Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft

We have deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to nearly all our employees and vendors at Microsoft. As Customer Zero, we are the first enterprise to do so at scale. As of this week, nearly everyone at the company has it.

We’re seeing immediate and wide-ranging benefits.

“Our employees are putting it to work for them right away,” says Claire Sisson, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the internal IT organization at Microsoft. “It immediately starts giving you smart insights that help you get on top of your work.”

So, what is Microsoft 365 Copilot, exactly?

It’s our new productivity solution that uses the power of AI and large language models (LLMs) to help us be more productive. It’s part of our Microsoft 365 Copilot offering that creates a single, seamless user experience across Microsoft 365, Copilot in Windows, Bing, the Microsoft Cloud, and other Microsoft applications.

Here at Microsoft, we got Microsoft 365 Copilot early as part of our role as the company’s Customer Zero, which allows us to test our products at enterprise scale.

“We’re pioneers in using AI in our products,” says Sisson, who is leading the rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft. “We’re the first enterprise in the world to launch Copilot at scale, and we’re capturing a ton of insights.”

Sharing the feedback that we get from our early adopters is helping the company create the best possible version of Microsoft 365 Copilot for our customers.

“We’re learning so much,” Sisson says. “We’re learning how to deploy it at enterprise scale, how to make sure we put in the right protections for our employees and for Microsoft, and then ensuring our employees start using it in productive ways that reap all the new benefits of Copilot.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot gets its power from seamlessly integrating with data in Microsoft 365 Graph and the various Microsoft 365 applications and services that we all—our employees and our customers—use to get work done, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

It helps you in numerous ways, ranging from summarizing action items from an important meeting, to helping you conduct on-the-spot analysis of data that has just come your way, to instantly crafting high quality content that helps you land an important project.

“Its capacity to boost productivity and produce high quality work for our employees enables them to dedicate their attention to their core work and big aspirations,” Sisson says. “And frankly, that’s what’s happening—our employees are getting time back to work on the things they love, and that’s the high value work that drives this company forward.”

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Succeeding as Customer Zero

We know that Microsoft 365 Copilot is evolving day by day. As the company’s IT organization, we work to understand those changes, document them, and translate them into communications and readiness assets for our employees. As we work to build a better product, the speed of these cycles accelerates awareness and improvement.

Microsoft 365 Copilot brings a robust list of new capabilities to each Microsoft 365 application.

“We’re constantly engaging our employees,” Sisson says. “Every application within Microsoft 365 has its own product team developing Copilot features and experiences. We’re working with these teams to provide valuable feedback, and while doing that, we, like our customers, benefit from the product getting better and better.”

As the company’s Customer Zero, it’s our job to make sure that our products are human-centric, and that using them makes sense in consistent and coherent ways. Culture, religion, and political beliefs are a few considerations that we’re using to evaluate how Microsoft 365 Copilot is working for and interacts with our employees. To help with this, Copilot is available in eight languages with a plan to add more shortly.

“The level of complexity that we’re dealing with is very high,” Sisson says. “We’re capturing and responding to very diverse feedback from employees who are spread across the globe.”

We also prioritize trust, security, and compliance. We’re working with the product teams, a broad set of regulatory bodies, and regional works councils to ensure that we’re looking out for the best interests of our employees and our company.

“The true potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot lies not just in its current capabilities but in its future possibilities,” Sisson says.

By continuously integrating feedback, staying attuned to global best practices, and harnessing the latest in AI research, Microsoft 365 Copilot is poised to redefine the boundaries of workplace productivity.

Works council collaboration

One of the ways we provide valuable Customer Zero feedback to the product group is via our partnership with our works councils in the European Union. They’re currently helping us examine the regulatory and ethical boundaries for Copilot usage across the company. Our works councils and other employee representation groups are providing valuable feedback on how AI should work to augment human capabilities, not replace them. They’re evaluating our internal deployment and considering Microsoft 365 Copilot use cases to ensure compliance with local laws as well as how AI can increase productivity and job satisfaction among their members. They’ve also provided critical insights that help us respect cultural nuances and ensure language accessibility.

“Our strong relationship with our works council in Germany helped us get the approvals we needed to deploy Copilot quickly,” says Anna Kopp, director of business programs for Microsoft Digital in Germany. “Because of our proactive outreach, our works council almost immediately moved into a state of ‘tolerance’ for Copilot—which basically means that they haven’t blessed it, but they’re not blocking it either.”

It was about working together early and often.

“We gave our works council members early access to Microsoft 365 Copilot so they could test it and give feedback,” Kopp says. “Their feedback helped us improve the product in numerous ways, especially around potential uses for behavioral assessment, which is not allowed in Germany. Giving them early access enhanced trust and enabled them to help us improve the product for all our customers with works councils.”

