When we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft, we thought it would save time for our employees and vendors, and it has, especially with the help of Copilot Chat.
With a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, Copilot Chat becomes more powerful with its ability to bring together your web and work data as your front door to Copilot. It’s accessible within the flow of where you work, including in your Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Teams, Outlook, and Edge sidebar.
“It allows you to get ahead of all the noise that’s all around you,” says Swapna Malekar, co-lead for deployment of Copilot Chat and a principal product lead in Enterprise Search on our Microsoft Digital team, the company’s IT organization. “It’s about creating a coherent experience wherever you go—whether it’s your emails, your chats, your documents, your people, your calendars, your meetings, each and every entity type is covered under Copilot Chat.”
In short, Copilot Chat, a key path for accessing Copilot, simplifies your life at work, so you have time to think and get high-value tasks done.
Today, our employees and vendors are using Copilot Chat to get summaries of their emails, meetings, and messages; to check Teams mentions; to manage their inboxes; and to make graphics and illustrations. They’re using it to create documents and set up meeting agendas. They’re using it to draft documents, augment content, and do simple searches.
But to get these benefits, we first had to ready our employees for the change.
Employees wanted ‘more and more’ Microsoft 365 Copilot
Malekar and Anishkumar Thoppil Ramakrishnan, director of product management on the Microsoft Search team in Microsoft Digital, co-led the initial deployment pilot in May 2023, when 2,000 of our employees in sales roles were trained to use the product. Microsoft Digital used different scenarios and use cases to show that group of employees the value of Copilot and Copilot Chat.
“People were loving it more than we thought,” Thoppil Ramakrishnan says. “They wanted more and more because they were seeing the benefits.”
By October 2023, the number of internal users rose to 25,000 when our legal and marketing teams were onboarded, and in February 2024 our company-wide rollout was completed.
Driving adoption of a powerful, easy-to-use tool
The impact of Copilot Chat was almost immediate and transformational. And as Copilot Chat usage grew, so did the focus on accuracy and reliability. We in Microsoft Digital studied the rollout closely, evaluating overall user experience and the product’s accuracy, reliability, completeness, relevancy, personalization, coherency, consistency, and ability to evolve. Of equal importance, we also compared how well it surfaced and shared workplace information.
While usage was high, the deployment team remained cautious, especially as some employees wanted more accuracy for the information Copilot Chat was gathering.
“We have to help employees use Copilot Chat to find information, but at the same time, we have to be cautious,” Ramakrishnan says. But over time, the model continued to learn and improve. And with it, accuracy and user confidence went up. “They trust it more now.”
No longer having to focus on the mundane
Advancements haven’t just focused on accuracy, but product refinements and feature releases that empower our employees to do more.
“As an employee, as a user, you want to work on the most high-priority items,” Malekar says. “Copilot Chat can help you with the mundane tasks and free up your time to think more strategically and be more effective in your communication with your stakeholders.”
Our employees can automate their favorite prompts and share them with their colleagues using a feature that will become widely available in the coming months. If they create a useful Copilot prompt and want to keep using it, they can save and automate the prompt by asking Copilot to run it for them later. The prompt can be scheduled to run at set times and frequencies.
This spring, the team is releasing a new feature called Rewrite, which allows users to edit typed text for tone, format, and length within an open page in Microsoft Edge. Last year we introduced Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration that our employees are now using to turn Copilot responses into editable and sharable pages. This gives users a digital place for generating, organizing and refining content in real-time.
And the product is improving rapidly, so if it can’t do something thing one day, chances are it will be able to do it the next.
This is just the start
It takes time to build new habits.
“That’s the journey we’re on,” says Tom Heath, senior business program manager for Microsoft Digital. “It’s a natural migration, and our employees are getting there.”
Malekar believes Copilot Chat needs to be extended to include more data, domain types, and knowledge sources. In the meantime, it’s becoming more personalized—and effective—through the actions of its users.
Heath is one of our employees who uses Copilot Chat every day.
“There’s always a file or a conversation or something that’s happened and I can’t find it in Teams or Outlook,” Heath says. “I just put a prompt into Copilot Chat, and there it is.”
Copilot Chat will continue to evolve at the speed of AI and the product team is continuing to share the learnings it hears from employees back to the product group. That feedback is used to make rapid and iterative improvements to the product, turning Copilot Chat into an even more user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use tool.
“Our employees are finding wonderful and clever ways to use Copilot Chat,” Malekar says. “They are doing things with it that we never expected—it really has fueled their creativity. It’s changing the way we use and think about technology.”
Here are our suggestions for getting the most out of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company:
- Use Copilot Chat to help your employees quickly find and use information buried in documents, presentations, emails, calendar invitations, notes, and contacts.
- Your employees can use it wherever they work, as it’s woven into m365copilot.com, Teams, Edge, Windows, Outlook, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. If this link doesn’t work for you, feel free to remove the link and just use the text.
- It will save your employees much needed work time to focus on core work. In a three-month period during its deployment, Copilot Chat saved our employees 900,000 hours.
- Your use rates will go up when employees realize the best way to get to value is to change the way they work.
- Teaching your employees how to prompt Copilot Chat is key—our employees reported its usefulness went up when they learned how to write effective prompts.
