Enabling meaningful AI adoption at Microsoft with a Microsoft 365 Copilot Expo

As our employees incorporate AI into their day-to-day routines, new ways of working are emerging at Microsoft.

People are using Microsoft 365 Copilot as their personal AI assistant and employing agents to power new workflows. Meanwhile, our teams are building and deploying AI-powered solutions to meet our enterprise needs.

But advancing along the AI maturity curve means more than just adoption. It’s about fundamentally reworking our daily habits to boost productivity and empower our AI assistants to help us accomplish meaningful work.

At Microsoft, we’re dedicated to helping our employees weave Copilot and other AI tools into the fabric of their workdays. To get there, we’ve used the lessons from our early skilling efforts and our experience with peer-to-peer adoption leadership as the foundation for a new learning path.

This is the story of Copilot Expo.

A new approach to skilling

Thanks to the success of our Camp Copilot adoption efforts, we learned valuable lessons about rolling AI out across a company like ours.

We took what we learned working with our champ community and turned it into a more formal Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption program that evolved into an extended company-wide event called Copilot Expo. Our change leaders within Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, drove this three-week online skilling path with the support of our dedicated community of AI peer leaders, the Copilot Champs.

“We saw daily adoption move a lot more when we were presenting content that was bespoke to people’s roles and organizations.”

Stephan Kerametlian, business program management senior director, Microsoft Digital

As AI technology matured, we knew we needed to update our skilling offerings along with it. Some key lessons helped us make that a reality:

• AI adoption is about more than monthly active usage (MAU) and daily active usage (DAU). It’s about depth of engagement with the tools.
• Peer leadership is a must. Seeing people you know use a tool makes it much more accessible and attainable.
• Gamification was one of the most successful features of our early efforts, so we knew we needed to deepen those elements.
• Making content on-demand extends the life of an event like this, leading to easier knowledge discovery and further engagement.
• Company-wide initiatives are powerful, but divisions crave events tailored to their work, on their teams, in their disciplines.

“We saw daily adoption move a lot more when we were presenting content that was bespoke to people’s roles and organizations,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a business program management senior director within Microsoft Digital. “Copilot Expo was able to go a lot deeper into different roles and processes to make Copilot more real in people’s day-to-day jobs.”

Copilot Expo: Advancing along the AI maturity curve

Copilot Expo extended throughout three weeks, with plenty of opportunities for learning at different levels of AI maturity.

Our curriculum included three main sessions for the week. To accommodate different time zones with live presentations instead of recordings, each of those sessions took place three times across 12 hours. After each main session, breakouts expanded on their themes, highlighting different areas of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Some breakouts covered day-in-the-life scenarios that resonated with a wide cross-section of employees, but we also tailored use cases to more specific disciplines and tasks. As a result, the learning path included more role-specific breakouts like “Copilot for Product Managers,” more technical topics outside Copilot like GitHub and Azure DevOps, and more advanced learning like deep dives on prompting.

To help land the lessons for the week, we offered gamified experiences on Microsoft Viva Engage. These activities typically involved a creative prompting exercise, which participants would then share with their Viva Engage communities. As an added bonus, the social aspect helped drive further groundswell for Copilot Expo.

“Peer influence can scale further and faster than policy alone. Employees show a lot more interest in content their colleagues create than material handed down from IT or adoption professionals.”

Cadie Kneip, readiness business program manager, Microsoft Digital

The sheer number of sessions meant we needed to expand the involvement of Microsoft Digital subject matter experts and change leaders, but it was absolutely essential that we involve our Copilot Champs and maintain the peer-to-peer aspect that made Camp Copilot such a success.

Why?

Because we find that our employees respond well when a respected colleague shows them how to do something or shares why they are excited to try something new.

“Peer influence can scale further and faster than policy alone,” says Cadie Kneip, a readiness business program manager within Microsoft Digital. “Employees show a lot more interest in content their colleagues create than material handed down from IT or adoption professionals.”

When participants completed the learning path, we handed out awards, shared resources, and provided opportunities for feedback. All of these elements helped employees feel a sense of accomplishment while providing our adoption team with valuable insights.

We also updated our key metrics around Copilot usage and sentiment. To make sure these metrics demonstrated meaningful change, we tracked them for comparable periods both before and after Copilot Expo.

Gamification drives deeper engagement

When we developed the plan for Copilot Expo, we knew gamification was one of the most powerful levers we could pull. Not only does it provide a fun way for participants to practice the skills they’ve learned, but it boosts retention and uptake.

