils understand new AI technologies and establishes the trust needed for productive, long-term collaboration.
• Simplify and unify communication channels. A single global request platform (like the one we use at Microsoft) improves coordination across works councils of different sizes, enabling smaller countries to benefit from shared expertise and creating a more consistent review experience.
• Balance innovation with worker protections. Structured tolerance phases, like those used for Microsoft 365 Copilot, allow employees to test new AI tools under controlled conditions while ensuring compliance with responsible AI principles and local regulations.
• Treat works councils as strategic partners in the agentic future. Their early feedback on digital agents—like our Employee Self-Service Agent—helps improve product design, accelerate approvals, and reduce fear or misconceptions about AI in the workplace.
• Design governance that scales with low-code and agentic tools. With AI agents proliferating, platform-level approvals—similar to the Power Platform model at Microsoft—ensure innovation can move quickly while still requiring review for individual high-impact scenarios.
• Stay ahead of rapid AI change with proactive communication. Works councils “hate surprises,” so providing early visibility into emerging tools helps maintain trust, reduces friction, and enables Microsoft to build better products for employees and customers alike.

Try it out

Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

Related links

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft Places with the help of our works councils.
• Find out how we’re becoming an AI-first Frontier Firm at Microsoft.
• Read the full guide on how we managed the internal deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot at our company.
• See how we’re embracing the agentic future with our Customer Zero approach in Microsoft Digital.

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 Transforming into an AI-first Frontier Firm in partnership with our works councils appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Our strong partnership with our works councils has led to the successful deployment of many Microsoft 365 Copilot applications, including one of the latest, Microsoft Places.

Places is a workplace scheduling tool that uses AI to make scheduling in-person meetings and working in hybrid work environments easier for you and your colleagues. It helps hybrid and non-hybrid teams align and manage schedules so they can know when the best times might be to collaborate in person or hold on-site meetings. It does that through location tracking, which can be turned on and off.

We are Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and before we deployed Places globally here at Microsoft, we consulted with our works councils, groups of our employees who work in various geographies that advocate for the interests of employees in their region or country. One of the hot topics for works councils in today’s workplace is the introduction of AI into many areas of work. More and more, we’re being exposed to new ways of working with AI and we’re still learning how to use it in responsible ways. Many still have questions about its use around privacy. Initially the way Places uses AI has brought up some questions for our works council countries.

“It’s actually a very simple product, Places, but it touches on something that has huge interest in a number of works council countries, which is the aspect of tracking people’s location,” says Allan Hvass, regional experience lead for Microsoft Digital. “So even if technology is simple, it’s a high, high-interest topic.”

{Read and download our guide for deploying Places at your company.}

Works councils provide a ‘golden opportunity’

While we at Microsoft Digital serve as Customer Zero, meaning our internal usage and feedback is used to shape the product before it’s launched to the public, we partner with works councils to help inform our product groups of potential concerns. One of the keys to our strong partnership with our works councils has been being transparent with the purpose and benefits of the features we plan to roll out and being proactive with our communications. We work closely with them to ensure that everyone feels heard and protected when it comes to employee privacy.

Being proactive and starting conversations with works councils early has its benefits, according to Daniel Yaun, a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital.

“It’s a golden opportunity for us to have an open and transparent dialogue with works councils and for us to understand what the concerns are,” he says.

Part of the conversations around Places with works councils involved detailing the benefits of enabling location sharing. Being clear about the benefits, such as knowing when coworkers are in the office, seeing the availability of meeting spaces, and enabling in-person collaboration, helped relieve some of the concerns raised by employees.

“In a hybrid work environment, we needed to be clear about what the value is for employees,” Hvass says. “We had to be very strong on the message of why it is a great benefit for me as an employee to be part of this and share my data. What I can gain from it and how can I help my colleagues, versus just being used for tracking whether I show up at a physical place or how many people are in a building. Otherwise, people would find ways of opting out rather than opting in.”

In the end, having a strong relationship, communicating clearly, and proactively and incorporating feedback into the final product has served us and our customers well.

“It’s really beneficial that Microsoft has a very mature process on the work of council engagements,” Yuan says.

Making a better product through works councils reviews

Aside from acting as the voice of employees in various geographies, one of the more valuable roles our works councils play is as an extension of Customer Zero. We listen to their concerns and work with product groups to incorporate their feedback to make sure the product meets their requirements.

The things that made the rollout of Places with our works councils successful were:

• Having an established framework for working with works councils that has been successful and is repeatable
• Having the ability to manage the release of certain functionality to specific markets
• Moving the product to an opt-in model
• Providing a full explanation of what the technology was doing

Jason McWreath, a director of business programs for Microsoft Digital, says there was an initial issue where collaborators could see each other’s locations across country boundaries, which had not been approved by all works councils. This raised privacy concerns and required a product update.

