Copilot for Microsoft 365: Saving time and money and enhancing wellbeing for Atos employees and customers

The challenge: Optimizing the workplace

Atos sees each employee’s workplace as a place of empowerment, a place where jobs are rethought. “In our eyes, it’s not tools or productivity in themselves that make an organization perform,” says Mélanie de Vigan, Digital Workplace Development Manager at Atos. “Performance relies on employees’ engagement and on how we encourage them to engage, so we can nurture their desire to contribute to the success of the company and achieve more.” This is the goal that Atos has set itself through the slogan Liberating People Potential.

Once seen as a tool that supported the business, workplace IT has, thanks to generative AI, become the tool that makes the business. Companies are now obligated to rethink the way they work and how their employees interact with machines. This is where Atos comes in: as a service provider and leader in digital workplace solutions, Atos supports its customers with their AI-driven digital transformation.

In practical terms, this involves developing solutions tailored to each customer’s business—be it HR, IT, or aeronautics, for example—so their data can be managed efficiently and securely. But it also involves training and education. Employees aren’t always geared up to formulate the right questions for AI. They need to be taught how to “prompt” or be more descriptive in their requests so they are given relevant answers to the questions they ask about their areas of activity.

With innovation in its DNA, Atos was obviously among the first to take part in Microsoft’s Early Access Program, which gave a number of companies the chance to trial Copilot for Microsoft 365. That led to Atos’s Tech Foundations business line signing a new three-year agreement with Microsoft to develop a strategic portfolio of outsourcing solutions.

Alexa Van Den Bempt, Senior Vice President, Digital Business Platforms, Tech Foundations at Atos, reveals more: “Having first deployed Copilot internally, we’re better placed to offer our customers authoritative help in understanding and adopting generative AI, from strategy to implementation. We speak from experience, and when it comes to innovations as groundbreaking as this, that experience is invaluable.” de Vigan adds: “We needed to understand and experience the challenges posed by Copilot before we could then help our customers adopt it. You see all these stories in the media about people’s fears of AI potentially taking their jobs away. But our experience of adopting Copilot at Atos was the opposite: people felt that AI would help them. It’s that concept of collaboration between artificial and human intelligence that really is the key.”

The solution: Copilot for Microsoft 365, a partner in enhanced user wellbeing

Integrated with Microsoft 365, Copilot offers unrivaled ease of use, placing the tool right where users go about their everyday work. This lets them “do more,” “differently,” and “better.” Whether they are extracting a summary from the minutes of a Microsoft Teams meeting they missed, answering emails in Outlook, or summarizing a Microsoft Word document, Copilot represents “a real paradigm shift in the use of Microsoft solutions,” de Vigan says, adding: “AI is also very useful when it comes to creativity. It can generate ideas and organize concepts. Copilot offers a host of extensions, too, which makes it extremely useful for us. We recently developed two plug-in solutions: one to help identify experts better and another to make it easier for users to find information on service tickets.”

Implementing Copilot for Microsoft 365 brings more than cost and time savings. It is also a strategic shift that enhances user wellbeing by making lighter work of time-consuming tasks such as trawling through meeting minutes. This allows users to focus on more important aspects of their work and fosters greater engagement on their part.

“Copilot will help us free up time for our employees, time that will allow them to think, open their minds, and see things differently,” de Vigan says. “We’re going to relieve them of the burden of excessive workloads and nurture creativity and efficiency.”

For her part, Van Den Bempt adds, “We shouldn’t see Copilot as an autopilot but as a partner first and foremost. It still requires human intelligence behind it. But it helps us with our everyday lives and allows us to devote our energies to higher-value-added tasks.”

Within just a few short weeks, Copilot for Microsoft 365 proved its worth to the small group of 300 Atos employees handed licenses to test the program. In fact, it was so popular that Atos decided to distribute more Copilot licenses internally to promote take-up among coworkers and encourage entire teams to use the tool and share learnings. The ultimate goal is to have 15,000 employees Copilot-trained by the end of 2024.