Microsoft Corp. has partnered with Accenture Plc on the largest-ever deployment of its artificial intelligence tool Microsoft 365 Copilot, rolling it out to the consultancy’s global workforce of more than 743,000 people – roughly equivalent to the population of Denver.

The sheer scale of the rollout is truly a show of force, for Microsoft claims it has been overwhelmingly successful. It reported today that 97% of Accenture’s employees are now completing routine tasks up to 15 times faster than they could before, with 53% more reporting “significant improvements” in their productivity.

The rollout began slowly at first, with Accenture first testing the waters in August 2023, shortly after Microsoft first launched the Copilot tool, which acts like a digital assistant that spans applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. To begin with, Accenture tested Microsoft 365 Copilot with just a few hundred of its senior leaders, before introducing it to other select employees. But within just a few months, it had already scaled the tool to around 20,000 users.

Accenture’ Chief Information Officer Tony Leraris said his team monitored the rollout intensively to understand exactly how those people were using Copilot, while also adapting its data strategy, data governance and access controls to facilitate its adoption. “We were fine-tuning our adoption strategy and developing a blueprint for how it would be used in daily work,” he explained.

Phased deployment

Doing this was not an easy feat for a company with close to 800,000 employees globally spread across 120 countries, so the rollout progressed in phases. The company came up with a customized change management and adoption program that spanned one-on-one training sessions with senior leaders, regular communications about the latest new features, and also group training sessions on the Teams-based social networking app Viva Engage. That allowed Accenture’s employees to share the new ways they were using Copilot with their colleagues.

Haley Rosowsky, global Microsoft ecosystem partner marketing lead, said the ability to share how people were using Copilot encouraged others to experiment with it, fueling its adoption. “It fostered understanding and inspired people to go off and do their own experimentation and try new things,” she explained.

Leraris quickly realized that for such a large-scale deployment to work, the company had to customize its approach to different groups of users. “You can’t take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption,” he says. “We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them.”

The company then monitored its rollout to justify the decisions. In one survey of around 200,000 users, monthly active Copilot usage hit 89%, and 84% of survey respondents would “deeply miss” the tool if it disappeared. As the rollout accelerated, Accenture kept seeing encouraging feedback from across dozens of different business teams.

For instance, its marketing and communications groups reportedly use Copilot as their standard way of checking new content against historic marketing materials to ensure brand consistency. They also use it to draft storyboards and create new marketing concepts. Such tasks previously could only be done with the help of specialized design teams.

Accenture’s sales teams also became big fans of the tool. Avanade, which is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, developed an internal tool called D3 for making data-driven decisions. That tool uses Copilot to aggregate 8-K and 10-K reports and other data, helping salespeople to generate an average of 43% more sales opportunities, Accenture reported. More recently, Accenture’s employee base has started leveraging the latest capabilities in Copilot to develop AI agents that can automate their workflows. Many of those people have no coding skills.

Time to move beyond pilots?

The timing of the announcement feels like a calculated response by Microsoft to growing skepticism among investors over its AI story. While Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into AI, many investors are questioning whether or not its AI tools are providing a justifiable return on investment for early adopters. The Denver-sized deployment provides evidence that may convince other enterprises of the benefits Copilot provides. It implies that the era of AI experimentation is coming to a close — something Google LLC Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said at last week’s Cloud Next conference — and that those who shy away from such tools will likely regret not moving fast enough to embrace them.

Accenture says it’s not yet done with Copilot. It sees the tool as a foundation for a complete reimagination of its professional services. It aims to become one of the world’s first AI-native organizations, where every one of its employees becomes a kind of supervisor of an expanding digital workforce that gets more work done.

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