Microsoft just deployed Copilot for Microsoft
365 to over 330 ,000 employees and contractors.
Probably the largest deployment of Copilot for
M365 in the world. Now customers always ask me
for references and they want to talk to other
customers and how they've deployed Copilot. What
better customer than Microsoft itself to talk
about this? and recently Microsoft published
white papers and PowerPoint slides that you can
access that describe how they went on this journey.
I've taken a look at those documents in addition
to other documents that talk about deployment
of Copilot and in this video, in a very simplified
manner, we're going to look at the four different
stages. Number one is governance, followed by
planning and deployment, followed by adoption,
And finally, support. If you ever want to go
deeper into any of these topics, I'll provide
documentation and links from Microsoft that go
into much more detail. Now let's get started.
First, a brief overview. There are many different
flavors of Copilot, and today we're talking about
Copilot for Microsoft 365. Microsoft deployed
Copilot for M365 to 330 ,000 employees and contractors.
Now Microsoft sent out surveys and of the people
that responded 74 % said that co -pilot for M365
made them more productive and on average it saved
them about 20 minutes a day. The following challenges
were observed during deployment. Number one,
learning to delegate to AI. Most people haven't
had their own personal assistant so they're not
sure when and how to delegate to AI. Because
Copilot is essentially your own personal assistant.
Number two, learning to prompt AI. Prompt engineering
is real. The way you write your prompts and the
way you interact with Copilot takes some time
and practice to be able to get the best response
back. And number three, your usage of Copilot
is specific to your role, your job function,
the language and country so microsoft learned
this and had to do some unique things to make
sure that copilot was getting used in the most
efficient way based on those factors now let's
talk about that first section of governance and
more specifically we'll talk about tenant hygiene
see the reason why copilot can provide such amazing
responses is because it has access to data But
unlike public AI services like OpenAI that scour
the internet and provide you information that's
all public, inside your corporation, there are
probably lots of files and folders and chat messages
and SharePoint sites that you should not have
access to. Think of HR or engineering projects
that should be just focused on the teams that
are working on it. So basically you want to limit
oversharing. Oversharing content that's yours
with people that shouldn't have access to it
or people that have shared things with you that
maybe shouldn't have. So the way you do that
is by using sensitivity labels. Sensitivity labels
are labels that you can use to mark your emails,
your SharePoint sites, your files. And based
on the classification of those labels, the access
gets restricted. Another best practice is having
one SharePoint site per project. And that way
you can define who should be a member of that
SharePoint site versus using one SharePoint site
for all your projects. Another way is Microsoft
Purview. Now this application has so many different
functions and features, but one of them is DLP.
data loss prevention. So if you enable DLP, if
something happens that shouldn't, then Microsoft
Purview can kick in and provide some remediation.
And finally, there's also restricted SharePoint
search. This basically allows you to restrict
Copilot to up to 100 SharePoint sites that it
can then scour and have access to the data. So
if you haven't done the sensitivity labels and
other functions to make sure everything is in
order from a tenant hygiene perspective, then
you can leverage tools like restricted SharePoint
search to limit Copilot's access. Let's move
on to planning. In order to make sure that Copilot
was being used most effectively by employees
all around the world, Microsoft collaborated
with 12 country -specific work councils that
provided input on cultural nuances, language
access, and also ethical boundaries. Because
there are certainly differences between how privacy
and data is handled in Europe compared to the
United States. So again, this was important to
make sure that usage of Copilot was specific
to the role, language, and country. Moving on
to deployment. Initially, Microsoft did a very
targeted rollout. And to decide who would get
Copilot for Microsoft 365, business impact was
looked at. KPIs, key performance indicators.
