Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with our Copilot Champs Community

This story reflects updated guidance from Microsoft Digital—it was first published in 2024.

Nobody helps employees adopt a new tool like their peers—the people who know their responsibilities, their organizational culture, and their day-to-day tasks.

In the initial stages of our adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot—a technology that brings many new possibilities and ways of working to the table—we knew we needed an unconventional approach to change management. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we understand that peer-to-peer support is one of the most powerful levers for driving excitement, engagement, education, and action for employees.

We turned to a grassroots approach to adoption support: The Copilot Champs Community.

“The way to get people to really adopt a change is to make it relevant to their roles, and you achieve that by showing them the value of that change.”

Lisa Fryc, director of Employee Change Management and Readiness, Microsoft Digital

New technology needs a new approach to adoption

As we began our Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout, it quickly became apparent that a community-based approach would be particularly powerful for this technology. That’s because individual people use Copilot in ways that are highly specific to their work and organization.

So, although Microsoft Digital has an extremely robust team of change management professionals, we could never hope to address the needs and culture of every organization across the company. We also recognized that excitement for Copilot was leading many of our employees to dive in headfirst and become early super-users when it came to applying this tool to their roles.

“The way to get people to really adopt a change is to make it relevant to their roles, and you achieve that by showing them the value of that change,” says Lisa Fryc, director of business program management on Microsoft Digital’s readiness team. “Peer-to-peer adoption efforts create a trusted environment where people can get the best information from their own community members.”

“People learn better peer-to-peer. Everyone has their own learning style, so our job is to develop training material and package it in a way that peer leaders can grab hold of and customize for their specific audience.”

Cadie Kneip, readiness business program manager, Microsoft Digital

From a centralized change management perspective, our role at Microsoft Digital becomes providing the “one front door” to the assets and resources employees need, then relying on community support to direct employees to the material most relevant to their work. The result is a hub-and-spoke model that involves both core and local change management teams working to empower the Copilot Champs Community.

The internal benefits of our Copilot Champs Community

Our Copilot Champs Community enables scalable awareness for Copilot, encourages peer-to-peer engagement, and provides feedback for our product team.

“People learn better peer-to-peer,” says Cadie Kneip, readiness business program manager responsible for the Copilot Champs Community in Microsoft Digital. “Everyone has their own learning style, so our job is to develop training material and package it in a way that peer leaders can grab hold of and customize for their specific audience.”

Building a community that drives change

Although Microsoft has always encouraged culturally driven change initiatives, we’ve never run a champs program of quite this scale or sophistication. Microsoft 365 Copilot called for all-in peer-to-peer adoption efforts with a structured, targeted approach.

“We recognized that, despite their deep knowledge, our Copilot super-users aren’t professional trainers, so we had to develop ways to give them assets and coaching to deliver effective peer-to-peer adoption.”

Chad Hawthorne, director of business program management, Digital Experience, Readiness, and Change Management

Microsoft Digital’s Employee Change Management and Readiness team developed a strategy for building our Copilot Champs Community, then for nurturing champs as adoption leaders. It started with establishing the community, a process that continues as the team grows.

• Recruiting: We seek out and reward enthusiasm and provide a relatively open door to our Champs Community. That way, we can find enthusiastic participants who can appeal to all audiences.
• Welcome communications: We reach out to our prospective champs through Teams or email with a message welcoming them to the team, links to key resources including our baseline Copilot training, and opportunities to engage immediately.
• Branding: After our champs complete their required training and onboarding, they receive a Copilot Champs Community badge that serves two functions: signaling to their peers that they’re a source of guidance for Copilot and motivating the champs themselves through recognition.
• Kick-off call: Calls for new members help set expectations, foster excitement, and familiarize champs with their Microsoft Digital point of contact.
• Baseline poll: We try to establish a baseline for our champs’ existing Copilot familiarity, their eagerness to participate, and the assets that will be most useful for them.

These elements provided a steady influx of enthusiastic champs. From there, it was up to community leadership to make sure they were ready to support their peers.

