Staying ahead of fierce competition: Sunrise employees use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to free more time for innovation

The challenge: Digital collaboration and coordination eat up a lot of time

We live in a connected world with mobile devices, rapid internet access, and media on demand that we can enjoy wherever we want. Consumers all around the world expect their providers to come up with top offerings, including personalized digital services and rapid support. The competition is fierce and providers must move quickly to meet ever-changing demand. How do they do that? By continuously investing in new technology, being first to market with new solutions, and constantly improving service efficiency. In Switzerland, Sunrise does exactly that to shape the telecommunications market. The company always has an eye out for new opportunities and absolutely counts on the experience and drive of its employees. “Our competition in Switzerland is really strong,” says Stephen Dowling, Senior Director Technology & Assurance at Sunrise. “Our employees play the central role in staying ahead of that competition: they always want to come out on top, and they’re passionate about the important tasks they perform.”

But often, the typical day for an employee includes a lot of tasks like searching through a mass of emails to find the information they need and attending various meetings. The latter requires preparation and follow-up work. This leaves the employees with less time to work on their key tasks. Microsoft calls this phenomenon digital debt, where the relentless need to coordinate and communicate keeps employees from deep thinking, creating, and working with impact. “Sometimes you work your full eight-hour day and when it’s over, you’re left with the feeling that you didn’t work on any of the tasks you wanted to,” Dowling says. “It stands to reason that increasing efficiency by making communication and collaboration easier promotes employee creativity and productivity, which, in the end, serves our customers. That’s why one of our top priorities is to optimize operative processes by eliminating administrative tasks and freeing up people’s schedules so they can be productive where it really counts.”

Sunrise viewed reducing its employees’ risk of digital debt as yet another opportunity to stay one step ahead of the competition. And the way to do it was with generative AI in the form of Copilot for Microsoft 365.

The solution: Eliminating digital debt with Copilot for Microsoft 365

As part of the early access program (EAP) for Copilot, Sunrise gave 300 employees access to the tool in September 2023. Within a very short time, they identified several use cases in which the new AI assistant delivered great benefits in conjunction with Microsoft 365. “We’ve always been using Microsoft products. So when we were given the chance to join the EAP for Copilot, we jumped at it,” Dowling explains. “And since then, we’ve already identified three use cases with significant impact.”

One: After meetings in Microsoft Teams, employees can now ask Copilot to summarize what was discussed, focusing on the key actions and thus massively reducing their post-meeting work. “I find that feature alone very useful,” explains Maria Cassa Rohrer, Chief of Staff (CIO) at Sunrise. “If I’m unable to attend a meeting, I can just ask Copilot for a summary, and a few seconds later, I have it.”

Two: For a company like Sunrise, where email is a main channel of communication, Copilot’s integration into Outlook is a key benefit. Extracting information from huge numbers of emails is now quite easy. The integration of mobile devices also helps people plan their days. Before signing off for the day, employees can simply ask Copilot about the meetings they have scheduled for the following day, so they always know what lies ahead.

Three: Copilot makes it far easier to create preliminary drafts and outlines of documents. Employees just need to tell the AI what sort of information they want to communicate and what document they want to create, and Copilot prepares the draft for them.

“For us, the most important process is to identify the various scenarios in which Copilot is most helpful,” Dowling explains. “Our users are experimenting and creating scenarios, which they then tell us about. This allows us to find out where there is likely to be untapped potential. We’re putting our employees squarely at the center of our Copilot rollout.” This approach is helping Sunrise understand how it can customize state-of-the-art work applications so that employees can then devote the majority of their time to creating innovative services and products for customers rather than being hamstrung by administrative tasks.

One major takeaway is that Copilot resonates with each person in a different way. Everyone has their own way of working, and Copilot takes that into account. It does exactly what users want—there is no preset way of using it that employees must adhere to. Everybody can use it in the way that works best for their area of expertise or their role in the company. “That’s the beauty of Copilot: it eliminates exactly those tedious tasks that take up unnecessary time, while also empowering our employees to do more of the tasks they love,” Dowling says. It creates speed where necessary and time where it is needed most. With Copilot, Sunrise employees can focus on moving fast, on innovating, and on making the company Switzerland’s top provider of telecommunication services.