Getting governance right

While AI technology has recently generated considerable attention and excitement, questions and concerns also exist. Our teams have strong governance measures in place that aim to protect our employees and the company while not getting in the way of our powerful new AI tools. We build trust and are transparent with our employees as part of adhering to our Responsible AI and governance guidelines and are committed to working with our global employees who are represented by labor unions and works councils.

“It’s important that our employees—and the larger Microsoft 365 Copilot user base—understand that we’re implementing AI as an enhancer and accelerator, not a replacer,” Sisson says. “Successful use of AI lies in helping humans make better decisions, not in replacing those decisions altogether.”

We’ve done a lot of work to put strong governance measures in place here at Microsoft, and that early work is helping us to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot quickly.

“Microsoft 365 Copilot governance and compliance lies within the underlying data that it uses to deliver its insights and take action,” says David Johnson, the principal PM architect in Microsoft Digital who leads our governance efforts. “The data discovery that Copilot does is built on a good data governance structure. We have strong permission systems in place that make sure our AI tools don’t share insights based on data that an employee shouldn’t have access to.”

Johnson and his team are working with the Microsoft 365 Copilot product teams to ensure that these data governance practices and standards are used across all Copilot deployments. This includes deploying governance measures—highlighted by our robust and matrixed labeling measures—designed to prevent oversharing of data, to educate employees on appropriate AI use cases, and to continually assess how Copilot uses our data and how we use the data that Copilot is serving up to us.

“It’s all working together to create an environment where Microsoft 365 Copilot can be a trusted, practical companion for productivity and empowerment for our employees,” Johnson says.

Showcasing the power of AI

Getting Microsoft 365 Copilot in the hands of our employees is only the first step—now we want to get them to start using it in the flow of their work. It’s about showing them that they can use it to do more high-level work and have more impact by doing things for them like analyzing Excel data sets and creating PowerPoint presentations from Word documents.

We use a robust, tried-and-true adoption approach built on the pillars of envisioning, where you build a strong plan for getting your employees to adopt a new product, on onboarding, where you launch your adoption effort, and on driving value, where you look to help your employees find value in your product.

Following these best practices, new users can optimize their experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot and get the most out of its capabilities. Click here to get more information on Microsoft 365 Copilot prompting.

In the end, the best way to get your employees to start using a new product like Microsoft 365 Copilot is to show them how it can make their lives better.

“Copilot represents a profound shift in how our employees are working,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a director for employee experience in Microsoft Digital. “They’re seeing benefits immediately.”

For starters, they’re now using natural language to unlock tools that have been right in front of them for a long time—they just didn’t know that they were there, or if they did, how to use them.

“Most people only use a small fraction of the features built into Microsoft 365 apps,” Kerametlian says. “Copilot users don’t need to know precisely where a feature is in the app’s interface—they don’t even need to know that it’s there. They just have to imagine what they want to accomplish, and Copilot will surface the feature for them.”

As a result, our employees are discovering new and creative ways to work.

Microsoft 365 Copilot boosts our employees’ productivity by taking care of their mundane tasks and repetitive processes. “That lets them focus on ideation, creativity, and strategy, the tasks where they can genuinely add value,” Kerametlian says.

It’s also upleveling our employees’ skill sets.

“Talking to Copilot using intuitive natural language interaction leads to easier discovery and accelerated learning,” Kerametlian says. “This makes our employees better at what they’re good at and helps them quickly become experts at what they’re learning. They can rapidly get comfortable with the handful of commands that help them learn the technology and boost their skill.”

In truth, Kerametlian says, Microsoft 365 Copilot is so powerful that it is unleashing a new era of employee creativity and productivity. “It’s such a natural thing to do, to ask it for help,” he says. “The more interesting thing will be to see what our employees do with it. We expect that we’re going to see some very creative, and surprising results.”

Look to the future

The future vision for Microsoft 365 Copilot is bright. The measure of a tool’s success isn’t just in its deployment but its adoption, utility, and the tangible impact it brings to everyday tasks. Our Customer Zero emphasis on capturing user feedback from internal teams and external customers will be instrumental in shaping how we grow into using Microsoft 365 Copilot over time.

“We’re committed to the evolution of Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft,” Sisson says. “As we move forward, our mission continues to be to facilitate a seamless, productive, and enriched work experience for our employees.”

We’re charting a path where technology and human ingenuity converge through continuous feedback, rigorous refinement, and adherence to best practices.

“We’re very excited about where we are right now,” Sisson says. “Microsoft 365 Copilot isn’t just a tool for our employees to use—it’s a testament to the future of work, a future where technology augments human potential, empowering every individual to achieve more.”