“There’s more to managing a champs community than sending out a newsletter,” says Chad Hawthorne, director of business program management for Digital Experience, Readiness, and Change Management. “We recognized that, despite their deep knowledge, our Copilot super-users aren’t professional trainers, so we had to develop ways to give them assets and coaching to deliver effective peer-to-peer adoption.”

Our Champs Community nurture path includes the following elements:

• Viva Engage: A Viva Engage community created specifically for champs is our forum for posting announcements, encouraging discussions, and showcasing wins.
• Teams channel: We manage housekeeping, access to group files, contact with subject matter experts, and private discussions through an exclusive Teams channel.
• Train-the-trainer sessions: These live training sessions are crucial for enabling champs to host adoption activations such as lunch-and-learn or power hour trainings for their own teams.
• Community calls: A regular cadence of community calls lets our core adoption team showcase new features, go over housekeeping items, celebrate wins, share best practices, and generally keep the excitement and engagement rolling.
• Shout-outs: We use corporate communications channels to highlight champ stories that we can share as blog posts or leaders can use to give kudos to teams.

Setting champs free to lead

We discovered that a properly established and nurtured Copilot Champs Community quickly produces highly effective peer leaders.

“I love seeing people just light up. The technology is so impactful that people understand how it can change their work as soon as they see a demonstration.”

Brian Shaw, principal customer success account manager, Retail and Consumer Goods team

Yen Anderson and Brian Shaw are two of our nearly 10,000 champs and counting. Both started their Microsoft 365 Copilot journey as eager early adopters, and the community has given them a forum to share their expertise.

“As soon as I knew Copilot would become a broadly available enterprise tool, I knew the future of work would be changing,” says Anderson, a Copilot champ and senior customer success account manager for Azure and AI. “And because I ramped up early, I was already demoing it to my team so they could see its value.”

Much of our champs’ activities take place in demonstration sessions. Shaw typically conducts 1–2 of these per week. Champs are also active in localized or organizational Viva Engage groups, which provide the perfect forum for ongoing conversations, showcasing learning, and community building.

“I love seeing people just light up,” says Shaw, Copilot champ and principal customer success account manager for the Retail and Consumer Goods team. “The technology is so impactful that people understand how it can change their work as soon as they see a demonstration.”

After a champ-led session, there’s a valuable opportunity for follow-up and relationship building. That only reinforces our champs’ position as peer leaders and makes them ideal support for their colleagues, further unburdening our centralized change management professionals.

Anderson and Shaw’s experiences are characteristic of champs across the community. Their expertise and innovation are as diverse as their roles.

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Empowering leaders, enabling employees

This approach to driving adoption has produced outstanding results so far, as the community has become a self-perpetuating engine of growth and empowerment. The Champs Community is also a valuable vehicle for sharing product feedback and helping the Microsoft 365 Copilot product group improve the tool itself.

“What our team has done is invest time and talent into crafting an operationalized adoption program with many proven techniques that can be leveraged to accelerate both end user and company ROI from business and IT investments.”

Andrew Osten, general manager of business operations and programs, Employee Experience Success

“Change management is a critical role within large enterprises as many companies are realizing more and more when attempting to improve or evolve business processes and IT systems that directly benefit users,” says Andrew Osten, general manager of business operations and programs for Employee Experience Success. “What our team has done is invest time and talent into crafting an operationalized adoption program with many proven techniques that can be leveraged to accelerate both end user and company ROI from business and IT investments.”

The Copilot Champs Community is continually developing new and ingenious workflows for using Copilot in everyday work. They include building finance reports, creating videos and decks by combining textual and visual generative AI elements, ideation assistance, and other role-based use cases—all of which blossom out into greater productivity and creativity for employees across Microsoft.

“In every champ session our community runs, it takes just one magical use case to turn a skeptic into a champion or power user,” Kneip says. “It’s that easy to flip the switch, and it’s that moment we capture with a well-structured Champs Community.”

If you want to implement a Copilot Champs Community in your organization, use this resource to plan and implement your peer-to-peer adoption efforts.