La Poste is undertaking a large-scale digital transformation across its network of agencies and operations.
Building on its experience with Microsoft 365, La Poste is now exploring the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot in collaboration with its business experts.
La Poste teams have identified relevant use cases across 15 key functions, sparking creativity, enhancing compliance with rules and processes, saving time, and contributing to employee well-being.
As the historical operator of the French national postal service, La Poste has been offering innovative solutions for 600 years, adapted to each era to promote exchanges and create connections. This guiding principle is still present today in its digital transformation strategy. This large-scale project includes the modernisation of post offices, the deployment of intuitive digital tools, and the development of new online services.
Simultaneously, La Poste aims to provide its 233,000 employees with the best digital tools to enrich and streamline their work experience. Having already heavily invested in the Microsoft 365 suite; it was natural for the company to explore how Microsoft 365 Copilot could enhance the ongoing digital transformation initiatives.
“La Poste is a group with multiple activities—banking, postal services, logistics—and our vision for deploying generative AI is to improve our operations across all our activities,” explains Nathalie Brousset, Director of Internal Digital Transformation at La Poste.
La Poste began deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in 2023 to an initial group of 300 users.
"We knew that generative AI—and Copilot in particular—would be useful to our employees. We wanted to explore its potential from the start to better understand its value and consider how to integrate it into our daily lives," explains Nathalie Brousset.
"At the same time, we noticed that some users were starting to use different AI tools. It was important for La Poste to offer its employees a secure and controlled alternative," she continues.
Since Microsoft 365 Copilot is integrated into the existing Microsoft 365 applications, it benefits from the same cybersecurity framework, data governance, and permission management and constitutes the reliable and compliant solution that La Poste needed.
La Poste's team fully relied on the resources and support provided by Microsoft to facilitate the adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The strength of the Microsoft partner community allowed La Poste to benefit from the expertise of Wavestone, named Modern Work Partner of the Year in France.
"Wavestone and Microsoft helped us identify potential use cases, develop practical guides, training materials and set up a community of Copilot users and ambassadors," reports Nathalie Brousset. "We are a small team, so their support was invaluable to get this project off the ground."
Sophie Fuchs, Director of Digital Services and Performance within the Digital Support Directorate, explains: "From the start, our goal was to understand how Copilot integrates into work practices and brings value to each employee. It's not about the value for the company—at least not directly—but rather for each employee."
The digital team managed to create real enthusiasm around Copilot. The tool immediately sparked interest among employees across all departments. "We quickly realised that we would need more licenses," recalls Sophie Fuchs. "The phenomenon went viral; we were almost overwhelmed by the requests."
The rapid adoption was also facilitated by a team of local ambassadors, volunteers who helped overcome obstacles and support the skill development of employees within their respective fields. "The support of our digital ambassadors is essential," says Sophie Fuchs. "They are an integral part of the experimentation and are local relays. Thanks to their commitment, we have set up a whole training system around Copilot."
Faced with the enthusiasm generated, La Poste expanded the number of users to include an additional 1,700 people in the experimentation phase, bringing the total number of users to 2,000.
"To date, about fifteen job functions are represented," confirms Sophie Fuchs. "Some are heavily involved, such as communication, HR, legal, and marketing."
La Poste teams use Microsoft 365 Copilot to summarise meetings, draft briefing notes, accelerate project management processes and automate certain business tasks. Other use cases have also been identified in improving IT ticket response times.
"Even very simple use cases like summarising a meeting and synthesising key actions are relevant," notes Nathalie Brousset. "It allows us to save up to half an hour to an hour a day. It's basic, but very useful when you think about how often we perform this type of task."
Today, 95% of employees want to keep their licenses. 88% of them recognise that Copilot offers them digital well-being, helps with creativity (71%), reflection (88%), and facilitates access to information (91%).
Among the most numerous and active users are the Human Resources professionals. Microsoft 365 Copilot allows their teams to optimise talent management and recruitment needs. Among the most interesting scenarios: drafting job descriptions based on the internal job reference framework, analysing CVs against job description requirements, and generating interview questions from job descriptions and received CVs.