By acting as Customer Zero and partnering with global works councils, we heard the feedback and took that back to the product group to address the issue.  We updated Places to allow for specific targeting. This change enabled granular management at the country level, where the feature could be turned on or off for individual countries based on works council approvals. Getting approvals from works councils also allowed for Places to be updated after it was deployed.

“Instead of looking at it like these are more requirements that we need to consider, it’s more about what we can learn to enhance the product and make it more globally applicable for more customers by introducing these enhancements the works councils have raised,” says Jason McWreath, a director of business programs for Microsoft Digital.

Due to continued privacy concerns for everyone globally, location sharing became our most debated feature and we had to address the varying privacy regulations of works councils countries. By giving employees the default opt-out feature, it enables employees to choose whether they want to share their location and it has helped the product meet the requirements for global works councils approvals.

The feedback we receive from works councils around AI and other technologies not only helps us effectively deploy products externally, it also helps improve products for external customers. And now that several Places features have been approved by most work councils, we can bring new features such as the ability to locate someone where they’re sitting in a room or know whether a colleague is in a building based on Wi-Fi access, to works councils for review.

Here are some tips for collaborating with your works councils as you get started with Places:

• When working with global works councils, be transparent and trustworthy.
• Listen, learn, and implement feedback from works councils.
• After you’ve established a successful framework for working with works councils ensure that it’s repeatable and use it to partner with them.

Get a free trial of Microsoft Places. 

• Check out a demo of Microsoft Places.
• Read our guide for deploying Places at your company.
• Learn more about our internal deployment of Microsoft Places.
• Get our tips for partnering with your works councils.
• Find out how we partnered with our works councils to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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

The post Deploying Microsoft Places at Microsoft with our works councils appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

[Learn about our strategy for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally at Microsoft and the progress we’ve made against our vision. Check out our full content suite on how we use Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.Learn about our journey as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.] 

Unleashing the potential of Copilot for Sales

Lori: It’s been six months since you’ve deployed Copilot for Sales, what results are you seeing? What key considerations did you have when rolling out a generative AI tool like Copilot for Sales on a global scale?

Nathalie: Copilot for Sales is deployed across Microsoft. Being customer zero has been invaluable in this process. It has allowed us to confirm the product, learn important insights, and make improvements along the way. We’ve been focused on turning on Copilot features to enhance the seller experience, and the feedback we’ve received from our own teams has been instrumental in refining and perfecting the deployment. I’m so excited to partner with our teams to see the first commercial solution at Microsoft to combine Copilot and Copilot for Sales.

Since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in March, we have seen incredible adoption with nearly 4,000 users taking advantage of its capabilities. The impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. It’s encouraging to see the positive response from our users and the value they are experiencing. In fact, during a recent customer conversation, the Senior VP of Sales expressed their enthusiasm to partner with us as early adopters, emphasizing their willingness to invest in any technology that enhances the productivity of their sellers. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of Copilot and its ability to drive tangible benefits in the workplace.

Nathalie: It’s been quite the journey since we launched Copilot for Sales to our Microsoft sellers. What were the main goals your team hoped to achieve with this product?

Lori: We’ve been focused on seller productivity gains through taking advantage of conversation intelligence, enabling Copilot features, and ultimately improving customer connection, job satisfaction, and revenue for our sellers. Microsoft being customer zero has provided us with a unique advantage. It has allowed us to test these features within our own organization, gather valuable feedback, and fine-tune the experiences before rolling them out to more customers.

In the new update, we are adding some exciting capabilities to Copilot for Sales that have been influenced by your team’s customer zero work. Sellers can get real-time suggestions and guidance as they craft emails, pulling insights from automated email summaries. It’s like having a virtual assistant right at their side, helping them to generate compelling content and ensuring that no opportunity is missed. Our sellers have embraced these features with enthusiasm, recognizing how it significantly boosts their productivity and enables them to focus on building strong customer relationships.

Nathalie: Speaking of Copilot, how does your organization ensure that the implementation of Copilot features align with Microsoft’s ethical and responsible AI principles?

Lori: Supporting ethical and responsible AI practices is of paramount importance to us and our customers. As we use generative AI, we are committed to helping our customers be transparent, fair, and accountable to their employees and their customers.

As you know, one of the ways we do this here is with our works councils, where a few of our colleagues volunteer to help us protect the privacy of all our employees when we deploy new technology like Copilot for Sales. More importantly, they make sure we follow privacy laws in each of the countries and regions where we operate. We roll the feedback that we get from them directly into our products, which helps our customers protect their own employees. It’s this kind of thinking—and these kinds of checks and balances—that helps us be ethical in how we use AI in Copilot for Sales.

