By Richard Humphreys |
Professional services company Accenture is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to around 743,000 employees, nearly its entire workforce. Avanade, the consulting and technology services joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, has also implemented the tool.
Accenture began its Copilot deployment in August 2023, shortly after Microsoft unveiled the tool. The rollout started with a pilot involving a few hundred senior leaders and select employees, then scaled up to 20,000 users. During that time, Accenture focused on its data strategy, data governance, access controls and understanding of how its employees were using Copilot in Microsoft Outlook, Teams and Word.
“Copilot is a personal digital colleague,” said Tony Leraris, Accenture’s chief information officer. “It changes the way our people work, the way they research, ideate, analyse and execute many daily activities.”
In a 2025 study of 200,000 users, Accenture found that 97 per cent of employees reported completing routine tasks 15 times faster with Copilot and 53 per cent noted improvements in productivity and efficiency.
“Copilot fostered understanding and inspired people to go off and do their own experimentation and try new things,” said Haley Rosowsky, global Microsoft ecosystem partner marketing lead. “We showcased people who were getting value out of working in new ways with Copilot and gave them a bit of a pedestal moment that everyone could learn from.”
Leraris added: “If Microsoft 365 Copilot weren’t delivering real value, our people simply wouldn’t be using it – our high adoption rate is what shows us that there is value. That’s what led us to continue deploying Copilot to more people.”
As the rollout expanded, leaders at Avanade saw an opportunity to use AI and Copilot to deliver more customer-focused sales insights, helping sellers engage with greater relevance and precision. Avanade’s sales innovation team built D3, an AI-powered sales intelligence solution, which aggregates proprietary internal data, industry context and external sources to build a comprehensive picture of a customer’s business. Copilot powers the AI intelligence and the conversational agent that sellers engage with, delivering in seconds the level of research that previously took days or weeks.
Avanade has rolled out the new tool to 25 per cent of its sellers, and the company has found that active users are generating 43 per cent more sales opportunities than colleagues not using the tool.
“It’s about bringing content and context to the conversation,” said Harry Holstrom, vice president and US sales lead, at Avanade. “That’s hard to do. It takes a lot of research. It used to take a lot of time looking through 8-K and 10-K reports, company websites, understanding the industry, and understanding the Microsoft footprint. The tool now does that for you, so you can focus on the narrative. That allows us to scale and move quickly and be much more effective in those client conversations.”
Read more about the rollout, including how Accenture’s marketing organisation is using Copilot.