The training teams use Microsoft 365 Copilot to create educational pathways. Based on existing documents, Copilot integrates into the reflection process around defining learning objectives. This leads to improved efficiency and unlocked time savings, allowing HR to prioritise people.
In the legal department, another series of use cases proves particularly interesting.
"For legal teams, Copilot is particularly useful for simplifying complex documents for internal communication," explains Sophie Fuchs. "Copilot helps to vulgarise legal language for non-specialists. This strengthens compliance with rules and processes."
The team also uses Microsoft 365 Copilot for drafting contracts. "If teams want to compare two contracts to identify modified clauses or ensure that the final contract contains all required clauses, Copilot enables quick and structured comparisons."
In the fields of communication and marketing, Microsoft 365 Copilot is mainly used to facilitate the production of written content, particularly the creation of social media posts. "It allows for quickly generating posts, adding emojis, structuring messages, and integrating relevant visuals," reflects Sophie Fuchs.
The team also uses it for brainstorming sessions to build narrative content or slogans. "Copilot proves to be a good source of inspiration for this type of exercise," continues Sophie Fuchs. "It often serves to lay the first ideas, structure a base of reflection, before being reworked and enriched by humans."
Additionally, the team uses Microsoft 365 Copilot to analyse customer satisfaction survey results: reading verbatims, sentiment analysis, and developing action plans. "Several testers highlighted the importance of analysis within the team. Copilot proved particularly effective on this subject," reports Sophie Fuchs.
To generate such enthusiasm and achieve such encouraging results, La Poste emphasises the importance of quality user support. "The more you practice, the more you learn. We must ensure that no one gets discouraged and gives up," emphasises Sophie Fuchs.
Since Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new tool, and prompting is still a relatively uncommon skill, La Poste found that users need time, benchmarks, and confidence to progress.
"The learning phase is essential," explains Sophie Fuchs. "It's not just about understanding how Copilot works. The real question is: how can I use it for this or that task? Which ones? How do I interact with it? If we don't sufficiently support employees, they risk missing out. For example, asking for a summary or a synthesis is not the same—Copilot does not react in the same way. That's why support is crucial, to reassure users."
"The digital support team is only about twenty people," recalls Sophie Fuchs. "So, we rely on our network of ambassadors. Our ambition is to support each employee, so that Copilot can truly help improve their daily work."
"I am eager to see the effects on collaboration, learning, and adoption when we move to a full team deployment," says Nathalie Brousset. "These technologies evolve very quickly. That's why we will continue the experimentation and gradually increase the number of employees with access to Copilot."
In parallel, La Poste continues to identify new use cases. A project to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to sales teams in post offices across France is underway. The next challenge will be to extend the tool to an entire service, not just user groups.
"Initially, we launched the experiment at headquarters simply because it was easier for us," explains Sophie Fuchs. "But the initiative quickly gained attention. Field employees heard about it and showed great interest. We thought: this is great, the demand is coming from the field! So, we decided to support and familiarise them with AI, identifying use cases and actively encouraging participation in the broader deployment of Copilot."
La Poste believes that its adventure with AI is just beginning. "It is essential that no one is left behind in this digital revolution," insists Sophie Fuchs. "We know it saves time. We know it's worth it. But how will it concretely transform our jobs? We can't say yet. That's precisely why we continue our experimentation."
"A key piece of advice I would give to other leaders is to not neglect the support and training of employees. Attention must really be focused on concrete uses, adapted to the real needs of users," insists Nathalie Brousset.
"Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to explore and transform our working methods," she continues. "The recent arrival of agents from Copilot opens up new perspectives, but users will need support to fully benefit from it. These tools alone do not transform an organisation — but they help us accompany and accelerate it."
“La Poste is a group with multiple activities—banking, postal services, logistics—and our vision for deploying generative AI is to improve our operations across all our activities.”
Nathalie Brousset, Director of Internal Digital Transformation, La Poste
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