Lori: We were so excited to be the first Microsoft product to bring Copilot to our users; the feedback we have received from sellers has been incredibly positive! How have our newest Copilot in Copilot for Sales features influenced your thinking about supporting the employee experience?

Nathalie: It helped a lot! Seeing a tangible implementation of Copilot with real value opened our eyes to what was possible and is influencing ways that we’ll incorporate generative AI into our own employee experience. Kudos to you and your team for dreaming big and acting fast to bring that experience to the market!

Lori: Thank you. So, tell me more about this employee experience and how deploying Copilot for Sales Copilot in Microsoft has given your team insights and learnings that shaped your approach to using AI?

Nathalie: The success of Copilot for Sales really inspired my team to think more deeply about how we could further use AI in our employee experience at Microsoft. Just like Copilot for Sales provides conversation summaries and next actions for sales opportunities, we’re thinking through scenarios that will enable us to transform the way employees interact with our different services—like support and HR—to make them more personalized and efficient.

Broadly, our efforts fall into three categories—AI for IT, AI for the hybrid workplace, and AI for the employee experience. AI for IT includes investments to help us proactively detect and remediate issues in our employee services and IT infrastructure. AI for the hybrid workplace includes investments to help us perfect space planning and to enhance the experience when employees come into the office. Finally, AI for the employee experience is all about transforming the ways that Microsoft employees interact with our services and support. Across each of these investment areas, Copilot for Sales provided us with a great benchmark for how AI can really propel employee productivity.

Works councils and deployment

Lori: Nathalie, as the leader responsible for deploying Copilot for Sales across Microsoft, I understand that your team has been actively engaging with works councils. Can you provide insights into the impact of working with works councils during the deployment process?

Nathalie: Absolutely, Lori. Works councils play a critical role in standing for the interests of employees within our organization, particularly in European countries where they are prevalent, and they make sure that whatever we deploy internally within the company protects the privacy of the employees who live in that region. Engaging with works councils ensures that we consider the perspectives and concerns of the workforce during the deployment of Copilot for Sales. Their input is valuable in addressing compliance, privacy, and employee relations matters, making our deployment process more robust and aligned with local regulations.

Lori: What have you found to be some of the challenges in managing a global-scale deployment of Copilot for Sales?

Nathalie:Deploying any new technology globally has challenges, but the speed and efficiency with which we were able to roll out this transformative product was truly remarkable. We are working on a brand-new solution that is revolutionizing the way generative AI changes the workplace, and being customer zero has given us some unique advantages. We’ve had to navigate compliance and obtain necessary approvals for deploying AI features on a global scale. Our active engagement process, which includes working closely with works councils, has been instrumental in streamlining the deployment process and ensuring that our global teams can receive help from Copilot for Sales. Despite the challenges, the feedback from sellers has been incredibly positive, especially with the AI-generated email content enhancements we’re introducing. The best part is how easy and painless it is to enable Copilot for Sales, allowing our teams to quickly harness its productivity-boosting capabilities and experience a seamless transition to a more efficient way of working.

Lori: It seems like building an effective approval process is crucial. How replicable has Microsoft made this process for other companies?

Nathalie: At Microsoft, we have developed a globally recognizable, efficient process for enabling Copilot scenarios. By supporting open dialogue, we can gather feedback, address emerging concerns, and align our deployment approach with evolving regulations. We recently set up a framework with European works councils to supply valuable insights into employee needs and expectations, enabling Microsoft to tailor the product and deployment process accordingly. We encourage all companies to get connected with their respective works counsels to achieve a balance between rapid implementation and compliance, ensuring that their employees are protected, and the organization meets regulatory requirements.

Lori: It’s truly exciting to see the transformative power of Copilot for Sales in action and see the positive impact it’s having on our organization!

To learn more about our internal deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, read our “See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales” blog post.  You can also read more about our internal deployment of Microsoft Viva at Microsoft by visiting our “Viva la vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva” content suite. Learn more about other applications and capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales using the links below:

• Learn more about tips Microsoft has for working with works councils.
• Take a look at Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot for Sales release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Watch the Copilot in Copilot for Sales demo.
• Stay up-to-date on Copilot for Sales features and updates on the Copilot for Sales Blog.

If you’re not yet a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

We’re always looking for feedback and would like to hear from you. Please head to the Dynamics 365 Community to start a discussion, ask questions, and tell us what you think!

Click here to try or learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. 

• Find out how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Check out these seven things we learned deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at Microsoft.
• Read the Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide we put together based on our internal experience here at Microsoft.
• Take a look at our Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment and adoption guide for executives.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
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The post The power of AI in Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales: Insights from Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers appeared first on Inside Track Blog.