Aker BP builds an AI-first future with Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents

“To keep growing and to remain competitive, we need to be able to leverage the best technology out there and drive its adoption in our organization.”

Paula Doyle, Chief Digital Officer at Aker BP, is explaining the thinking behind why the business began its AI transformation. Despite being a large corporate organization, the Norwegian oil and gas company likes to conduct itself like a start-up with a very entrepreneurial and nimble approach to innovation and growth.

“I think we’re quite fortunate,” reflects Doyle. “We have a very curious and engaged organization, and we focus a lot on the expectation that all employees and leaders drive the use of technology in their day-to-day work.”

With a large ecosystem of processes and services, the organization is always on the lookout for ways to use technology to become more efficient, productive and optimize user experience – all while driving down costs.

So when Microsoft approached Aker BP and asked it to be an early adopter of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company were excited to try it. “It was the first time we saw a technology move so swiftly into the office environment,” Doyle says.

“We realized quite early on that if we could understand the tech and get on top of it, we could create a competitive advantage.”

Fostering a culture of innovation

Aker BP is a pureplay oil and gas company that operates exclusively in Norway. It produces around 450,000 barrels a day to supply the European market, making it the continent’s second largest independent oil and gas producer.

“Since the very start, technology has been core to Aker BP’s company strategy,” says Doyle. “We’re in a very serious industry and everything we do is based on a foundation of safe, cybersecure operations.

“We’re bigger than a start-up, but we appreciate a lot about the start-up culture, and we try to have a quick turnaround and be decisive. We’ve built a framework of technology and encourage people to innovate, and we reward it when they do.”

In the oil and gas industry, this isn’t typical behavior. But Aker BP believes in the value of driving innovation across the company and encouraging employees to have a hands-on approach to technology and learn by doing. The business has found success with this way of doing things in part because senior leadership models the behaviors they wish to see in their employees.

“From our perspective,” Doyle adds, “we can’t expect people to be curious and open to adopting new technologies if we aren't ourselves. So in the summer of 2023, when we got invited to Microsoft’s early adoption program, we absolutely jumped at that opportunity. We were very keen to stay ahead because although technology moves fast, our organization moves slower.

“We knew that the earlier we could get access to the tools, the quicker we could drive the organizational change that we needed to.”

Driving a company-wide digital transformation

Aker BP was one of the first companies in the world to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot. It first had to ensure it had a strong foundation of technology and good governance. Once the correct security ratings were in place, the company got 300 licenses and started utilizing them straight away.

In the beginning, when the company first adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, the technology looked a bit different. It was used primarily as part of Microsoft Teams to assist with transcripts and meeting summaries, and Microsoft Word to give writing support to non-native English speakers.

“After just a few months,” begins Eirik Aasen, Digital Platform Manager at Aker BP, “we saw that Microsoft 365 Copilot was solving various problems we had. It was a huge time saver for us.”

“Digital and AI competence is one of five key competencies for all employees,” he continues, “so to help them with this ever-evolving technology, we set up an internal help desk and learning paths for the fundamentals of AI. We developed learning materials, courses and we also did lots of hands-on training so people could better understand how to create prompts. It allowed us to develop a roadmap and as we watch things progress, we can identify new roadblocks.”

Early adoption has been a huge learning curve for Aker BP and the journey has given the business a deeper knowledge of architecture and what is needed to become an AI-driven company. This has enabled the business to accelerate development and empower employees to securely and confidently explore ways to make their own teams work more efficiently. 

AI-powered technology yields results

One way employees have optimized daily tasks is by using Microsoft Copilot Studio to create their own agents. In these early stages, agents have been developed by individuals or small teams, allowing employees to test the technology and explore its capabilities.

“After attending our adoption sessions, employees returned inspired and quickly began building AI agents to address specific use cases,” says Torunn Landråk Kleivenes, Data & Development Manager who is responsible for the Everyday & Low-Code team. “Shortly after, several agents were already live, demonstrating both the accessibility of the tools and the creativity of our team. At the same time, a central specialized team has been supporting makers with questions and developing more advanced agents to meet broader business needs.”

Among the agents developed so far are Knowledge Agents—designed to improve how employees' access and use information. These agents reduce the time spent searching through documentation, provide quick answers to repetitive questions, and ease the load on expert resources by structuring and routing more complex queries. Built using Copilot Studio’s generative AI, low-code capabilities, chatbot topics, and human-in-the-loop features, they are already supporting more efficient knowledge sharing across teams.

“Today, we confidently recommend Copilot Studio as a tool for building AI agents because we have the governance controls to support it,” says Kleivenes. “We leverage years of experience with the Power Platform—building apps, automating flows, and establishing governance frameworks that scale.”

This foundation now enables a broader vision: employees can build their own agents to boost personal and team productivity, a central specialized team can develop strategic agents to support core business processes, and Aker BP will actively promote the use of trusted third-party agents where necessary.

“Adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio has proven to be really successful for us so far and one KPI we use to measure that is looking at how many employees are regularly using the technology,” Doyle adds. “Our Viva dashboards show the number of active users is steadily increasing and over the past four weeks, the number has risen to 96%.”

“We now have a baseline expectation that AI will be used by everyone in Aker BP,” says Doyle. “AI is considered in everything we do from performance dialogues to salary reviews. If a team wants a new headcount, they now have to prove that a reallocation of tasks can’t be handled by AI agents instead.”

Pioneering AI across the industry and beyond

The technology’s positive impact isn’t just company-wide: it can be seen across other organizations. “We have many partners in our network that are now leveraging Microsoft technology and expertise to develop agents that we can use in our organization,” says Doyle. “It’s been fantastic to see the whole ecosystem work together and lots of agents blossoming around us.”

“By working with Microsoft, we have learned more about how to enable this technology for others,” continues Doyle. “We’ve been speaking with around 20 other organizations to share our learnings and what we have achieved with Copilot. It’s great to show others how we have developed, and the efficiency gains we’ve experienced. We hope we can inspire others to do something similar.”

As for what's next at Aker BP, it recently announced that 2025 will be the year it scales the use of GenAI technology, committing to giving every single employee a Copilot license. The company has put together an AI adoption champion network with accountability at the executive management team level to hold everyone accountable for driving adoption and building and using agents.

“Driven from the top, there’s a fundamental belief now that we need to be the best at leveraging technology to drive ourselves forward because this is quite a competitive industry,” says Doyle.

“So far, it’s been a fascinating journey to go from early adopters to where Copilot is today. For Aker BP it’s been totally transformative.”