Laura Hyde |
Organisations are adopting Microsoft Copilots to “empower human achievement, democratise intelligence and realise significant business value”, according to Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft.
In a blog post on Microsoft’s website, Althoff expresses pride over Microsoft’s products and the partner ecosystem’s co-innovation approach, saying “we are helping [organisations] make real progress in ways that matter”. Althoff also shares some customer stories that illustrate how Copilots have yielded results in the previous quarter.
Accenture and Avanade rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot to employees, which increased productivity, with 52 per cent of employees seeing a positive impact on the quality of their work and 31 per cent reporting less cognitive fatigue. Accenture also piloted GitHub Copilot, which resulted in 95 per cent of developers reporting they enjoyed coding more.
Access Holdings adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot to address challenges in data management, meeting productivity and software development as it grew from a small Nigerian bank to a major multinational holding company. The company reported “significantly enhanced” efficiency and engagement, with code writing now taking just two hours compared with eight hours previously. Copilot adoption has also driven a 25 per cent increase in staff engagement during meetings.
The City of Burlington in Ontario, Canada, adopted AI and low-code tools with the aim of improving resident services and reinventing customer engagement. It developed online services to automate internal processes and, in just eight weeks, created and launched a custom copilot to help residents quickly find answers to frequently asked questions using Copilot Studio. It also introduced a portal to streamline building permit reviews, which reduced the average time taken to process a permit approval from 15 weeks to between five and seven weeks.
Since integrating Copilot, the marketing team at financial services software applications provider Finastra has reduced time to market for campaigns from three months to less than one, automated numerous tasks, improved analytics and personalised customer interactions. Employees also cited a 20 to 50 per cent time saving for generating and gathering insights from each marketing campaign.
Engineering teams at Indonesian technology infrastructure and solutions provider GoTo Group adopted GitHub Copilot, which provides real-time code suggestions, chat assistance and breakdowns of complex coding concepts. It has led to a saving of over seven hours per week and achieved a 30 per cent code acceptance rate within the first month.
South Africa’s Milpark Education has migrated its back-office infrastructure to Azure thanks to close collaboration with Enterprisecloud. This three-month project replaced Milpark’s legacy student admissions system with a digital platform powered by technologies such as Copilot and Copilot Studio. After four months the institution has improved efficiency, increased the accuracy of student support and achieved a 50 per cent reduction in the average student query resolution time.
Teladoc Health has deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Power Automate to automate mundane daily processes, saving employees five hours per week, as well as thousands of enterprise hours annually. Staff can also now spend more time enhancing the client experience.
Energy company Uniper has adopted a single-cloud strategy with Azure and implemented Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce the time employees spend on manual and repetitive tasks. The company’s inhouse auditors have already increased productivity by 80 per cent by using Copilot to create plans and checklists. It is also utilising Copilot for Security to help identify risks twice as fast and take appropriate action sooner.
Global telecommunications company Vodafone is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 68,000 employees following trials that identified an average saving of three hours per week per employee if the tool was used to draft emails, summarise meetings and search for information. Copilot has also significantly accelerated the processes of drafting new contracts for the legal and compliance team.
After participating in an early access programme, shipping and vehicle logistics company Wallenius Wilhelmsen broadly adopted Microsoft Copilot 365 to help streamline processes, enhance data management and improve communication across 28 countries. Following a seven-week Microsoft Viva campaign, 80 per cent of employees are now using Copilot, with some teams reporting a 30-minute time saving each day.
“I believe that no other company has a better foundation to facilitate your AI Transformation than Microsoft,” said Althoff. “As we look ahead to Microsoft Ignite, I am excited by the latest innovation we will announce as a company, and the customer and partner experiences we will share. We remain committed to driving innovation that creates value in ways that matter most to our customers, and believe we are at our best when we serve others.”