Across industries and companies of all sizes, people are using AI to work faster and smarter, allowing teams to spend more time on more valuable strategic work. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are leading the way, using Microsoft 365 Copilot to streamline workflows, boost productivity, and drive growth. Their nimble, innovative and hands-on approaches offer practical, adaptable examples of AI processes that can inspire businesses of all sizes.
SMBs may differ from larger companies in size and scope, but their successes come down to their strategies, not their scale, offering methods that many can adopt and learn from. Plus, they show how Copilot can scale to meet diverse business needs, offering a practical guide for adoption—whether you’re a startup, a growing business, or an enterprise testing new innovations.
Benefits of early Copilot adoption
SMBs have shown how quickly adapting to new technology, like Copilot, can lead to real, tangible results. By making AI a part of their day-to-day work, these businesses are seeing improvements in productivity, collaboration, and efficiency—outcomes that other organizations can apply to their own AI journeys.
Speed up time to market
Copilot helps businesses across industries bring their ideas to life and get them to the finish line more quickly. In fact, The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMBs, a Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft, found that a faster time to market increased topline revenue by up to 6% for surveyed businesses.1
Here are a few ways SMBs are using Copilot to streamline workflows and boost productivity:
- Draft and summarize content: Morula Health uses Copilot in Word to summarize complex scientific data tables, cutting content creation time from weeks to days while meeting stringent industry standards for accuracy and reliability. Employees can dedicate more time and effort to data analysis, ultimately improving the quality of the final output.
- Analyze customer feedback: PKSHA Technology relies on Copilot in Microsoft Teams to analyze customer feedback and identify trends in product development, speeding up delivery timelines and minimizing delays for product delivery.
- Develop campaign briefs: Marketing teams like that of Newman’s Own rely on Copilot in Word, to help create campaign briefs in as little as 30 minutes—a task that previously took up to three hours. The team can now react more quickly to social trends with new campaigns.
Drive efficiency with assistance from Copilot
One of the key advantages of Copilot is its ability to help teams manage repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Businesses can turn to Copilot to speed up routine tasks, such as drafting reports, summarizing information, and managing schedules. These automations can not only save time but also help reduce the risk of errors, helping teams to direct their energy toward creative problem-solving and innovation.
Copilot can also deliver measurable cost savings. For example, the Forrester study revealed that surveyed businesses saved on operating costs (59% saw these costs decrease by between 1% and 20%) and supply chain costs (51% of businesses reported reductions between 1% and 10%).1
These are some ways Copilot can help increase efficiency:
- Automate manual tasks: At British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) employees use Copilot to generate notes and summaries, allowing the team to have more focused discussions and effective problem-solving. Employees also report a boost in productivity (between 10% and 20%), thanks to faster, more efficient financial analysis and improved decision-making processes.
- Streamline data management: Employees at Floww use Copilot to bring together technical, financial, and regulatory data from Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook into one easy-to-understand format. Copilot can help to summarize and cross-reference complex financial and regulatory documents, acting like a “shared brain” that removes bottlenecks and speeds up project timelines. This helps Floww deliver innovative financial solutions faster and more efficiently.
- Improve inventory management: The Rider Firm, which creates and distributes performance bike products, uses Copilot in Excel to help automate the consolidation of product specifications, allowing the team to standardize and organize data more efficiently. This not only helps them keep their website up to date but also makes it easier for customers to quickly locate the exact bicycle parts they needed.
- Create personalized experiences: Healthcare and wellness organizations like Sensei are using Copilot to enhance patient care by pulling vetted data on approved wellness practices from SharePoint and other connected apps. Copilot combines this information into tailored recommendations, ensuring a personalized experience for each patient, allowing healthcare professionals to spend more time focusing on patient outcomes.
Optimize workflows with Copilot
Beyond automating tasks, AI can transform workflows and boost efficiency. With Copilot, businesses can map out their operations, streamline repetitive steps, and empower teams to work more effectively. Here are three examples of how Copilot helps transform key business areas:
- Personalize sales pitches with Copilot in PowerPoint: Joos uses Copilot in PowerPoint to keep its sales decks fresh and targeted, saving time while enhancing the customer experience with tailored materials. Employees now have more time to focus on fostering relationships with new customers.
- Improve customer management with Copilot in Excel: The customer success teams at PKSHA Technology use Copilot in Excel to identify trends in their data in less than an hour, a task that used to take three or four. This efficiency allows teams to deliver insights and recommendations to clients more rapidly, improving satisfaction and fostering long-term relationships.
- Multilingual collaboration with Copilot Teams: Global collaboration is simplified with Copilot in Teams, which can be used to transcribe and translate meeting notes for distributed teams across continents. This ensures that employees stay informed without needing to attend every meeting. At Joos, for example, team members use the automatic translation feature to localize meeting recaps into other languages, enhancing communication. As a result, they can make decisions faster and streamline project management.
Provide training and support to maximize impact
Effective training is key to getting the most out of Copilot. The focus should be on hands-on, role-specific learning to help employees understand how to incorporate Copilot into their daily routines. Plus, with ongoing support like in-app tutorials, resources, and workshops, employees can keep refining their skills and continue using Copilot throughout their workflows.
Optimize business processes
Adopting Copilot isn’t a one-time process. It’s important to regularly assess how it’s being used, find areas where it’s creating value, and identify opportunities to improve. By tracking usage and gathering employee feedback, businesses can refine how they use Copilot, identifying where automation saves time and where additional support could increase adoption.
Get started with these training resources
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Adoption Playbook: Plan your rollout with a step-by-step guide for business leaders.
- Copilot Success Kit: Get an implementation framework and how-to resources.
- Copilot Prompt Gallery: Find examples of Copilot prompts to try and get tips for making them effective.
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Learn from others’ successes
The successes that SMBs have had with Copilot highlight strategies that businesses of any size can adopt. By taking a look at these examples, organizations can uncover ways to optimize their processes, use automation effectively, and achieve meaningful results.
Explore how Copilot can fit into your organization’s strategy. Jump-start your AI transformation with best practices and insights. Learn more about Copilot.
Sources:
1 “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™: Of Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMB,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. Results are based on Microsoft 365 Copilot customer interviews and surveys of over 200 companies with up to 300 employees across various industries, from retail to financial services.
