"Toshiba Revitalization Plan": Microsoft 365 Copilot deployed to 10,000 Employees

Introducing Copilot to 10,000 employees to increase "earning power”

In May 2024, Toshiba announced its new medium-term management plan, the "Toshiba Revitalization Plan" (FY2024-FY2026). The company is undertaking structural reforms to return to its fundamentals. However, Koji Ikeya, Executive Vice President and Director of Toshiba Corporation stresses that “The company is not simply looking back to the past. Instead, we will continue our transformation to become the Toshiba of a new era."

Toshiba Group's Corporate Philosophy, "Committed to People, Committed to the Future," was created in 1990. As environmental and other issues become more evident, the significance and importance of this philosophy have greatly increased. Toshiba Group aims to be a company that contributes to society through GX (Green Transformation) and DX to address social issues that many companies face.

Regarding the challenges in achieving the Toshiba Revitalization Plan, Ikeya says, “Our goals are to achieve sales of 3.75 trillion yen and an operating margin (ROS) of 10% by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027. We must lower our break-even point and strengthen our profit potential by improving management infrastructure, and fully investing in generated resources in personnel, business, and technology development to achieve this goal.”

Business process transformation is the key for increasing profit potential. Ikeya visited major sites and factories in town hall meetings and talked to a total of 10,000 employees about his thoughts on the revitalization plan, as well as issues related to operational efficiency improvements.

95% of the trial was used in practical work, confirming qualitative and quantitative effects

At Toshiba, the introduction of Copilot was a touchstone in the company's vision of generative AI. Shunsuke Okada, Senior Managing Executive and Chief Digital Officer of Toshiba Corporation, describes the company’s vision for generative AI: “Based on Toshiba Group's management philosophy, our vision is defined as ‘A safe, secure, and sustainable social infrastructure support through diverse data/knowledge connections using Generative AI.’ We will connect people, systems, and IoT with generative AI through natural language communication, to create new value and solve social issues.”

Toshiba has launched a project to promote realization of its vision for generative AI. The project will provide comprehensive support through five functions of consulting/support, awareness/refinement, usage guidelines, usage environment, and operations.

This Generative AI Promotion Project has a shared understanding that Copilot will evolve into a tool used by everyone on a daily basis, much like a calculator or a PC. “But it's a new tool for us, so we are still learning how to use it," Okada says.

He continues, “More than simply use it, we discussed how to maximize its usage and then conducted a trial with 400 employees with the support of Microsoft. Two points were studied. The first was the quantitative outcome, determined by measuring numerical contributions to the business. The second was the qualitative outcome. If people cannot feel effectiveness, they will not continue to use the system.”

The results of the trial showed the system was used by 95% in practice, for recording meetings in Teams, creating documents in Microsoft PowerPoint, and catching up on information from emails and meetings. As a result, the average quantitative effect was a reduction of 5.6 hours of work time per person. As for the qualitative effects, users rated the service as helpful in terms of creativity (brainstorming ideas) and quality (advice and organization when creating emails and documents). In addition to the validation results, more than 70% of participating users wanted to continue using Copilot, which helped drive the decision to deploy it to 10,000 employees.

The "use case catalog" that motivate people to use the system rather than force them

How can we change the way each of our 10,000 employees works? Each department and each employee have different needs to be met to find benefits from Copilot. The "use case catalog" is structured to motivate employees to use Copilot, rather than just make them use it. Yoshikazu Tonozuka, Senior Fellow, DX/Design & Communications Department of Toshiba Corporation, explains its features.

“The menu provides patterns to use Copilot, such as “When you use it this way for business, you obtain these kinds of answers.” We have created a guideline that allows users to select the application they would like to use from a menu and try it out. It is truly a digital catalog.”

In practice, use case catalogs do not cover everything employees and departments are looking for. Therefore, workshops were held for each department as part of the Generative AI Application Promotion Project. The point is that we took the stance of listening to the "problems" of each department.

“With Microsoft's support, we worked with each department to sort out the tools that could be used during work to solve their issues, such as Copilot, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Excel, and RAG (search augmentation generation),” says Tonozuka.

While implementing Copilot, it was important to look at business process innovation as well as individual benefits.

Tonozuka says, “We can certainly save time by using Copilot to attend online meetings by proxy, make summarized reports of them and translate documents, but it is only used on a spot basis. How can we go beyond 'the feeling of convenience' to improve the productivity of an entire department? What is important is to be aware of how work processes flow so that everyone involved can enjoy increased efficiency. Even if efficiency in one area is improved, when the tool needs to be prepared for use with pre-processing then the efficiency of the entire business process may not improve in some cases.”

The Generative AI project, in collaboration with business units, identifies and deploys business processes achieving sustainable impact with Copilot. Okada mentions a successful model of business process innovationwith Copilot:

“In the past, it took the Administration department three months to analyze 70,000 comments from an employee survey. That took only one day with Copilot. The Storage Products business unit also combined several Copilot use cases in the design process to increase overall effectiveness. As a result, the use of Copilot has significantly increased. They also moved data that was previously scattered outside of the file server to the file sharing tool Microsoft SharePoint, speeding up responses to enquiries from Copilot. The important point is that they are developing their own solutions. In addition, the Public Relations and Procurement departments are also working to upgrade business processes using Copilot.”

Automatic recommendations on how to use Copilot matched to individual work styles

The Generative AI Promotion Project has expanded its approach step-by-step, from dots to lines and planes, with the use case catalog, workshops and streamlining of the entire business processes. Tonozuka talks about the next step:

“Our employees use Microsoft 365. With Microsoft’s technical support, we are combining Microsoft 365 usage logs with Microsoft Viva Insights, which analyzes and visualizes the way people work, to create a system that automatically recommends how to use Copilot based on individual activities. We are pushing along users who do not actively refer to the use case catalog and getting through the last mile. We are also considering expanding the automatic recommendation mechanism to business applications.”

He explains about the mechanism for further use: “The ‘use case catalog’ is a resource that encourages people to use Copilot, rather than ‘forces’ them to use it. We've developed a way for people to select applications they want to use from a menu and try them out. We are also working on a system that automatically recommends ways to use Copilot based on individual working styles.”

Today, Copilot deployment has reached nearly 10,000 users. Regarding one of the key factors Okada says, “We have made Copilot licenses an expense paid by the beneficiaries rather than a company-wide budget. It clarified our purpose, which was introducing Copilot to improve the effectiveness of the system.”

“If divisions do not believe in its necessity, implementations cannot follow. To achieve our goal of introducing Copilot to 10,000 employees, we needed to implement measures that made people feel it works. The number of users increased as people heard about the program from other divisions and then became motivated to try it on their own.”

More than just having tools, it is important to solve actual issues for employees and business units. Tonozuka praises Microsoft's support saying, “Microsoft proposed timely solutions for the problems we identified during workshops. The tool usage proposals have become more sophisticated with the use of Copilot. I expect that Microsoft will continue to provide support on our journey.”

To achieve the Toshiba Revitalization Plan, it is essential to increase the productivity and creativity of every employee. Ikeya points out that time management is crucial, saying, “How do we reduce the time spent on non-core tasks, and how do we improve the effectiveness of our core business? The use of Copilot is different for each employee, section manager, department head, and executive. For example, combining coaching with Copilot will further enhance effectiveness. We hope to maximize the earning potential of 10,000 employees by increasing their productivity and ultimately ensuring that all employees use Copilot.”