Our internal research suggests that fun and gamification amplify engagement by 24% and increase productivity by 50%. They also reduce the time it takes to form habits by 40%.

“You need to think about the activities you can do to inspire your employees to recognize the value AI can hold for their work.”

Sandra Hausfelder, global adoption lead, Microsoft Digital

One of the most exciting components was a live leaderboard featuring participants’ avatars and gamertags created using Microsoft 365 Copilot. The dashboard assigned people points when they completed different components of the curriculum, and the friendly competition boosted engagement through a sense of pride.

We also increased the number of gamified activities that took place throughout the learning path. Yet again, our presenters and peer-to-peer leaders provided essential support, and we were able to crowd-source many of these gamification ideas.

Gamified activities included:

• Creating a new digital avatar by prompting Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Building a unique superhero.
• Writing a song with Copilot’s assistance.
• Creating digital swag by designing an enamel pin.
• Going on a scavenger hunt by trying out 10 Copilot scenarios.

“You need to think about the activities you can do to inspire your employees to recognize the value AI can hold for their work,” says Sandra Hausfelder, a global adoption lead for Copilot in Microsoft Digital.

At the end of Copilot Expo, we offered MVP badges designed using Credly for everyone who completed all the necessary steps. In addition to solidifying the learning with a final motivator, providing a badge encouraged participants to share their journey with their networks, further promoting Copilot Expo as an opportunity for professional growth.

Decentralization and on-demand learning

One of the most important aspects of Copilot Expo is its capacity for extending learning opportunities beyond our centralized event series. We’re accomplishing that in two ways.

First, we make all of our Copilot Expo content available on demand as part of a persistent SharePoint page accessible to both participants and non-participants. These resources aren’t just for passive discovery. We also use them for active adoption efforts like our “Copilot Daily Discoveries” campaign on Microsoft Viva Engage.

Since the end of Copilot Expo, employees have accessed these resources thousands of times—even people who didn’t participate in the event series itself. That demonstrates a real hunger for opportunities to learn about AI.

The greatest potential impact may come from decentralizing this learning model. Company-wide events can only do so much to bridge time zones, languages, and discipline-specific scenarios.

As a result, we’ve designed a system for enabling more tailored events within individual regions and Microsoft divisions. Essentially, we’ve templatized the Copilot Expo experience, and leaders can reach out to the Microsoft Digital team to help assemble and run their own events with more customized learning paths.

Building momentum with activities

We start by conducting discovery sessions and interviews that uncover how employees might use Microsoft 365 Copilot in their roles. We also look at existing usage metrics and identify Copilot Champs who can act as advisors and ambassadors.

“We have a baseline package of material, and then we partner with organizational executives and change leaders who want to bring it to their own teams,” Kneip says. “Then we work with Copilot Champs to tailor it to their organizations.”

These focused events typically take shape as three-day learning paths. They tend to cover similar elements to the company-wide expo across the basics, leveling up, and building daily habits. The difference is that they’re highly scenario-specific.

For example, we might provide example scenarios for the Cloud + AI team, like “Give me suggestions for optimizing our next datacenter.” On engineering-heavy teams, we might focus on opportunities for AI in the software development lifecycle.

“Every mini-expo looks a little bit different because we customize it to the organization,” Hausfelder says. “We work hard to create a span of customization by looking into the details of what the organizations need us to land for their employees.”

Continuous impact through more effective adoption

Whether they’re division-based or specific to a region, these learning paths have been highly effective. In one instance, we ran a three-day event specific to Central America and the Caribbean. That led to a 15% increase in DAU and a 17% increase in week-over-week Microsoft 365 Copilot usage.

“Copilot Expo sets us up for success in the future, because it’s a delivery mechanism for employees, by employees, scaled through Copilot Champs.”

Alexandra Jones, director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

Our company-wide Copilot Expo also demonstrated substantial impact. Before-and-after tracking of key metrics over equivalent testing periods revealed substantial boosts:

• Average DAU increased substantially.
• Copilot-assisted hours climbed sharply.
• Copilot actions taken jumped significantly.
• Copilot-assisted value nearly doubled.
• The perception of the quality work done with Copilot measurably increased.

It’s a testament to the power of coordinated efforts that reach across the company as a whole and resonate with individual organizations.

“We’ve created this persistent platform as a recognizable brand for skilling, and it enables us to continue driving change,” says Alexandra Jones, a director of business programs within Microsoft Digital. “Copilot Expo sets us up for success in the future, because it’s a delivery mechanism for employees, by employees, scaled through Copilot Champs.”