RCS England is exploring safe, secure AI solutions to empower employees, increase productivity and better support its customers.
The organisation is using Microsoft 365 Copilot to enhance productivity across Microsoft apps, whilst keeping data safe.
71% of employees at RCS England reported increased productivity, with time savings of up to 5 hours per week, elevated employee satisfaction rates and cost savings of £775 per user, per month.
“Now, I’m using Copilot in Microsoft Whiteboard to help me brainstorm and do retrospectives. Copilot is saving me so much time, offering suggestions and helping me to analyse much faster and with greater precision.”
Kim Lewry, Digital Delivery Senior Programme Manager, RCS England
The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England) is pioneering the use of technology in the not-for-profit sector to drive value. Having already embraced Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 to support flexible and agile work, the organisation is now exploring Microsoft 365 Copilot, as it seeks to harness the power of secure AI to elevate employee experience and enhance the delivery of its mission to support the surgical profession in England.
“We want to encourage our employees to be more curious and familiar with AI, but the biggest barrier is data protection,” says Kim Lewry, Digital Delivery Senior Programme Manager at RCS England. “Microsoft 365 Copilot is the clear choice for us as it contains enterprise data protection, alleviating our fears around data exposure and ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR.”
To establish which roles would most benefit from Microsoft 365 Copilot, RCS England launched its adoption with a limited trial in different business areas.
Kim Lewry reflects, “During the pilot stage, we did a lot of reading and attended webinars to understand which roles would really benefit from Copilot licences. We started small and used Microsoft Forms to gather feedback and ask people to share their success stories. This has been a great way to build a community, troubleshoot and share best practice.”
The pilot demonstrated increased time savings and a strong return on investment, with 71 percent of employees reporting an increase in productivity. Copilot's ability to transcribe and summarise meetings has been transformational. In an environment where daily collaboration is essential, this delivers real value for the organisation, enabling employees to save time, gain focus, take more accurate minutes and more precisely list actions.
“Copilot is enabling people to be more strategic with their time and thinking,” says an end user at RCS England. “In meetings, for example, it's fantastic to be able to listen and participate instead of worrying about taking notes. Copilot enables me to focus on being present and engage more fully with my colleagues.”
Based on this success, RCS England extended Copilot availability to more employees, especially those responsible for taking minutes or with diary or email overload, such as admin roles and directors.
“Just being able to tell Copilot to take a complex, impenetrable curriculum document and compare it to another document or webpage is wonderful. It saves time and the quality of output is better, as nothing is missed.”
Kenny Webster, Head of Learning Operations, RCS England
“The key to our success has been taking an incremental approach,” says Kenny Webster, Head of Learning Operations at RCS England. “Providing Copilot licences to individuals in each business area allowed them to learn and highlight the benefits to the rest of the organisation, as we continue to expand adoption.”
The availability of Microsoft Copilot in the business and productivity applications RCS England teams use every day is another key success factor. It encourages daily use and makes it easy for staff to identify new ways of working. Some users rely on Copilot to create formulas in Microsoft Excel while others use Copilot create content in Microsoft PowerPoint.
“I used to spend hours categorising, putting data into themes and analysing tranches of data from collaborative meetings,” says Kim Lewry. “Now, I’m using Copilot in Microsoft Whiteboard to help me brainstorm and do retrospectives. Copilot is saving me so much time, offering suggestions and helping me to analyse much faster and with greater precision.”
Time savings per user average at over two hours per week, with some people reporting time savings from their use of Copilot of up to five hours per week. The willingness of RCS England to innovate is boosting productivity and leading to a better employee experience, with average user satisfaction scores with the technology of 7.4 out of 10.
RCS England is also using Microsoft 365 Copilot to optimize the delivery of its high-quality training to students and members. It has found Copilot useful when assessing the large amounts of data in learning operations.
“In the learning team, we work with lots of curricula,” says Kenny Webster. “Just being able to tell Copilot to take a complex, impenetrable curriculum document and compare it to another document or webpage is wonderful. It saves time and the quality of output is better, as nothing is missed.”
In addition, the learning operations team is using Copilot to identify trends in student feedback. RCS England can better understand its students, ensuring its services align with expectations.
Kenny Webster explains, “My team sends over 1,500 feedback forms to our students every single year. To understand trends in this data, we’ve been using Copilot. We’ve found Copilot is wonderful for analysing huge amounts of text to identify the themes coming out of it.”
71% of employees reported increased productivity
The RCS England team is now using Microsoft 365 Copilot to support a more accessible, inclusive workplace and ensure that customer-facing and internal content is accessible for all. This includes analysis of both design and content.
Kim Lewry explains, “As part of a website audit, our digital team is using Copilot to assess the language on each page to make it accessible for everyone. I’ve also noticed it gives me accessibility warnings in PowerPoint when I use certain colours or text on certain colours. I think that’s a great feature.”
Kenny Webster agrees, “I’m using Copilot to make the language I use in job descriptions more gender neutral. I ask it to remove masculine phrases which might put off women from applying to a role.”
RCS England is pioneering the use of AI in the not-for-profit sector. Its rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot is encouraging employees to be AI-curious without undermining data protection. The responsible and incremental approach to adoption ensures the organisation achieves a strong ROI.
Kim Lewry explains, “The great thing about Copilot is that enterprise data protection is included in the licence – we don’t need to invest in additional security. I think this will help other organisations in the not-for-profit sector too, as we all have limited resources. This is a real positive from Microsoft.”
RCS England continues to innovate. Next, it plans to use Copilot Studio to build agents that will automate customer service, admin and HR tasks, driving further efficiency for its workforce and members.
“Agents are the next step in our journey,” explains Kim Lewry. “We have plans to integrate agents into our website and CRM to improve customer service and deliver on our mission to support the surgical profession.”
To continue this highly successful journey, RCS England is investing further, increasing its Copilot licences so that more employees can explore this exciting new technology and continue to drive greater value for the organisation and its members.
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“My team sends over 1,500 feedback forms to our students every single year. To understand trends in this data, we’ve been using Copilot. We’ve found Copilot is wonderful for analysing huge amounts of text to identify the themes coming out of it.”
Kenny Webster, Head of Learning Operations, RCS England
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