Connecting Opportunity: Telstra’s Early Success with Copilot for Microsoft 365

Imagine a workplace where innovation isn’t just a buzzword, but a daily reality. Here at Telstra, we’re hands-on testing the latest innovations. Our strategic alliance with Microsoft has given us early access to Copilot for Microsoft 365 (M365) to launch an internal Telstra Early Adopters Program.

The easiest way to think of Copilot for M365 is your AI assistant at work. It works alongside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, providing real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills.

Key takeaways based on our experience with Copilot:

• Leading the cultural shift: Based on our own experience implementing Copilot, we recommend leadership buy-in and sponsorship to steer the adoption process. This will help gain the momentum needed to see a change faster. 
• Get ready for the tech change: Review your technological infrastructure to ensure all your data, regardless of where or how it is currently stored, can be transformed so it’s ready to inform AI activities. 
• Security is key: Security isn’t just an option. You’ll have to pay attention to data privacy and security when integrating Copilot into your operations.

The cultural shift

The Telstra Early Adopters program showed us how important it is to consider the mindset shift required. Copilot wasn’t naturally adopted by many initially; and it took a while, even for our more seasoned “innovators”, to start using Copilot instinctively in their day-to-day activities.

One of our Product Managers, Rajinda Anthony, said he had to stop himself from “doing things how he was used to” and train himself to think about using Copilot when doing tasks like drafting an email and writing sales team notes.

But now, Anthony is using Copilot regularly throughout the day and seeing a big difference in terms of time saved and effort. He’s using it in meetings to ensure all action items are captured per individual, for drafting emails faster, categorising ideas after a brainstorm, summarising lengthy tech guides, and updating his to-do list at the end of the day.

Some of the key use cases most early adopters at Telstra are loving so far:

• Summarising meeting notes: It helps focus on the actual meeting, knowing Copilot will do the heavy lifting in terms of note taking and action points. 
• Finding and referencing documentation: It is saving people a lot of time in terms of research, validation and cross-referencing to create content and full customer profiles based on summarised interactions (across email, chats, etc) for different sales and services components. 
• Focusing on more strategic tasks: Using generative AI to create documents by combining multiple internal sources, saving a lot of time in research and content drafting, by layering prompts in Copilot—allowing people to focus on more strategic tasks instead.

Tech readiness 

Incorporating AI into our operations at Telstra brought forth critical actions and discussions on data privacy, intellectual property, and data security. For example, testing which departments and regions could access certain databases to prevent privacy breaches and discuss how best to handle semantic indexing of user documents.

Based on having done this extensive amount of work internally in Telstra, our customers can benefit from our learnings. Our Telstra experts know what to look for when evaluating an organisation’s use of M365 licensing, information architecture, security checks, level of risk, and data protection and governance needs for a safe and effective Copilot experience.

What we’ve learned so far

Telstra's findings have aligned with Microsoft's wider research on Copilot usage. Microsoft  found that 1/5 of the workforce saved 30 mins to 1 hour a day—getting back more than 1 day a month (~10 hours) in saved time! It’s no wonder that 77% of users said once they used Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up.

In the first two months, 81% of respondents in Telstra’s wider early adoption group stated that Copilot is easy to use. 75% of respondents are trusting Copilot to help with their work, accepting and using Copilot output on a daily basis.

Telstra’s "advanced user group" (~20%) were already seeing big time savings and strategic benefits using Copilot for M365, such as spending less time on low value tasks, experiencing more efficient meetings, and finding information faster.

As our test group demonstrates, there is a lot to gain with AI. We expect these benefits to increase as users become more familiar with Copilot and learn to integrate it into their day-to-day effectively.

Telstra's participation in the M365 Copilot preview has been incredibly insightful. A wide variety of employees have gained experience in using genAI for their daily work and our technology support teams have learned a lot about Copilot architecture and what is needed to ensure robust foundations from a data perspective. What we learned from the preview is helping us to roll out both M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio more widely.

— Leigh Gibson, Group Owner Employee Solutions Engineering

Two key learnings :

• A top-down adoption model with clear executive endorsement, versus bottom-up or IT-led, will drive faster adoption.
• Creating and educating on use cases will drive better usage.

Where to from here, for ourselves and customers

As we plan for a wider internal Telstra rollout, aiming to scale from 200+ users to thousands, we’re establishing further secure protocols and standards to mitigate risks and ensure compliance while using Copilot for M365, as well as mapping out use cases to accelerate adoption. Our commitment to these principles is unwavering, ensuring that our AI integration is as responsible as it is innovative.

We’re looking forward to helping customers across Australia unlock the possibilities of AI with Copilot for M365. Based on our learnings and experience, we have put together a range of options to start adopting Copilot, with readiness assessments led by our experts:

• Copilot Readiness Assessment> designed to build a clear action plan to prepare your infrastructure, security, and people for Copilot. 
• Copilot Technical Readiness> designed to ensure data security. It can include change management and user adoption as well.

Learn more about Copilot for M365 with Telstra and the endless opportunities for your business: Copilot for Microsoft 365 from Telstra>

(If you're ready to deploy Copilot for M365, you can now purchase it via Telstra Apps Marketplace>)