So who would make the most business impact if
they got the initial rollout of Copilot? One
important thing was product feedback. Whoever
got Copilot had to provide product feedback so
that... the product engineering teams could keep
building and improving the product before it
became generally available now one of the groups
as a whole that got co -pilot for microsoft 365
in the beginning was it and this served multiple
purposes one microsoft knew that it was eventually
going to support its user population so it would
be important for them to have access to the tools
so they can become familiar with it and two it
was also useful for them so that they could become
productive and provide feedback so that group
got co -pilot first then department leads got
to select groups of users that they thought would
make the most business impact so it was left
up to them to select these individuals but also
notice that rollouts were made to entire teams
because microsoft understood that If you just
pick one or two people from certain groups, you
wouldn't get as much collaboration across that
team. And so it would make sense to give co -pilot
to the entire team, all 10 or 20 people, so that
they can collaborate, they can learn, they can
help each other out. And once this was all done,
then the next wave of rollout actually went to
sales and support because that was the group
that they deemed made the most business impact.
As the deployment continued and more and more
users got Copilot, the team moved into the optimization
phase, adding value with extensibility. And so
the team ended up building connectors for line
of business tools like ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday.
This allowed Copilot not to just work with Microsoft
Office applications and data sources inside the
tenant, but also third -party applications and
data sources, adding a ton of value for the end
users at Microsoft. Additionally, the teams use
Copilot Studio to embed Copilot into Ask HR,
Microsoft's HR support tool, so that when employees
opened up cases and were chatting with the bot,
they got much better responses due to Copilot
being embedded in there. Critical to the success
of Copilot was adoption. Getting users to actually
engage with Copilot, become familiar with it,
use it, love it in their everyday work. So what
Microsoft did initially was, one, generate a
ton of excitement so that end users wanted to
get Copilot, use Copilot. And number two, create
an onboarding site, a place where users can go
to initially get some training. Now, the training
was happening in different modalities. There
were videos, there were blog posts, learning
sites, and later on, there were even in -person
trainings that happened locally. And it was also
happening at different difficulty levels, beginner,
intermediate, advanced. So there was something
for everyone. And Microsoft also opened a ton
of different feedback channels so that end users
could ask questions from the product teams, but
also learn amongst each other through these different
channels. And finally, executive usage was key
because for team members to see that their executives
are also using Copilot, how they're using it
and how it simplifies their workflow was motivating
and encouraging them to use it in their work
every day as well. On the training side, there
were initially foundational trainings developed
to teach users, where can you access Copilot?
How do you use Copilot inside Word, Outlook,
PowerPoint? real basic one -on -one level courses.
Then there were Viva Learning courses as well
because Microsoft uses Viva Learning a ton and
so this was a familiar environment for end users
to go and take these types of courses. There
were also videos and demos and frequently asked
question documents that were developed by the
product teams. And then later on there were instructor
-led classes because end users asked for in -person
types of events so that they can collaborate
and learn from each other. Those worked out really
well. And also teams of co -pilot champions within
departments or organizational units started developing.
People that were very excited and more interested
about co -pilot going in deeper. And so as they
got this additional training and understanding
from their colleagues, they'd go back to their
teams and provide localized training. And finally,
on the support side, which ties back into training.
Microsoft leveraged Viva Engage as well as teams
and channels where end users could post their
questions and get responses from their colleagues
or people in the product team. And then also
departmental sites from finance and marketing
and HR started popping up where specific use
cases and support flows that those types of users
were encountering. got posted so that colleagues
could receive help now as we wrap i do want to
bring your attention to one link in the last
slide of applying ai at scale and that is deploying
copilot for microsoft 365 in four chapters i
looked at this document and i read through it
and i thought that it was a great article it
essentially talks about what we talked about
but in much more detail so make sure you check
that out Also check out the other links in that
last slide as well. Tons of great content. Now
I hope you found this summary of deploying Copilot
according to Microsoft for all those users helpful.
If you have any comments, let me know. If you
like this video, make sure you give it a thumbs
up. And if you have also deployed Copilot and
have some unique experiences, I would love to
hear your feedback. Thank you very much for watching
and I'll catch you on the next one.