Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage at Microsoft

Microsoft Viva Engage is a critical tool for communicating with our employees internally here at Microsoft.

It’s where our employees go to have two-way dialogue, our leaders use it to engage with their teams, and it’s how we listen and respond to our employees at scale.

It was a major milestone internally at Microsoft when we brought Microsoft 365 Copilot to Viva Engage, first launched in the spring and expanded in September.

“Copilot in Viva Engage is allowing us to bring the power of generative AI to our employees where they are,” says Ife Kolawole, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Our employees are using it to more easily discover conversations and topics that they’re interested in.”

With Copilot added in, it has become even more useful to our employees.

“It used to be that staying informed meant manually scrolling through updates to piece together what mattered,” says Soumik Maji, who leads customer feedback and go-to-market efforts for Copilot in Viva Engage for the Microsoft Viva product group. “As a user, I’d need to manually scroll through all the posts, pick communities I’m interested in, and try to keep up. Even with prioritization, it could be overwhelming.”

That’s no longer the case with Copilot in Engage.

“The Copilot feature enables users to get a quick summary of the conversations and comments across all communities.”

Soumik Maji, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

Now employees can quickly catch up on all the communications they have access to across their community feeds, home feed, and posts from leaders. Copilot gives them real-time, comprehensive summaries of what’s most relevant to them, eliminating hours of manual scrolling and reading.

And because the process is fully automated, people can surface key insights with just a single click.

“The Copilot feature enables users to get a quick summary of the conversations and comments across all communities,” Maji says. “For example, if Satya Nadella shares a post about a major company initiative, Copilot helps me quickly understand the sentiment of all the comments and highlights the main themes being discussed.”

The leader’s perspective

Here at Microsoft, leaders use Viva Engage to connect and listen to employees. However with the volume and scale of information that is shared, they also need a way to listen and respond to what matters most.  

“Now with Copilot in Engage, I can instantly see what’s trending, understand how it connects to my team’s priorities, and communicate authentically. I can address feedback from employees based on these conversations from Copilot in our next All hands, or with a post in our community.”

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president, Viva Engage

Staying connected required scrolling through feeds and piecing together context.

That’s changing.

“Now with Copilot in Engage, I can instantly see what’s trending, understand how it connects to my team’s priorities, and communicate authentically,” says Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president for Viva Engage. “I can address feedback from employees based on these conversations from Copilot in our next All hands, or with a post in our community.”

It’s another effective way that we’re bringing Copilot to where our employees—and our customers—are living at work.

“Powered by organizational data, Copilot is evolving from a helpful assistant into a true strategic partner-one that helps me inspire, inform, and engage at scale,” Sitaram says.

Powering Corporate Communications with Viva Engage

Community engagement in Viva Engage started with thoughtful, but manual processes that built strong connections. Now Copilot in Engage elevates those efforts with intelligence and time-saving tactics.

“We would have to dig through hundreds of comments and posts to get an idea of what employees were engaging with. It was a lot of effort, especially when trying to respond or adjust strategy in real time.”

Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand, Microsoft

Amy Morris, director of global employee and executive communications and employer brand, and John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications, describe how challenging and resource-intensive it was for their Corporate Communications team to connect with employees across the company.  

“We would have to dig through hundreds of comments and posts to get an idea of what employees were engaging with,” Morris says. “It was a lot of effort, especially when trying to respond or adjust strategy in real time.”

Morris and Cirone oversee global communications for all employees across the company and lead the Global Executive and Employee Communications team (GEEC), which supports communicators throughout Microsoft as they work to scale the company’s internal communications. They invested time thoughtfully reviewing conversations and tracking sentiment to understand what mattered most to employees.

This often left Viva Engage community managers relying on intuition and scattered anecdotal feedback. Decisions about content and engagement were slow, driven by guesswork, and difficult to scale. Now Copilot accelerates that process with AI.

