Amber Hickman |
Canadian cloud solution provider Softchoice has reduced the time it takes to summarise meetings by 75 per cent following the adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365.
The firm decided to embrace generative artificial intelligence tools at scale to benefit its employees and customers.
“Early on in our AI journey, we recognised the value of conversational AI tools and made sure to guide our team members to use these tools in a safe and secure way,” said Matt Vasil, director of emerging technologies at Softchoice. “Implementing Copilot for Softchoice employees was a natural extension of that. When it was released, we expanded our AI policy to allow our team to use these tools to transform their work in new ways, while ensuring they had the understanding, support and guidance needed through regular training sessions and feedback channels for success.”
Softchoice took a user-centric approach that involved examining its workforce as a whole and identifying the main skills and tasks where Copilot could benefit employees. As a result, it developed five key personas: the seller, the delivery agent, the content creator, the analyst and the people manager. Softchoice then enlisted more than 50 employees across these personas to use Copilot for three weeks to gain insights and feedback into their experiences.
The pilot test found that Copilot helped to reduce the time it takes to make presentations by 62 per cent, to develop eLearning modules by 70 per cent, to review bid proposals by 50 per cent and to summarise meetings by 75 per cent.
“People are most engaged at work when they’re spending time on challenging and fulfilling activities,” said Amy Hansen, director of customer success and advisory services at Softchoice. “Copilot for Microsoft 365 adoption has been key to ensuring my team spends less time on administrative tasks such as meeting minutes, action items and follow-ups. Multiple people shared with me how much of a time saver Copilot was and how it allowed them to focus more on client conversations and engagement rather than notes.”