pladis engaged users save 12+ hours a month on average with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Headquartered in London, pladis is a global snacking brand with more than 180 years of baking heritage. Home to brands including McVitie's, GODIVA, and Ülker, it employs around 16,000 people and reaches consumers in more than 110 markets, guided by a simple purpose to bring happiness with every bite. But delivering on that promise at global scale meant finding smarter ways to support teams, reducing time spent on routine tasks so people could focus more of their energy on creativity, collaboration, and decision-making.

Across HR, finance, procurement, marketing, R&D, and operations, colleagues spent hours each week drafting content, summarizing documents, building reports, and handling routine requests. There was a clear opportunity for pladis to help teams work more efficiently, but experience and confidence in AI varied across the business. Without a coordinated approach, adoption risked becoming fragmented and inconsistent, and some colleagues remained understandably cautious about the technology.

A business-led bet on Copilot

In 2025, pladis set out to deliver a structured and measurable way to reshape everyday work, building the skills and confidence to do it, and proving the payoff to leadership. At the heart of its approach was Microsoft 365 Copilot, which brought AI directly into the tools employees already used every day, such as Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 

Rather than positioning AI as an experimental add-on, pladis made it a practical productivity accelerator inside existing workflows. People could draft content faster, summarize meetings and long documents in seconds, analyze data more efficiently and strip out repetitive administration. All without learning a new system. Its "Steal Back 10 Hours" initiative helped accelerate this further, with an eight-week program that paired hands-on training with careful measurement of the productivity gains each participant achieved. Its goal? To reclaim the time lost to mundane tasks and reinvest it in the thinking that only people can do.

"We use AI to help eliminate repetitive work and give our people more time to focus on strategic and critical thinking at pladis," says Nataliya Otluoglu, VP of Data, AI, and Digital Transformation. "Copilot enhances how our employees work today."

The secret ingredient: a people-first AI strategy

To make adoption stick, pladis surrounded the technology with people. It created an internal AI community, appointed AI champions and advocates across departments, ran office hours and masterclasses, and established governance to support the whole effort. Partner Mindworks delivered training and enablement sessions, answered questions, and supported colleagues as they turned ideas into working use cases. "We had to find a great partner," recalls Merve Gülşen, Head of Digital Technology. "We connected with Microsoft, and they brought us Mindworks. We structured everything and put the right governance around it." This kept momentum high and prevented sessions from being derailed by highly technical questions. 

From there, pladis moved beyond individual productivity toward process-level impact. It drew on Microsoft Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and Power BI to digitize recurring workflows and create purpose-built agents. 

For example, at the pladis site in Carlisle, home to one of the world’s oldest biscuit factories, the health, safety, and environment team built an AI risk-assessing agent using Copilot Studio. "It allowed us to take photos of a task being done or an area, and the AI agent would review that information, compare it to UK health and safety guidance, and give us a formatted response," explains Paul McConnell, Health, Safety and Environment Manager. 

In procurement, teams turned to agents to stay on top of fast-changing market conditions and map supply risk. "AI agents are incredible," says Usman Zafar, Global Procurement Manager. "They help me a lot with managing market insight in real time, with all publicly available data in one place." 

Results that beat the target

The impact was fast and measurable. The first cohort set out to reclaim 10 hours per person per month. Of the 70 people trained, 48 completed all masterclasses and the productivity gain tracker. Together, they reported saving 580 hours a month, averaging just over 12 hours each, with some colleagues reporting savings as high as 20 hours a month.  At Carlisle, the safety agent alone saved an estimated 800 hours each year.

Just as important as the numbers was the shift in mindset. What began with hesitation became genuine enthusiasm, with employees identifying new use cases and advocating for AI across their departments. Proof that the culture had changed, not just the tooling. “There was a fear around AI,” admits Gülşen. “Now we’ve turned it into a completely positive environment.” 

Unlocking end-to-end capabilities with Microsoft AI

With the model proven, pladis is scaling enterprise-wide, expanding Copilot and Power Platform to new cohorts, regions and functions, and evolving its licensing to unlock more advanced AI and security capabilities. "Rather than focusing on one individual task, we want to look into the end-to-end process as a whole," explains Zafar. 

As it looks to the future, pladis is keeping its heritage firmly in view. "We need to protect our brands so they continue to be trusted and protect our relationship with our customers," says Otluoglu. "Our focus is to increase AI literacy across the organization and modernize how we work today without losing what makes us distinctive and agile."

Discover more about pladis Global.