Let's get real: Bringing Microsoft Copilot on board

AI is so cool right now. But being cool is no excuse for adopting any type of AI into your organisation without understanding use cases, expected business value and desired impact. Without defining what success is and what impacts you’ll measure it against, you can’t determine value.

Getting value for money from Copilot is a prime consideration for any business. To be blunt, Copilot licenses aren’t cheap, so it’s critical that when you decide to adopt, you also invest in maximising how – and how well – your people use it.

Copilot is incredibly powerful in the right hands, but like some of the most loved Microsoft productivity tools (Excel springs to mind), it requires training to get the best out of it. Simply, effort in = rewards out. (This is why when we sell Copilot, our package includes training and adoption as part of the deal).

Why build used cases?

One of the fastest (and most publicised) wins you’ll experience with Copilot is the ease with which it helps generate on-demand content. We all know that the time and effort spent writing email responses, proposals, social media posts, etc, is dramatically slashed.

But a more compelling value proposition still is building use cases that align with roles within your business.

For example, if you’re rolling out Copilot to your sales or support teams, you’ll want to ensure that Copilot supports the role-specific needs of the team members. So, you want it to work with emails, customer data from the CRM, potentially your ERP for sales data, your help desk, and your contact centre for recent interactions.

Then, you can sit your teams down and say, “This is how we’ve set up Copilot to make life easier for you. Here are the use cases, and this is how we expect you to use it to get value out of the system.”

Use case examples could include:

• Here’s how to get Copilot to summarise all a customer’s recent interactions before you call them – and without exiting your current application
• Here’s how to ask Copilot to draft an email to a customer following up on a specific opportunity
• Here’s how to ask Copilot to provide you with a list of must-do tasks you’ve been allocated while a teammate is away on leave
• Here’s how to ask Copilot to prioritise all your sales or support calls based on priority

The use cases can be very specific to how you do business – in fact, that’s the whole idea.

By aligning them tightly with your internal processes, they resonate with your people. This makes Copilot’s value as a tool easily discernible - and hard to resist - as users can compare and appreciate their own real-life before/after efficiency and time-saving scenarios.

As mentioned earlier, Copilot for Microsoft 365 comes at a cost ($50NZ per head per month). So, if your Copilot budget and use cases don’t stretch to every team, you’re not alone.

But it does mean you need to decide where Copilot will drive the most value for your organisation, and this will depend on your strategic goals.

If increasing your pipeline and sales is your number one focus, Copilot absolutely needs to be rolled out to your business development team. However, if improving customer satisfaction is a priority as you’re battling a high volume of complaints, call queues, and slow call resolution times, then implementing Copilot in that space makes more sense.

(If you need to be quite specific in your allocations of Copilot licences within those groups, then workers who spend a lot of time on the phone or responding to emails will realise the most benefit for the business and the team.)

Here, the value of training is incredibly important.

Driving organisational and personal productivity (and minimising low-value repetitive tasks) depends on the individual’s ability to maximise tools like Copilot. While some users may be anxious about being ‘replaced’ by AI, the reality is that the ability to use Copilot effectively is a highly desirable and valued real-world work skill (one you can expect to see on CVs of the future).

If you want to realise genuine business benefits, there are three critical steps to successfully adopting Copilot.

1. Engage your stakeholders and build a compelling WIIFM (what’s in it for me) through a change management plan
2. Define your desired business outcomes (and set up realistic benchmarks to measure them against) to measure your success
3. Deliver the training that will empower your users to maximise how they use Copilot with competence – without feeling threatened

We know that AI is a whole new (and often unreal) world for many, so we have a framework for adoption that aims to ensure continual improvement and a measurable ROI.