Enabling real-time multi-employee collaboration at Microsoft with Copilot Pages

Copilot Pages is a dynamic, persistent canvas in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat designed for multiplayer collaboration. With Pages, you can turn Copilot responses into durable insights with a side-by-side page that you can edit and, when you’re ready, share with your team to collaborate.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re using Copilot Pages to develop collaborative practices with AI that drive innovation in a secure and compliant environment. With Copilot Pages, we’re taking individual productivity gains we get from AI and making them available to the rest of our organization.

We’re using Copilot Pages to transform our Copilot responses into content that is:

• Persistent: We’re saving and editing our Pages-generated content, making it durable and reusable. We use Copilot Pages frequently in the brainstorming and ideation process. Pages provides a unified and flexible canvas for gathering, creating, and refining content.
• Shareable: We’re easily sharing the content we create with our team through a link or directly in Teams, Outlook, or the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Collaborators can work directly on the content, getting it ready for final project materials created in Word or PowerPoint.
• Multiplayer: We’re using Pages to work collaboratively with our teammates and see everyone’s contributions in real-time. Pages provides a hub for content collaboration, where multiplayer stakeholders can use AI and draft content together in real-time.

Generative AI has joined the chat with Copilot Pages

With Copilot Pages, human to AI interactions come to life. We see collaborative prompting as the next great step forward in evolving Copilot from an individual, point-in-time exercise into a collaborative experience.

“Copilot Pages provides an important bridge between creation and collaboration in Copilot Chat,” says Chhavi Chopra, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital. Chopra’s team is responsible for deployment and adoption of Copilot features for Microsoft employees. “With Copilot Pages, you can take the result that Copilot Chat provides and continue the content creation and refinement process.”

Copilot Pages inserts generative AI into the flow of collaborative work in Microsoft 365. Copilot Pages turns a Copilot Chat response into an editable canvas that not only enables teams to create and refine content, but it also allows multiple users to work with the results at the same time in a collaborative space, on the web, mobile, or in Teams. It provides an answer to a question that often arises with generative AI results: “OK, now what do I do with this?”

Copilot’s AI features don’t end when the result is in Pages. When you’re there, you can use the Copilot capability in Pages to create content, rewrite existing content, summarize sections, and even transform content into dynamic components like tables, checklists, charts, and more.

Chopra’s team has fully deployed Pages to all of Microsoft, but successful deployment wasn’t just about enabling a feature. Adoption and change management practices were critical for the Pages rollout. Tom Heath was part of the team responsible for ensuring that Copilot Pages was adopted effectively at Microsoft.

“Copilot Pages is another piece of creating an employee-centric experience with Copilot,” Heath says. “It lets you seamlessly modify, share, and collaborate on any Copilot Chat result, which means ideas that start in Copilot Chat are solidified and developed more quickly using Pages.”

Heath’s team is demonstrating to Microsoft employees how they can capture and summarize essential information and create cohesive content rather than combing through the results of numerous searches.

Whether it’s generating agendas, ideating on a project plan, researching new processes, or creating content, context-driven AI across Copilot Chat and Copilot Pages streamlines these interactions to produce usable and shareable results quickly.

Early adopters of Copilot Pages show the way

The adoption practices used for Copilot Pages are reused across new Copilot features at Microsoft. Heath and his team use a Copilot Champs program to build an early adopter community and provide peer mentoring opportunities for features like Copilot Pages.

“Copilot changes quickly, and we’ve had incredible results with our Champs program. Our Champs are the first and best adopters among a larger group of first and best adopters,” he says. “They not only help educate their peers on features and capabilities, but they increase adoption and effective use by demonstrating the use cases that are working well for them.”

Effective Champs supplement help desk and support systems, too, with employee leaders acting as trusted advisors to their peers. They provide valuable feedback on Copilot feature enablement across many areas. Here’s just a few ways that Champs have helped with adoption of Copilot Pages at Microsoft Digital:

• Creating the groundswell of enthusiasm that grows adoption
• Building a circle of influence among their teams
• Bringing new ways of working with Copilot Pages to life across teams
• Identifying business challenges and possible solutions
• Providing feedback about Copilot Pages to the project team and sponsors
• Reducing strain on the core project team through active, ongoing engagement

The entire team uses an extensive set of listening and feedback mechanisms to stay apprised of successes and challenges with Copilot Pages.

“A lot of our early feedback wasn’t overwhelmingly positive,” Chopra says. “People were unsure of how they would use it, where the use cases were. It was important for us to understand that feedback and respond with information and use cases that demonstrated how Pages could improve their Copilot usage and make them more efficient creating and sharing content with Pages.”

Chopra sees even broader and more effective use of Copilot Pages in the near future with several important feature improvements on the roadmap. Soon you’ll be able to reference Copilot Pages artifacts in Copilot Chat prompts and use Copilot Chat directly in the Copilot Pages canvas to create content and ask questions about the page content. It’s another step into effective AI collaboration at Microsoft, and we’re excited to be part of it.