“Before Copilot, we had manual efforts for community management, like analyzing trends and themes, which meant a lot of manual effort for community management,” Morris says. “But now Copilot helps by providing insights from community conversations, sentiment analysis, and content suggestions for leaders. We can easily see what’s trending, which helps us be more responsive.”

Staying connected to what matters most

Community managers must stay closely connected to the audiences they serve, and one of the most effective ways to achieve this is by providing accurate and thoughtful responses to the questions that matter most to them.

“As a community manager, I can appreciate a huge time savings, since Copilot helps by surfacing answers to frequently asked questions,” Morris says. “It gives a first-pass answer based on the resources available in the community and has been a huge help in reducing manual work.”

With Copilot in Viva Engage, much of this responsiveness is seamlessly automated.

“The insights we get from Copilot, like understanding what employees are discussing, have been incredibly useful. They help us tune into the conversations that matter most, and with real-time feedback, we can adjust our strategy quickly. It’s all about listening and responding at scale to employees.”

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications, Microsoft

Copilot also helps leaders create content by suggesting relevant topics based on community sentiment. This is a major time-saver and helps our teams focus their content creation efforts on what employees are most engaged with.

“The insights we get from Copilot, like understanding what employees are discussing, have been incredibly useful,” Cirone says. “They help us tune into the conversations that matter most, and with real-time feedback, we can adjust our strategy quickly. It’s all about listening and responding at scale to employees.”

For communicators working across multiple platforms, Copilot offers a seamless way to pull together the information they need to create posts that are timely, relevant, and meaningful. Its ability to tailor content for the right audience is especially helpful for leaders sharing updates with their teams or the broader organization.

“We want to be able to find those conversations and use that feedback to make improvements.”

Eva Etchells, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

Still, one of the biggest hurdles is often just getting the first words on the page.

“Employees often experience writer’s block when trying to craft a message,” Maji says. “Copilot helps by pulling together the relevant information from your Microsoft Graph, your emails, meetings, and Teams chats, and uses that data to generate a tailored post. Whether you’re summarizing your week’s work or sharing a company initiative, Copilot gives you the structure and content you need.”

IT Communications and community content

In Microsoft Digital, we often run marketing campaigns and promotions in Viva Engage to let employees know about new features that we’d like them to try or other similar updates. For example, we might encourage them to try a new Copilot feature or inform them about an upcoming change that they will need to make to their PCs.

Our goal is always to raise awareness and encourage adoption, but we also want feedback. While employees do provide feedback within apps, they also often go to Viva Engage to post about their issue or complaint.

“We want to be able to find those conversations and use that feedback to make improvements,” says Eva Etchells, a senior content program manager within Microsoft Digital.

Copilot in Viva Engage is also helping the IT Communications team identify important trends that they should respond to.

“Copilot’s features can help us track trending topics and identify common questions. It gives us a better understanding of what people are asking about and helps us provide more targeted responses.”

Sarah Lundy, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

For example, Sarah Lundy, a senior content program manager for Microsoft Digital, is currently working on communications for the Employee Self-Service Agent that supports HR, help desk, and campus services.

She’s using Copilot in Viva Engage to gather community feedback on the agent, to quickly consolidate that feedback into actionable insights, to summarize the top themes that it calls out, and to generate content based on those insights.

“It’s a huge time-saver,” Lundy says.

Lundy also manages a community called “TechConnect,” where employees can bring their questions about Microsoft Digital.

“Copilot’s features can help us track trending topics and identify common questions,” Lundy says. “It gives us a better understanding of what people are asking about and helps us provide more targeted responses.”

With faster, more accurate insights, the IT Communications Team and the individual employees who lead Viva Engage communities can both more easily stay responsive to the needs of each community at the company.

“If I need to create an FAQ or a content piece based on what’s trending in a particular community, Copilot can help pull all that information together and save me time,” Lundy says. “I’m excited to see how it will help me stay on top of community conversations, especially as things ramp up.”