How Microsoft 365 Boosts Workplace Productivity

Our team spent the past nine months collaborating with dozens of Microsoft 365 #Copilot customers to analyze the work habits of more than 6,000 employees -- one of the largest telemetry studies of its kind to date. We split employees into two groups: one with access to Copilot and the other without. And three major trends emerged.     1. AI is starting to liberate people from email. Overall, employees at a consumer goods company with access to Copilot spent 31% less time reading emails, a time savings of 50 minutes a week per user. At a telecommunications company, employees spent 23% less time, saving 40 minutes per week. 2. Meetings are becoming more about value creation. The workday is often a balancing act between crucial meetings and focused work. And with AI, some companies are reducing time spent in meetings, and others are making the time spent in meetings more valuable. People using AI at a consulting firm spent 16% less time in meetings. An energy company saw a 12% increase in the number of meetings being left early, suggesting that people may feel comfortable bowing out because they can use Copilot to get meeting notes, ask questions, and check on action items. 3. People are co-creating more with AI—and with one another.  Human-to-AI-to-human collaboration fosters better human-to-human collaboration, reducing the time it takes to get from good to great. One consumer goods company saw a 41% boost in the number of Word sessions, while at a law firm and a telecom company, Word document creation soared by 58% and 45%, respectively. Employees with access to Copilot at a financial services company co-edited 33% more documents than those without AI, and a consulting firm saw a similar effect.      Learn more in our latest #AI Data Drop here!

20,000 government employees recently put Microsoft 365 Copilot to the test during a real-world experiment conducted by the U.K.’s Government Digital Service. The results? Quantitative and qualitative data clearly demonstrate the tremendous value of AI-driven capabilities for businesses and their employees. Here’s a snapshot:   🔹Users saved 26 minutes per day on average, or nearly two weeks per year per person 🔹82% of users said they wouldn’t want to return to pre-Copilot ways of working 🔹Copilot was widely considered a positive step forward for users as well as their organizations   While expansive, this experiment is just a microcosm of what’s happening across industries. Organizations evolving from traditional working models into “Frontier Firms” are able to scale impact, streamline operations, and stay competitive. Further, with AI agents by their sides, employees work more efficiently, focus on creative, high-value tasks, and ultimately make their jobs more rewarding.   For a full breakdown of the experiment’s structure, results and impact, check out this article: https://lnkd.in/g7wCMBAD. You can also read the full report below.

The UK Government gave Microsoft 365 Copilot to 20,000 employees and found an average time savings of 26 minutes per day per user across a wide variety of job functions and levels from those who responded to the question "On average, how much time does using Copilot save you on a daily basis?". What's more interesting is how those savings seem to vary by the type of work being undertaken. Those involved in project delivery saw the biggest gains, while those involved in tax or legal work saw the smallest. This makes sense as out of the box Microsoft 365 Copilot is a generalist tool and those involved in project management or operational delivery spend a great deal of time in more general knowledge work functions. By contrast, financial or legal work often more heavily focuses on specialist capabilities, industry-specific software or datasets, very nuanced reasoning approaches. Overall, those who saved the most time also had the greatest satisfaction with Copilot. Whereas users reported increases to productivity and work quality, outputs like improvement of work-life balance were comparatively low. This is important as one of the key questions is if time is being saved, what happens to it? My stance on this is that organizations should seek to share those timesaving benefits between the users and the business. There is a growing and valuable set of research reports and case studies from Microsoft's WorkLab and elsewhere about the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Personally, I would still like to see more reports that focus on empirical measurement of metrics such as time savings rather than the fluffier user perception driven analysis we tend to see. However, the overwhelming direction of research I have seen is to reiterate time and time again that investment in Microsoft 365 Copilot is indeed useful to worker productivity. ❓ What research questions do you think still need to be answered about the impact of Copilot on organizations? 🖼️ from the UK government research report